The Garden Catalogues

Christmas is barely over and the catalogues have started to arrive. I have been making a nice neat pile for my weekend reading. Who needs a New Years Eve party when you have a pile of catalogues and a credit card. Lots of awesome new items seem to be available and prices have gone down on some things I was watching. One thing is for sure clematis will be at the top of the order this year there are several I have been wanting that are more available and cheaper than they used to be.

Winter Relief

Garden relief came in the mail yeterday the form of a flyer from our local extension office. The Green Thumb Micro-College sponsored by our local Master Gardeners will be taking place at the end of January. I'm so excited a whole day of garden related seminars and interaction with people who don't think I'm crazy! I have been looking over flyer trying to plan my day. It's an interesting line up. I can start the day with high desert gardening work my way thru hellstrips and end the day with ponds and bog gardens. Obviously there will be something for everyone. This is another benefit to the MG program the continuing education when we all have more time and could use it the most.
The lily picture is just for me I enjoy looking at other garden photos and posting mine as well. It is an orientpet of unknown name maybe 'Silk Road'. I added several more of these in this fall and am looking forward to the show.

Winter Bloomers

Here is a picture of Helleborus niger the "Christmas Rose" which blooms in late February or early March in my garden .
I have read a couple of Nancy Goodwins garden books and she has a tradition of walking around Montrose on Christmas morning and documenting the flowers that are in bloom. The list is suprising long. I understand Montrose is a zone warmer than I am but there has got to be something that I could have blooming right now. The closest I could come right now would be the hellebores except when Scott shoveled the snow he covered them with about 2 feet of the white stuff...sigh. I have heard corsican pansies will bloom 12 months out of the year but the one 4 inch pot I bought a couple of years ago died promptly. Maybe I'll get some seed and try it that way. Obviously further research needs to be done.

Obsessions

The catalogs have started rolling in (YEA!!) and as I was flipping through my newest High Country Gardens catalog I wonders what my obsession of choice would be this coming gardening season. Last year it was coneflowers in all the new colors and every absurd price imaginable.
Sunrise, Sunset , Sundown and several others I can't think of at the moment. For me it was the horticultural equivenlent of baseball cards. I didn't need 20 more coneflowers but if I saw it I immediaty picked it up. Frankly as I was looking back through the pictures I can't tell the differece between some of them and for an orange coneflower the one in the above picture(either sundown or sunset) looks rather purple to me. The best of the bunch is Mango Meadowbrite which was actually released last year but due to some issues with it's orange counterpart got some bad press. I wish I could find my pictures of it. None of the others were worth the price tag unless bragging rights are worth something to you.