The beauty of April

There's a saying here; April April, Sie machst was Sie will. That means; April April, she will do as she will.

That's what happened in the last 4 weeks of April.

There was sun, warmth, storm, sleet, snow, icy rain, frost. In short, all 4 seasons weather was all jumbled up during the month of April. I garden in the alps region. You can see from the pictures featured in here how little sun I'm getting. It has been a very tempermental month, lots of cloudy days but time moves so fast when you're having fun, at least that's what everyone kept telling me, and I definitely had some fun out in the garden. One day I'm in tee shirt, the next day I back into my old ski pants trying to move some plants and the next day I'm in my rain jacket builiding dams to stop overflowing from the pond.

Working and toiling in the garden in the the cold wind and rainy weather with the thick layers of clay that stick to the garden wellies is also very challenging and that bit is not very funny. The achilles tendons are stretched to the maximum while negotiating the 70 degrees slope while at the same time trying to avoid getting hooked by the grabbing thorns and prickles from the canes of the rose bushes.

Walking about on the steep sloping part of the garden after the rain is also very treacherous and adventurous experience at the same time, especially when the wellies are getting heavier and heavier as they collected clay with each step that I took. Every now and then I had to scrape off the thick layer of clay from the wellies. It felt like walking in a pair of heavy moonboots.

The garden is alive! From the ground up, suddenly everything is green and colourful and smelling grrreat.

Wisteria is slowly opening up its pea like flowers

If I am down to just

only one

spring blooming tree in the garden, it must be the Lilac or Syringa Vulgaris.

Nothing beats walking into the garden when the lilacs are blooming. After the rain washed off the pollutants from the atmosphere, I can feel my lungs expanded and my spirit lifted as I inhale the fresh air filled with the wonderful fragrance of lilac that waft in the air.



(left) Syringa Vulgaris

and mahonia, when used as a long evergreen hedge around the garden, will perforate sweet smelling honey fragrance to the outdoor living space. The only thing about Mahonia is that the leaves are prickly and it suckers like crazy but that means free propagation for making more mahonia plants to make the hedge even longer. Mahonia can take in a lot of shade, even under dense trees. Very easy to grow even on impoverished soil.

There's so much documenting to do, lots of photography subjects but it is always very cloudy and the usual overwhelming endless list of things to do. I should also mention that I am still struggling to clean up the mess created by the third party scrapers who consistently victimised and abuse this blog. My blog abuser is taking a huge chunk of my time. I created this blog because this is one of the simpler ways in my small effort to stay in touch with my gardening friends who follow this blog and other readers too. It will be very sad to lose this blog to the hands of the irresponsible people, but everyday it is like struggling to remove the dandelion that kept sprouting out in the middle of the lawn. Removed one and another 2 more popped up. It seems like a never ending story. This is just one of the other things that made me missed the moderated forum. How I missed Pete with his excellent ways of keeping the bad elements away and nobody scrape my words posted over there. If only that bleeding H had behaved in a more tolerable manner.

So I chose to blog up my garden in a way I feel comfortable but the blogsphere is not much better. There are more bleeding H out there constantly harrasing and harming this blog. Why do God create too many bleeding H in this world??

Life is certainly not a bed of roses. Just when I think one part of my life is doing well, another part of life start to crumble and screaming at me to start doing something about it quickly before it really begin to fall apart. Multi tasking is very challenging and I fully respect those one man show multi tasker who succeeded in their effort keeping all their projects afloat like a breeze.

The roses are coming along nicely. At least there's something to cheer me up despite all the hick ups. There are lot of buds everywhere and they are getting bigger and fatter everyday which is very exciting and I'm full with anticipation. Some buds are already showing hints of colours, but since the temperature suddenly dropped to single digit, that probably slowed them down a little from unfurling the petals.

The surrounding is looking much more alive today as spring strengthened its foothold in the garden. I'm looking forward to the month of May as this is one of the most beautiful time of the year when everything in nature became most productive. If you've read my earlier post some 2 weeks ago, I did wrote that there are so much colours around me at the moment, I really mean that because there are so much explosion of colours from ground level up to the tip of the tree branches.

Right now, every spring blooming trees and shrubs are showing off their true colours. Apples and cherry fruiting trees and shrubs are all in bloom, so are the weedy dandelions and wild daisies.

Flowering current Ribes Sanguineum

Ribes Sanguineum or known here as Johannis Berries shrub is at the moment looking really cheerful.

Weather hasn't been that great and I was running around quite a bit too so I did missed photographing them beauties during their best blooming period. Some trees and shrubs that bloom in spring such as magnolia really made a very short show. After 2 weeks, they don't really look that photogenic. One that I always miss the best time to capture their beauty is the magnolia tree Heaven Scent.They are difficult to photograph on dry sunny day and they look awful after the rain.

Magnolia Sieboldii

Magnolia Sieboldii blooms tend to brown immediately after the rain.

I really didn't have much time to sit down and dream about anything at the moment. There are just too much things to do, running around between what pay the bills and what takes away the pain after paying bills. I'm off to the garden now. Tomorrow is a public holiday and that means a long gardening weekend.

I guess this is what "work on your dream" means...you keep moving....

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