Friday was beautiful here in NC- 80 degrees and sunny- so we headed over to the Duke Botanical Gardens in the afternoon. They have a number of raised beds filled with tulips in the spring and this year we seemed to visit right around their peak.

and irises too

The garden allows dogs so Riesling got to strut her new haircut (and pink bandanna) around the grounds.

As usual, she got a lot of smiles and comments from folks. She’s not used to heat yet so she was panting heavily; of course, this didn’t slow her down too much, though she did stretch out on the cool futon when she got home.

More pics can be seen on our flickr pages.

The recent rainfall along with the warm temperature has brought most everything in our garden to life over the last few weeks, and we are fully in mid-spring in Durham. Some photos from the garden:

Our daffodils started blooming in mid-February, and this is one of the last with a bloom. I’ll need to deadhead them next weekend.

A group of grape hyacinths in the front yard. This is the most prolific they’ve ever been, which is surprising considering the drought we’ve had.

These hyacinths have a great scent so we’ve been cutting some to bring inside.

With a little luck our dogwoods will be in bloom next week!

Even with the drought we still have a few plants that have provided us some color late into November. For example, we planted hardy cyclamen several years ago, and they send up flowers every fall.

These are really winter plants- after they’re done flowering they’ll send out their leaves which will stick around until April or so. We’ve also got some traditional fall color, especially from my Japanese maple:

Clearly happy in its container on the patio.

The biggest surprise is our gerbera daisy:

We haven’t had a gerbera flower in several months, but after we got some rain a few weeks ago, “Fred” came back to life and started blooming. With a bit of mulch the gerberas will come back next year. Hopefully we’ll have a better balance of sun and rain in the next growing season for Fred and all the others!