I love all things miniature, and tiny flowers are no exception. Most of the small-scaled plants and alpines are soon overwhelmed in this rough-and-tough landscape, losing the fight against the more vigorous neighbours in the garden and the hardy native plants.

Miniature daffodils, however, survive and thrive — a constant source of joy and delight.

The fact that the mice and deer don’t eat them, well, that’s just a wonderful bonus!

Here, in my Zone 4 Maritime garden, miniature daffodils are the true harbingers of spring. In the warm sheltered sunny patch by the old lilacs, where the concrete underground septic tank draws the sun’s heat into the earth, miniature daffodils bloom early —

Miniature daffodils bloom even earlier than the crocus, scilla, and other small spring-flowering bulbs, usually, at least in my garden. In early April, when we’re still getting whomped by occasional snowstorms but the winter’s drifts begin to melt and dwindle, it’s the brave green shoots of miniature daffodils that poke up first through the crystal-white snow. Even if we get more snow thereafter, I’m sure to be greeted, one bright morning in the third week of April, by a perky little bouquet of bright yellow blossoms.

I mention miniature daffodils now because today — Mother’s Day — I picked the last of this year’s fading blooms.

Yes, it was a lovely long season for the little darlings this year, almost a full month of flowers. Soon the foliage will begin to yellow and die back — I just tuck the dying leaves out of sight under the leaves of surrounding perennials, to give the foliage a chance to feed the bulbs for next year.

Meanwhile, other yellow flowers take over from the happy miniature daffodils… The forsythia bushes are starting to burst into bloom, at last, and the roadsides are full of cheerful yellow coltsfoot and dandelions. Pussy willows have blown out their fuzzy grey buds into the neon-yellow flowers that are always busy with pollen-gathering bees. Trout lilies (which people also call “adder’s tongue” and “dog tooth violet”) are showing their delicate yellow bells in the ditches and damp woods…

Every season has its charms, but I do believe that mid-May is my absolute favourite time… here, anyway, in the Maritime provinces of Canada. (Other places, other times!)

Every time I step outside, or even look out the window, the beauty strikes anew. I deeply love our landscape in this yellow-dominated phase of burgeoning spring, when even the fresh new leaves of the hillside trees are a bright light green that seems tinged with sunshine…

Okay, now here’s exactly why it so ticks me off that lavender plants are just barely hardy in my zone 4 (windy) garden — a pretty wreath of lavender blossoms, accented with one tiny perfect rosebud in a bow of raffia.

This is one of the bountiful variety of lavender wreath styles at Hood River Lavender, Oregon — certified organic, too!

If you can make an evergreen wreath, and a grapevine wreath, and a wreath of dried autumn leaves… this would be totally do-able! The trick, of course, is to have an ample supply of lavender to make enough bunches for an entire wreath…

So I offer up this floral inspiration for you lucky crafting gardeners in a milder climate, who can grow beautiful thick lush lavender plants ’til the flowers come out of your ears… or who live within an easy jaunt of Hood River’s lavender U-Pick!

Friends are very forgiving about small garden imperfections (that’s why they’re friends!) but this year, we’ve got A Big Wedding Anniversary coming up in the extended family and everyone’s keen on making the party an outdoor event. We’ll want the place to look its very best for the occasion — but re-designing the landscape completely is out of the question!

So I’ve been going back through some earlier garden-related posts of mine, seeking inspiration, and remembering my Aunt Virgie’s old tried-and-true methods of getting a show-stopping yard and garden without actually going to a lot of trouble or expense.

5 Ways To Fake A Show-Off Garden

(with thanks to my frugal and green-thumbed Aunt Virgie)

1. Planter Magic

Need some colour? Group a few containers of lush flowering annuals wherever your borders look tired or dull. Keep your planters in the one single family of materials for unity — if you do terracotta for one, do terra cotta for all — but do mix up the heights and sizes of the pots to increase the interest.

2. Weed Wisdom

If you don’t have the time to weed all your borders before a big garden party or flower-loving in-laws are expected, concentrate your efforts on tidying up the front six or eight inches of each bed. A clean edge gives such a good impression, no one will notice a stray weed among the back-of-border specimens.

If time permits, do crisp up the meeting of soil and turf grass with an edger or straight-edged spade. And if your budget permits (which mine never does, oddly enough), consider a layer of decorative mulch.

3. Artful Dodges

Locate the lawn art with care. A piece of garden sculpture or a wind-driven whirly-gig can do a lot to dress up a garden, if chosen well, but it will draw the eye to whatever you place it near. If your roses are overblown and going brown at the edges, for example, move those garden gnomes out of the rose garden and over to the late-season lilies or whatever else is looking its best at the time.

4. Put It In Perspective

In general, concentrate your major tidying-up efforts for the areas of garden that are closest to the house or outdoor seating area. Distance, when it comes to viewing a garden, can hide a multitude of flaws!

If the view form your patio leaves something to be desired, despite your best efforts, you can make the patio itself the centre of interest. Go for bright cushions on lawn furniture, a pretty table setting, groups of potted plants at the edges of the seating area, maybe a shade umbrella or two for a festive air… This is a great place for a stunningly original piece of garden sculpture, unusual windchimes, decorative pavers, all the small close-up touches that will draw the eye away from a less attractive vista.

5. Cosmetic Measures

Every yard and garden, like every house, is likely to have some bits and pieces lying around that you yourself don’t even see any more because you’re so used to them.

Try to look at your place with an outsider’s eye — the way that real estate people tell you to do when “set dressing” your home for a prospective buyer to view:

• Pick up the kids’ toys (and, of course, the dog’s droppings!).
• Tuck away your garbage cans, garden tools, water hose, and other work-a-day necessities in a garage or garden shed, out of sight. If you don’t have a building in which to hide your tools, a good-looking large deck box will do the trick — and it can double as outdoor seating, too.
• Remove or replace any outdoor furniture or garden ornaments that are showing age and wear, or just plain getting shabby.
• Seed quick-growing annual vines like Morning Glory to clamber up a network of well-placed plant sticks and screen the compost pile (or use one of the many tidy compost bins on the market).
• Consider some flower-filled windowboxes or a new coat of paint to perk up an old garden shed.

Of course, if your nearest neighbour is stockpiling old rusty automobiles in his yard, that’s another thing.

Pick an attractive point in the middle distance — in your own yard — and focus the attention there, perhaps with a show-stopping floral display (in containers, if you must) or a busy bird-feeding station.

In your long term plan, consider a free-standing trellis, overhung with vigorous grapevines or fast-growing Virginia creeper, to screen the unpleasant view. A solid privacy fence can do more than block a sight line, so think twice before installing one: there’s a chance it could block out a welcome cooling breeze, or even make your yard or garden seem smaller.

In a treasured old copy of The English Garden magazine I revisited recently, Helen Gunn wrote:

There is a general feeling, mostly unspoken, that English names are low brow and folksy. Latin implies education and expert knowledge, no matter if it also sounds affected.

She doesn’t deny that it is sometimes very useful to have a precise Latin name by which to identify a particular plant, but regrets the fading-away of more colourful traditional plant names like kiss-at-the-wicket, leopard’s bane, love-lies-bleeding, wake robin and Oswego tea.

There is such poetry in the English names that it seems an impoverishment of our literary heritage to lose them. I would rather think that I was growing sweet sultan than centaurea or bishop’s hat than the dreary epimedium. We could even reinstate some really old names, and refer to gladioli as corn flags and nasturtiums as lark’s heels.

Around here, for example, that tall white-flowering plant I love is called snakeroot, but we are quite able to identify it as cimicifuga if forced to do so.

Oh, but didn’t I read somewhere that the garden gurus have started changing the Latin names around? So now cimicifuga is supposed to be called by another name entirely…
Well, it’s still snakeroot to me!

In the various pet-owners groups where I hang out, a common topic of discussion is dangerous plants, and whether a favorite garden plant might be harmful to dogs, cats, horses, or other pets and domesticated animals who might wander up and start munching away.

What common wild and garden plants can harm your pets?

And what part(s) of those toxic plants would be harmful to the animals we love:

• Roots?
• Shoots?
• Leaves?
• Berries?
• Stems?
• Flowers?
• or all of the above?

Who knew that horses shouldn’t eat chives – or red maple leaves?

Horses are poisoned sporadically in the northeastern United States after they ingest red maple leaves. Signs of toxicity are similar to those seen with the Brassica anemia factor after animals ingest plants of the genus Brassica (such as canola, kale, cabbage).

Now we’ve got every hardy herbaceous plant known to eastern Canada and New England growing around this place, I think — no poison ivy, though, happily! — but I don’t spend a whole lot of time obsessing about whether our domestic dogs are going to start snacking on the Aconitum. Still, handy to have a searchable database of poisonous plants at my fingertips, courtesy of the Government of Canada, and a whole bookshelf of reliable field guides and reference books!