Iris time

Iris 'Buckwheat'

Spring in Washington, DC is a delightful season but all too short.   We've just had 10 days in a row with temperatures above 80 (a new record for May), reminding me that heat and humidity often arrive early and that it's best to get most gardening chores out of the way by mid-May, before that window closes.  But spring-blooming plants like my bearded irises look so nice this time of year with no care at all, whispering we don't need anything, look how well we're blooming, just sit back and enjoy us for a while.  It's positively hypnotic.  By the time I snap out of it, June has arrived with its muggy summer heat and perhaps worst of all, bugs.  I was bitten by my first mosquito of the year just yesterday, marking spring as effectively over.

Cornell Plantations: gardens far above Cayuga's waters

Cayuga Lake, view from Stewart Park, Ithaca, NY

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, part of my recent travels included several days in Ithaca, NY to attend my 30th reunion at Cornell University.  Ithaca is a small city in upstate New York at the southern tip of Cayuga Lake, one of the Finger Lakes, and greeted us with early June weather at its very best with blue skies, low humidity, warm sunny days and cool nights.  While there, my husband Dan (also Class of 1984) and I toured the Cornell Plantations, the school's botanical gardens and among my favorite areas on the campus.   I wrote earlier this year about my brief stint as a gardener at the Cornell Plantations after graduation (see Throwback Thursday: summer of 1984), a job that helped change the direction of my career.

Spring Garden Day at Green Spring Gardens

Tradescantia cultivar

One of the pleasures of spring is attending the various plant sales, and the Washington, DC area has a couple of big ones every year.  The first is the Garden fair and plant sale put on by Friends of the National Arboretum (FONA) to benefit the U.S. National Arboretum.  I missed that one this year but did attend the other big one, the Spring Garden Day at Green Spring Gardens.

Spring has sprung

Iris 'Buckwheat'

What a relief that spring is finally here!  In fact the last 3 days have felt more like summer, humid and with highs close to 80.  In addition to the spring perennials cheering me up, I'm seeing recovery on several plants that were badly damaged by the winter and that I thought (or feared) were dead.  To recap, this was the Washington, DC area's coldest winter in 20 years, and was a good test of all the marginally hardy plants we're growing here!  The low in my own yard was about 5 degrees in early January, with several more lows in the 9-12 degree range and several periods of temperatures well below freezing.