I pity people who live where there are no seasons

....because for all the heat and freeze we put up with we are more than repaid with our glorious spring and fall.

The north light coming in my window is tinted fuschia by the masses of  blooms clothing the branches of the big old redbud tree just outside.  Do they clash with the red of the flowering crabapple and the last of the magnolia's pink and cream cups or the pink and white dogwoods? No. Nature's colors never clash, not even my neighbor's black maple whose early leaves are dark, bronzy red.

Forsythia, its arcing boughs decked out in golden trumpets, is always the first to announce spring's arrival.

Rain soaked lawns, suddenly emerald after a winter of beige, are sprinkled with crocuses' purple, white and yellow, blue grape hyacinth, and edged in daffodils all annnouncing the new season.  

Tulips show off their amazing panoply of satin colors from beds all over town. 

Yesterday my order of impatiens and  geraniums arrived.  The geraniums will be tiered on the baker's rack on the brick patio.  I will plant the impatiens just behind the curving row of bricks that edges the perennial garden around the back of the garden.  I call it 'faux' gardening because it looks as if I am a gardener, but it is really just the row of vivid color in the front and a parade of daffodils, Virginia bluebells, peonies, rocket phlox, hosta and day lilies that do  their thing through the summer months and into fall. 

I do plant annual herbs and flowers, often from seed gathered the previous autumn. I have an abundance of hollyhock, basil, marigold and zinnia seed. The hollyhock goes near the lattice fence that shields the patio, the zinnia in the sun where tulips bloom now. The remainder of my one sunny bed is my herb garden.  The basil, parsley, sage bush, and tarragon winter over, and the dill reseeds itself, but I replant basil every spring, and border the bed with marigolds to keep the rabbits and squirrels away.

Against the back fence is a long bed of native perennials with a few aliens.  Lots of echinacia, daisies, black-eyed susans, some beebalm and tickweed with its dainty yellow flowers fill that space.  Each year I try something new to see if it likes that location.  My goal is to have a bed that is so at home in the climate and soil that all will bloom faithfully like the wild flowers they are.