The fireworks begin!

Caspar and I were out of town last weekend and came home to the beginnings of a firework display on our back hillside.  The Baby Blue-Eyes and Five Spots are starting to come up in mass.  They are already starting to look beautiful, but the exciting thing is realizing that every little flower that we see pretty much represents an entire plant that can grow to a mass of flowers about 2' across!  Although it is beautiful now, it is fun to know that this is just the beginning of things to come!

Hard to see in the photo, but the hill is starting to come
alive.  Each little dot represents one plant that will
eventually produce dozens of flowers in a big mass.

Five Spots and Baby Blue-Eyes dotting
our back hillside

 It was fun to be away for only three days and see such dramatic changes.  I am out inspecting our yard every day so it often makes it hard to see the buildup of all the gradual changes that are taking place.

One of my favorite aspects of wildflower gardens is how they sleep and then seem to come alive overnight.  The flowers time their blooming so that they seem to come out of nowhere.  One day the hill is green, the next it is a profusion of color.  The seasonal firework display comes on like that... right now, we are just watching the sparklers of twilight, what is only the anticipation of the big show.  The show has started, but my lone blooming buttercup and the Clarkia, lupines and Phacelia are all waiting to join in the party and really get things going!  I can already see buds and I know that in one, two month's time... things will be really exciting!

Can you see the buttercup?  I saw it and came RUNNING out to get
a better look.  I ADORE buttercups!

My first Ranunculus- Buttercup.

I look out over my back hill and our front yard every day- looking for new emergence and to get angry at the weeds that have the audacity to show their weedly little heads... The other day I was thrilled when I spotted a tiny little yellow dot amidst the green, blue and white.  A BUTTERCUP!  I simply adore them- partly because of their name... I can freely admit that it brings back memories of "The Princess Bride", but mostly because they are a sweetly cheery little yellow flower with a glossy (some might say "buttery") sheen to its flowers.  The glossiness of these flowers is what gives them their name and also makes them easy to identify.

What I did not know before embarking on this gardening adventure, is that this sweet little flower is not actually an annual, as I would have expected, but it is a perennial.  The reason they seem like annuals is that their foliage is not very eye catching and they die back in summer.  Having perennials on our hillside is great not just because once it gets established, I can name it and have it return year after year, but also because the living roots will persist and help to stabilize the hill.  I have already planted many perennial grasses on the hill for that reason, so my lone Buttercup will not have urgent work to prop up the back yard... but it is still nice to think of it that way.