Holiday Monday afternoon in the East Bay garden where the roses my daughter pruned last month now needed to be fed. Their growth spurt arrived this week, and that seems to be one of the more reliable signs of spring in this peculiar micro-climate we live in here. The rose above is a mongrel climber that blooms profusely in May – hundreds of small flat-faced scarlet roses – and then festers in mold for the rest of the year. My daughter is never tired of stressing the virtues of this rose, and takes more time to prune it than any of the others. Clearly, it reciprocates her affection.
Our transplanted lilies are still bruised-looking, but lustily blooming anyway, and clearly intending to thrive.
New iris spears, from the roots we broke up and spread out last August.
Grape hyacinth, a tiny brief flower, but well worth the bother of rearing it. I will now officially stop using the tag "winter" for any & all subsequent posts covering the short-term future, no matter how winter-like the weather that may still arrive. We will, by virtue of this grape hyacinth growing out of the ground, now say that in San Francisco it is spring.