Spring Art Here

Spring is here and it's time to think of solitary mining bees and ditch lillies.

I worked over at the old house today and found the little ground bees are proliferating as never before. I had memories of when Rosie lived next door and got hysterical over them despite my numerous reassurances. (As a courtesy I tried to smoke out the ones closest to her house, set fire to the grass and nearly my house too until some nice kids came by to help me!) Neighbors! These little bees live and reproduce in their perfectly round holes until until... they don't anymore and that doesn't take all that long either. They fly at a person if you go messing around in their territory but never do they actually sting. So this provides an excuse for getting lazy about weeding for the duration. I need to get a better photo than what I'm putting up here..

Then there's ditch lillies... I guess they really aren't lillies so I read but as a gardener who is not purist, I think they're quite lovely. They don't ask for much year after year and yet they bloom, spread and provide shelter for snakes and other lovelies of which we may not all be too fond. Willie Jean absolutely LOVES them. At the old place she'd go outside and sleep away the heat of the afternoon deep in the heart of the bunch. Now I'm wondering if the snakes she caught and killed were in her place and she wanted them gone. She'd hide out from me in there when I had to fly back to work after lunch hour. I'd part the foliage and look down in upon her like one of those monsters in the old Japanese horror flicks looming over the buildings. I decided today to move over the whole lot in the front to Willie's backyard here at the new place,take out those funky old hydrangea's and put them in where she'll have her natural hiding spot again.