It's a bright sunny day at the farmette. For the past few days, it's been more like mid-summer than mid-spring, with temperatures in the mid-20s Celsius.
All that sunlight and heat has brought out the best of the spring flowers, so I thought I'd do a bit of a round-up.
Here on the property, my double daffodils in the west bed are just peaking. Before moving here, I was never a huge daff fan, but now I'm hooked. William Wordsworth was a big fan, too, with his poem, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.....
The crocuses are nearly finished, but the purple star flowers are just coming on. Nice timing. This is next to the toolshed, which gets the most amount of sun during the day.
My hyacinths are pumping out the perfume at the base of the back stairs. The rather sad Greek myth around the flower is that a beautiful boy name Hyacinth was struck in the head by a discus, and the flower emerged as he died in Apollo's arms. Yikes.
On my walk yesterday, I came across a gorgeous magnolia that was just starting to perform. This one is on Queen Street, and it's a corker, with gorgeous white flowers festooning the bush and brightening up the whole neighbourhood.
The white version is connected to Greek lunar goddesses Selene or Artemis and symbolize all the good things: faith, hope, love, spirituality and care. Nice.
Farther along Queen is a gigantic, almost overgrown forsythia bush that is really doing a job this year.
According to one legend, when the forsythia blooms, we'll have three more snowfalls before winter is really over.
Let's hope that one doesn't come true! Enough with the white stuff already.
So that's it for today's session. It is genuinely uplifting to see, smell and love all the flowers of spring.
Gratuitous cat photo courtesy of Calvin, who's obviously been working too hard.
