If you enjoy the bud as much as the flower, the emergence as much as fruition, then you extend the ‘season of interest’ of every plant you grow. (Click on images for a larger view.)
Blanched sedums:
Clockwise: Emerging eranthis, hellbore bud, emerging hellebore stems, another hellbore bud.
Something I don’t even remember planting coming up around cyclamen.
They look like tulip bulbs, Craig… and maybe not an actual planted bulb but the little bulblets from a once stalwart tulip which has split, then was replanted by the squirrels. [It’s been 8 years since I actually witnessed this phenomenon, so take my words as a guess.]
Those are nice photos! If the rain stops in the next day or two I may try to get some of the buds emerging here in Austin – we plant the Hippeastrum/Amaryllis outside, and a few of mine seem to be starting to put up flower stalks.
Annie at the Transplantable Rose
I’m guessing tulips, too. But they usually don’t come on so early. Guess it’s that ‘compressed spring’ I was talking about. One of the benefits of working in the Department of Horticulture, there are often pots of forced tulips up for grabs in the mail room at work. Like a fool, I grow them on in the pots, let them dry out over summer, then plant them haphazardly in the fall. They aren’t supposed to do too well with that kind of treatment. But maybe I got lucky this year.
Great point, Craig. I love the blanched sedums–did you ever notice the ones posted by Kylee on “Our Little Acre”? (You can get to hers from my page.) That’s the first I had ever seen them… they look rather insect-like somehow. Fascinating.