Window boxes!

Grace, holding a flower from some very hardy ground cover that has a good foothold in several places in the yard. People occasionally tell me, "Your v_______ is looking great! It's so healthy!" and I nod but fail to remember the actual name of the plant.

Crocuses from the bulbs we bought at the hardware store.

Forsythia close-up.

To our surprise, we have a forsythia! I vaguely remember cutting down a shrub when we first moved in about two years ago (mid-July, so it wasn't blooming.) Last year, it didn't bloom at all. And this year - lovely yellow flowers. There's probably a moral there about not hacking down shrubs of unknown origin in case they're beautiful during another time of the year, or some other cautionary lesson to be learned. But it ended well, and we had the great pleasure of unexpected flowers this spring.

These are some of the daylillies I transplanted last fall. We have a large bed of them in the back yard which hadn't been divided in years (at least five, our neighbors estimated.) So I dug up the bed, split the plants, replanted half right where they were, and then planted the rest along the front of the house. And they came up this spring! I can't wait for them to bloom.

Our first spring in the house, these daffodils were a great surprise. I've since learned that while tulips dwindle over time, daffodils multiply.