Purple rain, purple rain

Spring arrived in Gifu at the end of February, and, keeping with tradition, there has been a lot of rain. Nice, ground soaking, helping plants (including weeds, unfortunately) grow type rain.

This is our little Japanese dogwood (yamaboshi). It is just outside the back door and is very happy there, but never grows. We wonder if it needs a bit of competition to encourage it to reach for the sun.

Warning Warning! Graphic photo follows! Those who are recuperating from operations may wish for their fuzzy vision back...

We have these birds, I have no idea what they are called in English, but in the summer they hunt frogs and birds and store them for safe keeping on various tree branches throughout the yard. But they are busy taking care of baby birds and get a bit forgetful (we know how that is). As a result, we have slowly mummifying frogs impaled on various tree branches around the yard. Lovely!

We used to keep our umbrella stand outside the front door. Well, one rainy day, running late as usual, I grabbed our umbrellas, wrangled the girls into the car and pulled into the parking lot of their preschool, which was full of other harried, slightly damp mothers and children. I whipped out my umbrella and popped it open. SCREEEECH! Impaled on my umbrella spoke, right in front of my eyes was...

Well, almost exactly the same. Of course, no one else saw the nasty dead frog, they just saw (and heard) the crazy foreign mom having a fit in the parking lot shaking her umbrella like a madwoman. Oh well, I have gotten used to standing out.

So now we keep our umbrella stand INSIDE. The trees, however, remain ghoulishly decorated.

Back to the rain...

One of our two camellia trees, tucked into the gaps between buildings where they can hardly be seen. Some day, maybe 20 years from now, they will look lovely from the road when they get tall enough to be seen.

Guardian of the Garden

With a face like that, I don't really think she will manage to scare away any robbers. In fact, we are rather hoping they might help themselves to some broccoli which is all about to flower.
Peas are starting to sprout in the plot next door.
Which my husband, the human-rotatiller has been busy expanding...
I tackled some weeding. I started with the lawn. See all those green bits. Those are weeds.
I did about a third and gave up. I figure the grass will turn green in a few more months and then the weeds won't stand out so much.
I turned my attention to the weeds in the flower beds.
My mini irises are starting to bloom.
And the white narcissus are getting close to blooming, too.
Flower bed post-weeding. The daffodils will be blooming soon!
I moved two extra sweet peas to the back of this flower bed. I wonder if this blue hibiscus tree is still alive?
I moved most of these hardy yellow flowers to the embankment where they can multiply to their hearts' content. They are a bit much for the flower beds.
Crocus.
Last year I got some mystery osteospermum from the weird little flower shop I frequent. When they bloomed, some of them were pretty, but one had these weird pinched petals that reminded me of a clown. I didn't have the heart to outright murder it, so I moved it to an out of the way, partially shady, totally sandy and devoid of nutrient corner. Well, it turns out that it loves partial shade, total sand and no nutrients! Look at how it has thrived, threatening to engulf this baby camellia tree.
And it is about to bloom. If I am not mistaken, I think its petals might not even be pinched any more!
One of its sisters which stayed in the flower bed has also started to bloom.

patience

Narcissus blooms in January here in Gifu. They are so pretty and cheerful, I would love to have large patches of them like our neighbors. But I think it will be a few years. Here are ours:
The girls love kinkan (kumquat?). We dream of a big kinkan tree like this someday...
But at least we got our first few kinkans this year.
When we moved in 2 years ago we saw the mikan (clementine?) trees next door
And planted ours with high hopes, still not a mikan to be seen.
However, the neighbor beyond planted her mikan tree the following year and look!
Lucky duck!