I know it’s Mother’s Day this sunday, but for me May is Mother’s Month. My mother was born on the first day of May and her middle name is May. So how can I not think of the woman who made me a gardener this whole month, which is busy with gardening activities and just bursting forth with flowers and growth.

My mother used to take me out in the garden plop me down on my little ass while she worked away in the garden. I’m sure I learned to dig before I ever walked or talked. And I’m sure I learned to be a gardener, learned the joys and travails of gardening from  my mother. Everything after was just filler.

In the my mother’s garden, it was always her garden though my father tilled the vegetable patch and mowed the lawn and we kids reluctantly weeded; it was always her garden. She was a dedicated gardener, she was outside as soon as the spring thaw permitted and didn’t quit until the snow flew. I often saw it as way too much. Of course now I’m doing it. We had a large vegetable patch for a city lot about 400 square feet and we grew everything possible to eat. My mother wasn’t only creating a gardener as she raised me but also a gourmand. Nothing compares to my memory of those tangy vine ripened tomatoes, or the crisp clarity of summer cucumber  and the earthy funk of rutabagas. Beyond the toil and the gustatory pleasures I learned growing vegetables in my mother’s garden I also learned to appreciate beauty there in her flower garden.

Now that I am on a farm thousands of miles from my childhood home and the garden I grew up in has long been sold and turned into lawn I still carry that garden with me, try to recreate it, not specifically, though we grow peonies and I even planted a Peace rose a reminder of that garden. But what I do plant are vegetables. Loads and loads of vegetables.

Because I think turnips are as beautiful as roses and I bet I learned that from my mother, too.

I am totally and childishly in love with tulips. That’s why I like spring so much. Sure the birds are singing, the cherries blooming, and the sun shining, but nothing makes me beam like a bunch of tulips. People have gone an ad infinitum about tulips , there are books and books, and now website upon website devoted to tulips. Even the little macro icon on my camera is a tulip. Exotic they are not. Brief, triumphant and beautiful they are.

So I’ll shut up and let the tulips speak for themselves:

We are fortune to live across from fields and fields of tulips,  unglamourously protected from rain and forced into early bloom under poly-tunnels. The fields are far from picturesque……but look what’s inside.I grew some of my own tulips for cutting in our green house this winter. It sped up bloom time by a month. I love having a bouquet of tulips on the kitchen table to ogle over breakfast. I am in love with this parrot tulip ‘Flaming Parrot’ with it’s circus tent appeal.

I also  grew ‘Semper Maxima’ in the greenhose. It’s the first time I’ve grown this tulip, I usually shy away from the peony flowered types, but I couldn’t resist the red and white striping. Not a truly gorgeous tulip like the catalogue lead me to believe, but interesting none-the-less.

I like my tulips simple and loud, like this kaufmanniana cultivar called ‘Shakespeare’, early, outrageously scarlet and tough.

Yet nothing beats this understated, for a tulip, beauty of the species Tulipa sylvestris.Or this selection of the species Tulips clusiana,  named after Clusius the botanist said to be responsible for bringing the tulip to Europe and beginning the tulip craze.Another selection of  Tulipa clusiana, ‘Lady Jane’, has an elegance that I have never seen surpassed by the more hybridized tulips.
I find this small Tulipa daystemon which I planted in out gravelly drive absolutely endearing, even though, or maybe because, I had to get down on my hands and knees to get a good look at these flowers held so close to the ground. This is the first year I actually got a Tulipa accuminata to bloom and I must admit I was sorely disappointed. This was considered the height of beauty in a tulip to the Ottoman Turks in the 1500s. Some botanist even consider this species not a species at all but a hybrid that has naturalized. I had to try it.

Like I have to try a lot of tulips. Each year I always try a few new ones just for kicks. This one is ‘Helmar’. It has a lovely solid form and beautifully variable markings, or what tulip fanciers call breaking.

But  this tulip with it great form and uniform markings, very deserving of it’s name: ‘Grand Perfection’, thrilled me to no end when it opened this weekend. Nothing says triumph over winter like these 70 degree days we are enjoying, and this tulip which looks like an explosion of happiness.