Scarlet buckeye echoes the fresh leaves of our crape myrtle in the upper garden.
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“Color is simply energy, energy made visible.
Colors stimulate or inhibit
the functioning of different parts of our body.
Treatment with the appropriate color
can restore balance and normal functioning.”
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Columbine has spread itself with dropped seeds, from a single plant or two.
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Our garden fills itself with more color each day. We love watching the various leaves and flowers unfold, revealing their beauty, bit by bit.
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Native Iris cristata
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The color palette shifts and changes as we move deeper into the season. More and more colors appear, filling our forest garden with beauty.
This week we’ve enjoyed the emerging pinks and reds as azaleas have bloomed, the scarlet buckeye tree covered itself with flowers, and the new hybrid crape myrtle leaves began to emerge. Its leaves will stay fairly dark, in the purplish range, through the summer.
Winter clothes itself in greys and browns, summer in greens. Autumn erupts in reds, yellows and golds. But spring gives us delicate shades of yellows and blues, white, pink, scarlet and fresh pale green.
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Wood hyacinths finally reveal their delicate blue flowers.
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“I celebrate life with a different color each day.
That way, each day is different.”
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Color shows us the vibration of light. Physicists and philosophers teach us that our world is wholly composed of light and energy’s vibration.
Some light vibrates so rapidly that our eyes won’t register it at all, and some light vibrates too slowly for our eyes to see. But other eyes, in other creatures, can see what we can not. We see the spectrum allowed to our human species, and the colors we see effect how we think and feel.
Perhaps that is why we feel joy on a spring time day, surrounded by such pure, vibrant colors.
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Photos by Woodland Gnome 2019
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“For colour is one of the most rapturous truths
that can be revealed to man.”
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Iris pallida are the first to open this year, though we noticed the first German bearded Iris opened during the storms, overnight. I. pallida is one of the European species Iris used in many German bearded Iris hybrids. It was first brought to our area by European colonists in the Seventeenth Century and can be found growing in Colonial Williamsburg gardens. These were a gift from a friend.
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Yes, a bonus #7 photo today, just because the Iris are blooming and it’s spring! N. ‘Salome’ in the pot bloom to close the Narcissus season for another year.
Forest Garden 
Iris pallida is still my favorite iris, even more than any white bearded iris. I got mine from the garden of my maternal-maternal great grandmother. I still think of it as a bearded iris, just because that is how I think of it. I think it was grown for orris root. My great grandmother did not grow many flowers just because they were pretty.