I must have planted these, though I don’t remember when or why. They are coming up in a bed on the north side of my house, and were a pleasant surprise yesterday as I pulled out the last of the brown foliage from last year’s daylilies. I wasn’t sure what they were at first, but a little looking confirmed: Glory of the Snow (Chionodoxa). Glory of the Snow are distinct among the early spring bulbs in that they turn their flower faces upward, unlike the more bell-like shape of the squill bulbs, which are blooming just around the corner from these.

We were in Faribault anyway, so I talked the man in my life into a side trip to Donahue’s, just to look. $57 and change later, we were heading home. This is the time of year when gardeners are so starved for color, so sick of winter, and so ready to cut loose, that we are like sailors on shore leave. Roll that lucky seven, I’m buying a hanging basket full of bougainvillea.

So, how can you get a great garden without going broke? Here are four suggestions I’ve heard (though not always followed!) from savvy gardeners.

• Remember: Plants grow. Look at the mature size of a plant before you buy 10 flats of impatiens. That little coleus may grow to 2 feet tall and almost as wide. The Purple Passion rose I bought in Chicago this past weekend will be 5 feet tall and maybe 3 or more feet wide. That’s a pretty good sized plant.
• Hit the garden club plant sales. This weekend is the big weekend for plant sales in Minnesota. For a complete list of sales, check out the hort society’s calendar. (Northfield readers, head to Bridge Square Saturday morning for the Northfield Garden Club’s sale.) If you are fishing or hanging out with your mom this weekend, some clubs hold their sales next weekend as well. Garden club sales are the perfect place to pick up perennials for a reasonable price. Many of these are divisions of well-established plants grown by careful gardeners. In other words, no wimps that will fade in a few weeks. The real benefit of garden club sales, though, are the club members working the sale. They know gardening and love to talk about it and answer questions.
• Defer gratification. If money is tight, remember that the season for selling plants in this climate is remarkably short. You can wait a few weeks, buy your plants at half price or less, and they’ll still grow and look good most of the summer. Selection may be limited, but sometimes you can find a wonderful plant for much less.
• Stretch out your gardening. You don’t have to re-do your landscape in a single year. Landscapers recommend coming up with an overall plan, then planting it one phase at a time.

If none of these work for you, try doing what one woman I know did to fund her plant habit: Get a job at a garden center!

With the cold and rain we had last week, the blooming is still behind the past couple of years. But trees are starting to leaf out and more of the spring bulbs are showing. Around town I’ve seen hyacinth as well as daffodils and magnolias (yes, there are magnolias hardy enough for Minnesota) and a few tulips. In my yard, the squill (Scilla siberica) is blooming around the front yard and the pansies in pots look healthy. Two new bloomers have emerged over the past couple of days: daffodils (only one so far, but more coming) and a pretty stand of yellow tulips. (Sorry, I don’t know the name of these.) I hope your garden is starting to bloom, too.

Since envy is one of the seven deadly sins, is zone envy a particularly egregious offense for gardeners? If so, I am guilty after a trip to Chicago this weekend. I went to help my daughter, a student at Loyola University, move home for the summer. Early Friday morning, I left Minnesota amid wind, cold, and threats of snow showers. Traveling across Wisconsin, I was pelted by heavy rain. But on Loyola’s pleasant urban campus, there were azaleas in bloom, tulips filling the planters, flowering crabapples, and near the shore of Lake Michigan, a planter filled with blooming (blooming!!!) roses. Chicago is in zone 5, according to the USDA map, only one zone lower than Minnesota, but the lake may moderate temperatures even more on the campus. Fortunately, I was able to ease my suffering with a bit of retail therapy at Ferraro’s Garden Spot, a small garden store near the hotel we stayed in. Ferraro’s had a good selection of Jackson and Perkins roses, so I bought two: ‘Purple Passion’ and, not surprisingly, ‘Iceberg.’

UPDATE and ADDITION: After I wrote this post, we were back on campus, and what should appear but this fox. My daughter had a startling late-night encounter with a fox several weeks ago. Apparently, the fox is a regular on campus. (Keep in mind, these photos were taken near a building overlooking Lake Michigan and less than a block from North Sheridan Road, a very busy intersection.)

Not many of us can garden in the fashion of impressionist Claude Monet. Lacking the 5-acre garden, help from a full-time gardener and (most importantly) artistic genius, we instead look at Monet’s paintings, and sigh. There was a lot of sighing, and gasping, and general oohing and aahing at the Minneapolis Institute of Art this morning during photographer Derek Fell’s talk on Monet’s garden. The event was part of the MIA’s annual Art in Bloom, and the auditorium was packed with enthusiastic gardeners and art lovers.

In addition to photographing gardens, Fell designs them so he brings great knowledge and sympathy to his photographs of Monet’s garden. We’ve occasionally used his stock images in Northern Gardener. He recently completed a book on Monet called The Magic of Monet’s Garden: His Planting Plans and Color Harmonies.

At the MIA, he talked about how Monet used color and lines to create the depth and luminescence in his art. Some of these are techniques we regular gardeners can employ. For instance, in order to create the shimmer that impressionists are known for, Monet used white flowers or silver plants. But white shouldn’t be used in a clump, Fell said. A clump makes a hole in the garden; dotted throughout the garden, white plays off the other colors and brightens them. As Fell said (and he may have been quoting Monet), you’ve got to sprinkle it like salt and pepper. Monet used color harmonies throughout his garden. His plantings would be all in cool colors (such as in the painting above) or in hot colors. Cool harmonies include blues and purples, hot ones reds, oranges and yellows. Monet sometimes would plant beds of hot colored flowers in front of beds of cool colored flowers. From a certain angle, the cool behind the hot makes the bed look deeper. Monet also used only straight beds because he wanted to create deep perspective and a sense of walking into infinity.

His famous water garden took the opposite approach, according to Fell. That was a cup garden, where the visitor was called to introspection. Monet, like many smart gardeners, planted at least three of any of the water lilies he chose for his water gardens.

Monet’s interest in gardening grew from his painting. He gardened to create the kind of place he wanted to paint. In the process, he created the kind of garden many gardeners would like to visit.

I’ve always worn an old baseball cap when I garden, which was not much in the looks department and did not protect my neck from the sun. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve been more careful about sun protection. (And perhaps a bit regretful about those sunburns in the Bahamas back in the 80s.) So, this year, I splurged. Here I am modeling my new sun-proof garden hat from Tilley’s. It’s still not much in the looks department (or maybe I’m just not a hat person) but no stray UV rays will get me. What I really like about this hat is that it has a band that goes around the back of your head–just like the famous hats worn by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, according to the brochure–so it will not blow off during windy weather.

I’ve never been very dedicated to keeping garden records, even though I have several lovely journals just for that purpose. I’m hoping this blog might keep me more on task. So, here it goes, the first of what I hope will be weekly updates on what’s blooming in my garden. Right now, I hope your garden is doing better. This morning, I stepped out on the front stoop and the most prominent “bloom” was frost. According to the weather service, it hit 26 F. in Northfield last night.

I’ve got two things blooming: two pots of pansies that I just put out and the squill that I planted last fall. I potted one set of pansies in a strawberry pot and another batch in a terracotta pot I picked up for free last fall. This is the first year I’ve put pansies out, because it usually gets too warm for pansies very quickly. This year, it seemed worth it to spend a few bucks for some color.

The squill (Scilla siberica) are bright and cheery, despite the cold, rain and general gloom they have put up with since emerging. Squill flowers tend to face downward (as in the first picture), so I held the bloom up on one to get this detail shot.

While I don’t have much going, I’ve noticed a few yards with early daffodils blooming. My neighbor’s crocus were very pretty a week or so ago, but have faded now. The forecast calls for warmer, but still cool weather for the next week or two. I guess this is the time of year we northern gardeners earn our bragging rights.

Unlike so many condos for people, I am hoping my just completed condo project for orchard mason bees will soon be abuzz with activity. I’ve been meaning to build one of these since I read an article in Fine Gardening about raising raspberries and the importance of orchard mason bees as pollinators.

Last fall, we had an article in Northern Gardener on the honeybee crisis. Honeybees, which are responsible for much of the pollination of commercial crops such as almonds, have been dying off in large numbers. Marla Spivak of the U of M is a bee expert, and she believes several factors may be causing the die-off, including mites or diseases and changes in habitat, such as prairies becoming residential areas and large monoculture crops (corn). If you are interested in honeybees or just want to see pictures of people with bee-beards, please check out the U’s great Bee Lab web site.

Well, no matter what the situation with honeybees, gardeners need bees of all types for pollination. Orchard mason bees are perfect bee neighbors. They are not social bees–each little bee wants her own condo. They are very gentle and pollinate like crazy. To build the house, you need a 4-by-4 block of wood of any length (mine is about a foot) with an angle cut on one edge. You also need a spare piece of wood or a cedar shingle for the roof, and another piece of wood to mount the house on. If you are lucky and have a friend with lots of spare lumber and a rotating arm power saw, the job is a snap. (Thanks, Steve!)

Once you have the wood, you drill holes 5/16th of an inch in diameter about 3 inches into the wood. Drill as many holes as you want, but there should be about 3/4 of an inch center to center between the holes. I got 28 on my block. Then, attach the roof to the block, and the block to the mounting piece and you are ready to hang your bee house. The bees like it facing south, so I mounted mine on one of the posts of my pergola. The bees use the holes in the house for nesting. They love pollen from apples and raspberries and I have both very close to the bee house. With any luck, the bees will help produce a good crop of raspberries, apples, veggies, flowers, and more bees this summer.

The rain we’ve had has been great, as I noted in the previous post, but c’mon, snow! This morning, I woke up to a small pile of the white stuff on the gardens and yard. It’s melting rapidly, but according to local weather forecasts, we’ll be getting night temperatures in the high 20s the next two nights. Spring bulbs and buds on trees should be able to deal with this–and, if they can, I suppose gardeners can as well.

It’s been cold and rainy the past couple of days, but I cannot help but feel grateful for it. This is one of those turning-point rains, steady and plentiful, but not too hard. With a rain like this, suddenly the grass goes from dull to vibrant, the trees start to glow with leaf buds just ready to pop, and foliage sprouts from the ground where flowers were last summer.

The buds on my tulips need only a little sun before they will open up to spring.