Grass as foliage — our backyard.
Thanks to Pam at Digging for hosting Garden Bloggers’ Foliage Follow Up on the 16th of every month.
. . . Each blade
the entrance to the grass city.— Kathleen Fraser, from “Grass“
(And another poem about grass for a Monday.)
in the pleatpetal purring of mouthweathered May.
— Karen Volkman, from “May“
The Chinese tree peonies are definitely the stars this month in the Speilhaus garden of the University of Hohenheim.
I took these photos yesterday evening.
The garden has around ten mature specimens.
Unfortunately, we had several days of rain last week, and the blooms were not at their best.
The fern leaf peony shown above was new to me.
Beyond the peony bed, I liked the combination, above and below, of light-purple geraniums and orange euphorbias.
Nearby was a planting of bearded iris.
In the photo above, the bright yellow at the top, just below the arbor, is mountain goldenbanner, which is native to the western United States.
White asphodel — “that greeny flower” — was also blooming in the garden.
The pretty blue-violet flower above was close by, but I didn’t get a picture of its label. I think it’s another Asphodelus. It’s a Camassia, a North American native in the asparagus family (see the comments below).
Looking south across the garden from behind the wisteria arbor, you can see the row of tree peonies. In the lower right-hand corner is a planting of yellow asphodel or king’s spear.
Looking across the garden from the east to the west, a beautiful pink blooming Judas tree draws the eye.
The tree is native to Southern Europe and Western Asia.
At the other side of the garden a Lithospermum purpurocaeruleum or purple gromwell drapes over the steps. The flowers emerge purple reddish and then mature to deep blue.
To see what’s blooming today for other garden bloggers, please visit Carol at May Dreams Gardens.
Schloss Nymphenburg, Munich, May 7, 2016.
Mary Heldon, between 1900 and 1920, Friars Point, Mississippi, by Milton McFarland Painter, Sr., via Mississippi Department of Archives and History.* Mary was also pictured in this garden photo by Painter.
I had not thought of violets late,
The wild, shy kind that spring beneath your feet
In wistful April days. . .— Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson, from “Sonnet“
*Photo cropped slightly by me.
Buckingham Residence, Paradise Valley, Nevada, July 1978, (35mm slide) by Suzi Jones, via American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress (all photos here).
The house, the oldest in the town, was originally built as a hotel for a mining settlement. It was later disassembled and rebuilt in Paradise Valley.
Also from the Folklife Center’s Paradise Valley* collection. . .
This residence on the Ninety-Six Ranch was built around 1900, added onto a bunkhouse/dining hall from the 1880s (shown below).
The ranch has been in the same family’s ownership since 1864. The ox yoke above the gate may have had particular significance for them, as their ancestor — a German immigrant named William Stock — first saw the land while hauling freight from California.
There are other views of the home here and here.
One more picket fence image from the same collection. . .
The house was built by Stefano Ferraro, an Italian immigrant who bought the ranch land in 1902. It is still family owned.
According to the Folklife Center’s notes, the cottonwood trees that were planted behind the house by Stephano “were among the tallest in the valley.”
There is a 1934 view of the home here.
*From 1978 to 1982, the Center conducted an ethnographic field project in this distinctive ranching and mining community. The study became the collection “Buckaroos in Paradise: Ranching Culture in Northern Nevada, 1945-1982.”
enclos*ure 