Bringing the outside in.

It was over 100 degrees today. I thought I would spare our lilies the pain by cutting a few and arranging them in a vase. This is, perhaps, one of my favorite aspects of planting bulbs. Bringing the outside in, that is. I've learned a few tricks over the past 4 years of growing flowers. The first year I learned that you should never follow the directions on the packages about how far to space them apart. Always, always plant them closer. In fact, I especially like planting them in groupings so that each grouping looks much like its own little unique shrub.

The tough thing about bulbs is that you plant them with a perfect vision of how they will come up in the spring and summer and it never turns out quite like you planned. Sometimes you don't get the spacing right, sometimes the daffodils bloom earlier than you'd planned, and the tulips later so instead of having the yellow daffodils as a complement to the lavender tulips, you get something a bit more monochromatic than you'd expected. Sometimes you get so much rain in the springtime that the hyacinths drown before they've even had time to poke their fragrant heads through the soil. Augh. It's not an exact science. But, practice does make perfect and I'm finally starting to get somewhere. This fall my game plan is to inundate a few beds with more flowers than I can handle so that when I bring them in, the landscaping doesn't experience such a deep sense of loss.

I probably should spend my time on something more practical, like perfecting vegetable gardening (which I also love, by the way), but in the meantime, I'm enjoying my "free" bouquets of flowers throughout the spring and summer.