Cherry blossoms are one of the most stunning blooms, creating such a mass of flowers on a small tree. The blooms are ethereal but ephemeral. A heavy rain followed by gusts of wind in a day or two can leave a flowering cherry blossom tree that’s once pretty with flowers to a sad looking stumpy trunk with denuded branches, with few leaves in sight — its beautiful mass of flowers scattered on the ground skirting its trunk.
For this reason, I have not planted a single cherry tree in our home garden no matter how much I’ve been tempted to have such showy floral display in late March or in April. Nature’s unkind weather in our locale during the peak blooming season of cherry blossoms is too cruel for my meager gardening budget.
My wife's cat Paisley with cherry blossoms at Port Moody city hall
Cherry blossoms at Garry Point Park in Richmond
I am merely content to admire the neighbors’ cherry blossoms. I do drive around to places where the cherry blossom displays are phenomenal, like in our city’s parks, in front of the Port Moody city hall, along certain streets in Vancouver, by the airport and at Garry Point Park in Richmond; I don’t mind paying for gas, but I cannot splurge on even a single cherry tree in our home garden.
So, what’s there to satisfy my gardening hankering for blooms in early Spring?
There’s a plethora of early-Spring blooming plants that I’ve collected in our small home garden. Because of our garden’s small size, I must be more selective with the plants I have introduced in our garden.
When the cherry blossoms are gone, the flowers of our variegated weigela claims the spotlight. This is next to a few stands of lemon-yellow forsythia that bloom right after the pink weigela. Good timing since I prefer pink blooms to be a good distance from something that blooms in bright yellow. I am not keen on golden yellow and sweet pink blooms together.
At our back garden, two shrubs of Magnolia stellata send their fragrant white blooms to coincide with the white sprays of the neighboring Bridal Wreath spirea. I am not crazy about the pungent smell of the spirea, so I am glad the sweet smell of the star-like magnolias masks the spirea smell.
Pink weigela with variegated leaves, forsythia, and magnolia Stellata in our back garden
The red rhododendrons also offer their share of flowers in our back garden. Unfortunately, only we can see these floral displays because the back garden is beyond the public’s view.
Our front garden has a decent collection of foundation evergreens. We have English boxwood (both all-green and some variegated varieties) that I shape into oval balls and planted along the south and southwest sides of the house, a few dwarf Alberta spruce, rhododendrons underneath couple of more-than-half-century-old pine trees, heather, Japanese aralia, dwarf Mugo pines, and Japanese holly.
Two cascading Sawara cypress (Chamaecyparis pisifera) stand guard at the entrance walkway to our house. I try to prune some branches of the cypress to make it multi-layered, but my procrastination coupled with laziness have gotten the better of me in the past few years, so the shrubs look like a messy mass of cascading, wiry limbs of yellow green needles.
At the front corner, blooming tulips, rockcress, and heather are edged with cascading Japanese hakonechloa
The attention-grabbers in our front garden currently are the early-Spring flowering plants. At the front corner of the garden bloom a mass of pink and crimson heathers, with early-Spring tulips of assorted colors blooming with the yellow daffodils and white rockcress. This southwest corner garden is edged with Japanese hakonechloa grass and a few store-bought annuals (primula and pansies). This is the public’s favorite garden.
My favorite part of the garden is at the end of our front walkway. Here, the hyacinths, muscaris, crocuses, bleeding hearts, Pasque flowers, and white and pale pink tulips compete for attention. The sweet smell of the hyacinths and sweet woodruff and sarcococca confusa greet us when we walk in from work at dusk. The white and light-colored flowers glimmer despite the fading sunlight.
pink bleeding hearts
Top row: pink hyacinths, bright pink bleeding hearts, and white bloodroot
Bottom row: Purple Pasque flowers, purplish hellebores, and pastel pink early Spring tulip
Another favorite area of mine is the southeast corner of the garden. A weeping plum tree, and an apple tree that found its way to our garden via an errant seed, show off their pale pink and white blossoms.
Plum blossoms, white apple blossoms, and brunnera Jack Frost
Underneath the mini trees (mini, because I prune them every year) reside some blooming tulips, bluebells, crocuses, bloodroot, creeping phlox, hellebores, and self-sowing forget-me-not competing with brunnera Jack Frost.
At the outskirts of the tree line are columbines, lungwort, and pastel daffodils to add to the harmonious blue and pastel colors. This flowering circular patch has proved to be minimal maintenance yet blooms with abandon.
A scattering of more tulips and daffodils, together with wild cornflowers that volunteered to sprout here and there, occupy the ground level of a row of now-budding azaleas adjacent to my favorite garden areas. In a week’s time, these azaleas color our southeastern front garden in pure whites, fuchsia pinks, magenta, and maroon.
This is early Spring yet. We’ve already forgotten about the cherry blossoms. We look forward to more blooms as Spring rocks on to usher in Summer.
Our home garden — like most gardens everywhere — peaks in early Summer when most plants are waving their blooms to gain the viewers’ attention.
Gardening is a seasonal joy.
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If you want to read a similar blog story on early Spring gardening delights, here’s the link: https://sansenleevendiola.wordpress.com/2023/05/01/april-showers-may-flowers/
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