inspiration from the garden

It's so beautiful here this time of year that I just couldn't resist taking some pictures.

First, the forests are full of white anemones.

These blue flowers also grow wild. I don't know what they are, but I think they're my husband's favorite.

Even the trees are blooming. Luckily I'm not bothered by pollen.

In our back yard are old fashioned daffodils. We heard from a former owner that in the 1970's when her aging parents were tiring of all the work that goes into running a farm, they decided to give up on the garden in the back yard and put the bull there instead. They tried to rescue their favorite daffodils by planting them in the forest. After them, other tenants have kept horses in the back yard. In the meanwhile, the daffodils have thrived in the forest, and they're even starting to make a comeback in the back yard.

This clump of daffodils has come up in the middle of the lawn. I've been mowing around it very carefully for the last couple of years, and it seems to have paid off.

We also have a patch of modern daffodils in the back yard, and every year there come more and more.

Tulips are my favorite flower. In California, you can make tulips grow, but you have to dig them up every year and keep them in the refrigerator to simulate winter. Needless to say, I never bothered to plant tulips. Since coming here, I have made several efforts to plant tulips. Unfortunately, it seems like wherever I plant something, my husband ends up digging it up for one of his drainage or electrical projects or such. His mother is a landscape architect and is always trying to make me more interested in gardening by giving me plants. Sometimes she surprises us by planting stuff for us. This would be great, but she does this with no consideration for what has been planted in that spot previously, so the result is often not what anyone intended.

After one of his digging projects, he arranged for a load of fill dirt which turned out to be from someone's yard in Lund. This has resulted in a section of our lawn that is full of randomly distributed tulips, daffodils, crocus, and other bulbs.