The year of the plant

Y'all living in places with snow on the ground may wish to avert your eyes. (Ahem, JoVE.) Last month I started photographing some of my plants, gathering a time-lapse record of how things look. I hope to continue this weekly for a year.

My reason for doing this is that when I started gardening I knew what blooms and fruit to look for, but absent those I often couldn't identify plants. This became a problem when it was time to weed, divide perennials, or prune. Once, as a teen, I even "weeded" all the hundreds of tiny bluebonnet seedlings out of my mother's flower bed. Oops. They didn't have flowers on them, so how could they have been bluebonnets? It's a testament to Mom's self-restraint that I lived to type this.

I took consolation in the fact that I wasn't alone. I learned in my Master Gardener class that some people faithfully prune the long, stringy things off their mountain laurels every year to neaten them up. Then they wonder why there are no blooms. They don't know what part of the plant's cycle is playing out before their eyes. I suspect that's true of a lot of us.

Don't cut anything off your mountain laurels because in three weeks' time they go from this, which is the stringy thing all chunked out with buds:

to this:

and then this:

I wish the blog had a scent widget, because mountain laurel blossoms must be smelled to be believed. They smell like grape Kool-Aid, but lighter and more organic. Bees love them. People love them. In Central Texas, they are the forerunners of bluebonnets and other wildflowers that will explode in a few more weeks.

I have a few prodigies blooming now, like this little grape hyacinth

and columbines standing guard near the street.

I expect everything else to come along soon. It's supposed to reach 90° F by the end of the week here. What about you? Is anything sprouting, blooming or vining where you are?