Spring Flowers Are Here - Day 105 - Daily Haiku - Landscape Photography on our farm

Spring flowers are here
pollinators are filled with
the fullness of life

Cori MacNaughton

Our spring flowers are everywhere right now. Our hummingbirds are chasing newcomers away from their feeders, bees of all shapes and sizes are buzzing by en route to their next flower, and I finally managed to put a name to this absolutely gorgeous flowering bush above the barnyard; as it turns out, it is a mountain azalea, which is a wild native of the Appalachian chain.

According to the source material I found, it gets around eight to ten feet tall, which is about the size of this one, and forms dense thickets, which this one is in the process of doing. Hopefully I'll be able to start a few of the seedlings elsewhere in the woods around our place, as it prefers partial shade such as where this one is located, and I'll save seed this fall in the hopes of starting more come spring.

Interestingly, I never noticed this bush until a couple of years ago, which I'm guessing means that it wasn't old enough to bloom before then. Since it is a native, I'll do everything I can to propagate it, which evidently can be done through cuttings. I'll also share it as widely as possible, because it is an important nectar source for our native pollinators, and we all know they need as much help as we can give them.

I'm all about native plants, and I recently purchased sourwood (lily of the valley tree) seeds for the same reason; it is a highly important native nectar source, it is an absolutely beautiful tree with four-season interest, including beautiful fall colors, and sourwood honey is to die for delicious.

When in bloom, in the spring, the flowers of sourwood really do look like lily of the valley, and cover the tree, exuding a lovely sweet fragrance that perfumes the area. I want a LOT of these on our place, and I want to propagate them as well.

We don't have any growing here, yet, which is why I'm not including a photo, but hopefully soon! Meanwhile, I'll include more photos of our amazing wild mountain azalea.

In the following photo, our mountain azalea is being framed by a lovely weeping branch from one of our many forsythia bushes, which just finished blooming a few days ago, and there is a young native red oak seedling in the foreground. To the left, with the oddly shaped four-lobed leaves is a taller tulip poplar seedling, which is the state tree of Tennessee.

We have a huge grandmother tulip poplar right next to the barn, with a massive poison ivy vine climbing her trunk, and her prolific seedlings are taking over the barnyard. We'll be transplanting a lot of the little ones, but the ones that were three and four feet tall when we moved in are now fifteen to twenty feet tall, so those we'll have to cut down.

They are another valuable native nectar source, but we definitely don't need hundreds of them in what is supposed to be a cleared space for animals and growing.

We do have a little bush by the studio that may possibly be another type of azalea, as it has tiny double flowers that begin blooming near the base, and blooms higher and higher on the branches as spring progresses.

It dies back every year to the ground, and I've never heard of an azalea that does that, so at this point I still have no clue what it's actual identity may be. It is almost done blooming, with literally one bloom still hanging on the plant at this point, and the blooms are about 3/4 of an inch across, which you can tell with my fingers to give it scale. I'm 5' 2" tall, and my hands are quite small.

Finally, our large peony that suffered a die back last year, due to a black walnut seedling that grew up in the middle of the clump, is still going strong. Hopefully that means I got the walnut out in time, and this year we'll have a full bloom season from it, but time will tell.

The peonies are behind schedule as compared with last year, as last year on April 19th they were already blooming, and this year the buds are still swelling, but none have begun to open. Which is odd, but there you go.

All photos were taken with my Samsung Note 8 smart phone.

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The photo of our dog, Lolo, and our late cat, Miod, I took as they were cooperatively begging at the dinner table, despite our longstanding rule of not feeding them from the table.

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