Last fall Richard (aka wechsler as there are a few Richards out there) and I worked hard to get a nice garden planted in my back yard. This was a special year because I'm actually trying to have some flowers ready to enter into the Wakefield and North of England tulip society's annual show, so we took a whole new approach to laying out the garden in order to ensure I could keep my "breeder" and "broken" tulips separated from the purely decorative or species tulips I had elsewhere.

I spent most of the last three snowy weeks hoping the tiny irises hiding hopefully in the pot near my kitchen window would freeze to death, and look: this weekend they opened up nicely.


I also saw through the window that my very first tulip had come up - one of the species tulips we'd planted the previous year right against the edge of the brick wall that holds up the east side of my garden. I'm pretty sure it's the Kaufman tulip, the Shakespeare variety - it can't be a greigii because the foliage is the wrong color and I'm pretty sure the Verdi is yellow. It's a good thing I keep track of these things ...



Of course the daffodils are all old news now (though they're still blooming) and the snowdrops in the lawn have gone to seed ... but tulip season is really just starting.