Another week gone; another week closer to the Big Sleep. But spring is stirring, and Hili is hungry:
Malgorzata: Look, how beautifull the forsythia is flowering.
Hili: Last year it was flowering with a sparrow nest inside.
In Polish:
Małgorzata: Patrz jak forsycja pięknie zakwitła.
Hili: W zeszłym roku kwitła z gniazdkiem wróbelka w środku.
That is definitely a happy cat face!
Yes indeed, Hili is most content. She is most pleased to have Małgorzata as a doting and attendant servant.
I’m impressed that the forsythia is flowering like that. Mine is just a bunch of sticks. 🙁 Poland seemed to get the winter we had a last year & before!
Gorgeous! That’s a big specimen, Malgorzata! (the bush, not Hili 😉 )
Normally, even in Poland, forsythia is just a bunch of sticks. But this one, which is 15 years old, has been trimmed to form a massive bush. It took a few years to get the bush from those puny sticks.
As a child, I remember every year, my mother commenting on forsythia being the first sign of spring. Has spring finally sprung? Let’s hope so! Hili looks happy about it too. 🙂
I LOVE forsythia!
Malgorzata, what I’ve been told by our local horticultural experts is this: Every 3-4 years you must prune out all the older wood, right at the ground. This stimulates new flower-bearing shoots. Forsythia also requires full sunlight. Southern exposures are good for it (early spring warmth) — at least in northern climes.
This is also good for other flowering shrubs such as lilac. I would do it more often than every 3-4 years however.
The Arizona analogue to forsythia would be the palo verde. They’re just now starting to explode in gold blossoms. Indeed, I strongly suspect that, had whoever named it first seen the plants in the spring, we’d be calling them “palo oro” instead.
And the ocotillo is turning into living fireworks, and the pad cactuses are sporting yellow or purple or whatever blossoms, and….
b&