I like to photograph small plant vignettes in the garden, when certain plant pairings please me. Here are two views of the same scene, Iris verna 'Brumback Blue' with the wonderful Epimedium ilicifolium, the holly-leaf Epimedium. I find the blue iris flowers harmonize with the soft yellow of the epimedium bloom. Photos taken the same day, May 18 2014, one in the morning when it was cloudy, the second on with afternoon sunlight.

Those little iris are beautiful. I've never seen them before. I wonder if they would do well in my woodlands here in Tennessee?

Lakeside said:Those little iris are beautiful. I've never seen them before. I wonder if they would do well in my woodlands here in Tennessee?

Sandy, Iris verna is native to much of southeastern USA, including Tennessee, they should do just fine for you in a woodland garden. I really like Iris verna for its shiny evergreen foliage, even in my northern Massachusetts climate

And the wonderful dwarf carpeting Crested Iris (Iris cristata) has a similar native range in your area, and would also be good for your garden. This species is deciduous in winter, but perfectly hardy even in more northerly climates.

Here's the USDA distribution map for Iris verna.

Thank you for the information, Mark! I'll have to see if I can find a source for some of the iris verna. The crested iris sometimes show up at local plant shows. I bought some last spring for my woodland garden. I'm hoping they will spread. I was looking at your other posts to this forum with the photos of all the different iris varieties. Now I really want more woodland iris! They're beautiful.

You can find some of these Iris at online nurseries, many of mine have come from Garden Vision Epimedium nursery (they sell choice woodland plants too), here's the link. They don't have Iris verna available on their list this year, but the sometimes carry a named form. Good luck on your search for woodland Iris.
http://www.epimediums.com/othe...

Thank you for the resource, Mark. They have so many beautiful things! Part of the fun of getting into woodland gardening is that so many of the plants are new to me. After years of "sunny" gardening, it's a pleasure to find a whole new world of plants to learn about.

It is still a bit too early in the season for any of my woodland plants to be blooming, but here are a few favorites from previous years.

A native azalea that grows throughout my woodlands


Native Mountain Laurel that also grows throughout my woodlands


Crested Iris with Sensitive Fern in the background


Old Fashioned Bleeding Heart


Native Trillium


Native Jack in the Pulpit

Looking forward to more pictures. Your garden looks amazing.

Terri, I'm so envious of having lush mountain laurel growing natively on one's property, simply beautiful. Do you know what species the native Azalea is, it has pleasing coloration. Is it fragrant...many of the southeastern native azaleas are fragrant. Nice plant portraits

We're going back into the deep freeze for the next 4 days, bye-bye Magnolia buds, spring has to arrive eventually.

Mark, I think the azalea is the common Pinxterbloom Azalea - R. periclymenoides, but I'm not very good at plant id. https://www.tjhsst.edu/~dhyatt...

I'm not sure if it is fragrant or not, but I'll take a good whiff when it blooms in a few weeks. It blooms before the mountain laurel does, so I think it is late April or early May. The mountain laurel usually blooms around memorial day. One of my goals this year is to start keeping bloom time records. In fact, I just set up my landscape db last night with fields for it. I put the db on a thumb drive so I could walk about the gardens and type the notes into my laptop, and then I can just copy the db back to my desktop computer from the thumb drive. With the amount of plants that I have, I think this will be much easier than hand writing it in a notebook. I'll filter the records to display the garden area that I'm currently in and observing. I'm going to try it out today and see how it goes. I'm usually too ambitious with my ideas for record keeping and it gets really time consuming to keep it up.

As far as the mountain laurel blooms, some years they bloom profusely as in the photo, and other years the blooms are pretty sparse. I've not yet figured out the pattern to understand why.

Colder weather is predicted to come back here too with snow predicted for the weekend. My saucer magnolia is just starting to bud out so I'm also wondering how it will fare.

Here are more woodland photos from previous years.

Woodland Phlox (Phlox divaricata), Solomon's Seal (Polygonatum), and an Epimedium just visible on the left


Japanese Primrose (Primula sieboldii) - I love this plant, but I have a hard time finding it for sale anywhere
Lungwort (Pulmonaria) just visible in the lower left corner


Hellebores, Jacobs Ladder (Polemonium reptans), and Lungwort (Pulmonaria)


Trillium grandiflorum and Solomon's Seal (Polygonatum) with Brunnera macrophylla just visible in the lower left corner


Shooting Star (Dodecatheon meadia)


Grape Hyacinth (Muscari)

These pictures are so lovely. I know I'll get a lot of inspiration from you folks. Thanks for sharing these.

My yard is in the earliest stages of development, as we were overrun with invasive and aggressive plants when we moved here, and we're just now getting where we can plant things we'd like to see. When we moved here, you couldn't see a foot into the woodland in our yard due to vines and brush! I think I'll start a thread to show our progress over time, so I don't dirty up this thread with the less pretty parts of our yard. For now, in the interest of joining in, we have one area that is coming along. Here's a picture of it from April of last year. Although this was taken 4/10 2017, the plants are much further along than what is in my yard today, so I'm posting that old pic instead. Also, one pic of a pretty blue and yellow combo that you can't easily see in the larger shot, and finally, a shot that I hope Julia will enjoy (like your @springcolor profile pic!). There is some Jack-In-The-Pulpit in this old pic, but you can't see them. I found them on an area near the ravine that was washing out, and actually climbed down with a rope to dig them up and move them to the more civilized area. It seems happy there, and would have simply been washed out if left in it's previous precarious position.

April 10 last year, west side of yard:



And a couple of pics taken today, including the garden sentry on duty

Your dog could be a twin to my Nina!

Terri: thanks for azalea ID, I love the southeastern USA azalea species (Rhododendron). I have one that I bought while visiting gthe US National Arboretum in Washington DC, there happened to be an American Rhododendron Society sale going on there, and I bought just one plant (not much room with family and luggage driving back to Massachusetts for many plants), it was Rhodendendron (azalea group) 'Late Date'. It's a natural hybrid between prunifolium x arborescens, from the later it gets the white flowers but extraordinary late flowering in July-August, and those long red eyelashes (stamens) from both parents but red color from the former. The rich spicy perfume is amazing. It is sun and drought tolerant which is appreciated.

Azalea 'Late Date', growing alongside my deck stairs, look at those red eyelashes


Hope your saucer Magnolia misses any late frosts, always a tricky matter.Love the views of Polygonatum growing with Phlox divaricata and Trillium grandiflorum, I feel an addiction coming on with Polygonatum, a great group of plants. I like the lungworts (Pulmonaria) too, but they can seed around too much. Here they look great in spring, in early summer go through a leaf mildew phase where they look terrible, but eventually recover from it and leaf out again and look better in late summer and fall. I NEED to get some Dodecatheon in my garden, another fantastic genus of American native plants.

Good luck with your ambitious garden database effort. I wish I could be that organized. The only thing I do is make folders for my plant photos named by date, then within each date-folder, I name photos with plant name, some detail keyword, and date, then can use standard Windows Explorer search functionality to search on any given plant or keyword, works well enough but I would like to be more systematic about the process.

Chris: it's so satisfying to recover a wild overgrown part of one's property, reclaim it as your own garden territory, that's exciting. Looks like you have some nice rocks to work with too. The garden palette is wide open, have fun planting this new garden area, good start with the Mertensia virginica, one of my favorite plants. I too use fallen branches as garden path edging, looks nice and natural.

That's a really pretty azalea

Chris, looks like you are making great progress. Great photos. I noticed the rocks and fallen branches as garden path edging too, and to second what Mark said, it "looks nice and natural"!

Mark, you are mentioning so many new to me plants in your posts. I have started putting them in a list to look for to add to my own gardens. The Azalea 'Late Date' would be wonderful here for the late summer blooms. The fragrance would be a bonus!

My saucer magnolia is in full bloom and luckily missed browning with the cold weather. I guess even though it was cold, it must have stayed above the freezing/frost point. The weeping cherry and the native serviceberry are in full bloom too. The three of them blooming simultaneously in a sight line has me pretty psyched. I'll try to get a picture today, but most of the time my photos trying to capture more of a landscape view don't seem to do justice to what it really looks like in person.

A couple of years ago, I did a small bit of internet research on polygonatums with the thought that I'd like to start building a collection of them. They do really well in my woodland conditions and so far the deer haven't touched them. I haven't gotten around to it yet though. So far I just have the variegated Solomon's Seal that you see in the photo which were pass along plants from a gardening friend, and polygonatum humile. The humile is charming - solid green and short in stature.

The National Arboretum is an easy destination for me and I've been there several times over the years. Never as often as I'd like. I commuted to DC for 34 years before I retired recently, and once in a while I would take the afternoon off and go to the Arboretum before heading home for the day. Only saw the azalea collection in bloom once though. Reminds me that I should make an effort to get back down there sometime this spring.

Here are a couple more photos from previous years. Shouldn't be long now before things start blooming here for current photos. Anyway, this time the photos are of old fashioned bleeding hearts.



'Alba'


'Valentine' (still fairly immature in my gardens - love the darker color of the hearts)

Valentine is a stunning bleeding heart. Very crimson! Nice.

Thanks for the kind words on the yard, Terri. Trying to make due with what we have. Glad it's looking fairly natural so far. That's what I'm trying to do, but still getting a feel for pulling that off.

I'm loving the ideas on plants, too. It will be a slow process over time (isn't gardening always?) I'm starting a spreadsheet on plants that I need to learn more about and consider planting. This thread is really inspirational.

As we clear, we have May Apples and Solomon's Seal coming up on their own, so I'm not looking for more of them right now. Not even hybrids. Found a Jack-In-The-Pulpit in a mudslide that I moved to the upper backyard! Have lots of wild black raspberries in there, too. Love the fruit, hate how prickly they are. Can't walk by them without them grabbing you. However, I'm encouraging them to grow in specific areas, as I love the idea of food forest, too! I'm also encouraging the wild black cherry, elderberry, and persimmon. Made elderberry syrup last year! Friends enjoyed elderberry Cosmos I think I like that better than making elderberry wine. Besides, I'm in the heart of Missouri wine country

Terri, love the bleeding hearts, I have white and pink but need to add that deep red 'Valentine'. I had the good fortune of being at US National Arboretum several times, but just once was I there at Azalea time (amazing!), but I was there with sister-in-law's family (young children) in tow, so could not linger as long as I'd like.

So you thought about doing more with Polygonatum, it's a wonderful genus, and all the rage currently, great for foliage and "architecture", adding that vertical effect. One of my very favorite ones is Polygonatum odoratum 'Fireworks', it's a variegated one, but not strong or boldly contrasting variegation, instead it's a study of fine striations of white, chartreuse, and green. Chris, some of these Polygonatums could be good plants for naturalizing in your new reclaimed garden space.

Here's my original purchased plant in July 2013


It's lovely in flower, and keeps the variegation throughout the whole growing season.
With many more stems in the second photo in May 2015


In flower in May 2016


Testament to the tough constitution of this plant, the photo on the left taken on Oct 5, 2016, after suffering a record drought (total 3/4" of rain the entire summer, full water ban with $500 fine if caught watering with a hose), the foliage still looks great. Photo on the right is two weeks later, Oct 18, 2016, making quite a splash with gold autumn color.


One of the more fun aspects of this plant is spring emergence, when fat pink noses poke through the ground. Photo on left is early May 2016, second photo is in 2017, the shorter shoots furthest away are all new noses that weren't there in 2016, these plants can increase fairly rapidly. In the photo on the left, the narrow upright plant in front of the tree trunk is a Chinese form of Polygonatum humile, which is very different than the very dwarf form with more rounded leaflets that's common in cultivation...the small form is from Japan.


Parting shot of Polygonatum odoratum 'Fireworks' from spring 2017, with a couple unnamed Epimedium hybrids (that shall stay unnamed because they're not good enough).

Since I have so many native species Polygonatum already, I'm focusing on other plants for now, and then will circle back around to some interesting cultivated ones. Yours are really nice! I especially love the variegated ones that must show up so well in shade!