We say goodbye to winter this time of the year, and prepare our three acres of lawn and gardens for spring, summer and fall glory. To the right is one of the last remnants of winter, the arils (fleshy covered seed pods) of Burning Bush (euonymus alatus), which we keep contained to keep from becoming invasive. In designing our outdoor landscape, we look at each garden as an outdoor "room," which helps us to design the landscape around different themes. Our "Ashie's Garden," for example, is watched over by two life size cow statues, symbolic of the dairy business here in the lush Lebanon Valley, where the Inn is located. We think these scarlet arils foreshadow the trusses of hanging red and pink blooms of the bleeding heart (Dicentra spectabilis) that we grow in the same garden.
Our Romance Garden will have a new feature this spring, a beautiful fountain, which we have been working on over winter to prepare for its debut. Later this summer, plans are for a special garden wall for this area. Craig is hoping for a garden scale railroad for his birthday, which will be installed in one of our twelve specific garden areas. It will probably not go into the butterfly garden, as we don't want to scare away any of the hundreds of butterflies in that area.
At left, one of the first signs of spring in our gardens (in addition to the tulips, which have pushed up three inches of growth in the last two weeks (except for the ones dug up by our resident squirrel.)) This is a branch of silver maple (Acer saccharinum) in our Romance Garden showing buds getting ready to set its famous "helicopter seed pods," which are somewhat of a gardening issue, but managable!
