Tulips!

Tulips are my favorite flower, followed closely by blue hydrangeas.  We’ve planted a hydrangea bush each summer we’ve been at this house, so last fall I finally got my act together and ordered some tulip bulbs.  Sean also bought a bag of surprise tulips at Lowes, along with a little bulb planter tool, and one nice day in October I planted about sixty bulbs somewhat willy nilly in our front yard garden beds.

I might have mentioned in entries past about how I am not a natural gardener.  I cannot look at a plant, like my father does, and know what it needs—more water, sun, trimming, what have you.  I have no plant instinct.  In the almost four years we’ve been at our house, I have practiced my weeding, and have worked up some skills at taking horrible predator vines off of plants and trees, but I’m still on the very beginner side of beginner gardening.  I realized this winter that there is another way that my temperament doesn’t match up well with gardening, and that is because I have become, in my old age, a worrier.  And so what did I do when we had a strangely warm December that caused the bulbs to start growing?  I worried! I worried all through January as they inched higher, and February as they inched higher still.  And then I worried in early April during our freak snowstorm.

And then I kept seeing rabbits in our front yard and started worrying that they’d eat the flower heads.  (They didn’t with the tulips, but might have done with the daffodils?)  At any rate, despite my worrying, the tulips look lovely, if a bit in need of some weeding:

Our backyard woodchuck was late in reappearing after her hibernation.  I didn’t see her until April, and then the second time she appeared, Dorothy, all primed to chase cats from our yard, forgot that she is friends with the woodchuck and chased her back under the shed with her bulldogge fangs a millimeter from the woodchuck’s derriere.  Sigh.  I haven’t seen the woodchuck since, although I did give her a few apples as a peace offering.  She likes them cut into quarters and left outside of her main hole.  I’m hoping she does not hold a grudge.