I walked into the coldframe yesterday morning and completely expected to find a bird. What I didn't know, is that the chirping I heard as I approached the coldframe was that of a blue bird. Upon opening the large wooden doors with plastic flapping everywhere from our last storm, the blue bird immediately detected his escape route and flew right past my head.

We seemed to have a lot of blue birds around during that last cold spell. Now there is a lot of cardinals and the only thing that can perhaps compare to their brilliant red is the flowers in our field. Many of the paperwhites have bounced back, and new buds have already opened. The white hyacinths remain strong, along with the double Romans and Chinese sacred lilies. All seems to be going well in the fields.

Fischer and I did see a gopher digging a new hole right next to our row of tulips. Normally they don't tunnel when it is this wet and cold, but I imagine with all of the moisture we've been having he was just trying to breath. We walked to the triangle corner of the northern part of the land, and some of the dens were so extensive that for a radius of about 10 feet I sunk down almost a foot into the soil. For a second I remembered an old cartoon where children of archaeologists at an excavation site sink into the ground and are taken back in time. In reality though, I thought a large gopher was going to mistake me for a tulip and eat me.

Off to San Antonio for the six hour drive, then to Austin for a speech to the Garden Club of Austin (Formerly Men’s Garden Club of Austin that supplied two of my scholarships while at Texas A&M). That speech is at 7PM in Austin, and once it is over, I drive straight to Dallas to be at the DFW airport at 5:30AM to catch my flight to Washington DC. On Saturday in Washington, I have the honor and pleasure of presenting to the Potomac Valley Chapter of the North American Rock Garden Society at the National Arboretum. This next Tuesday is a presentation in the woods of East Texas to the Holly Lake Ranch gardeners. To the moon, and back again.

On the left are some jonquils Ben placed in the coldframe and they are blooming early. On the right is a layout of the individual flowers picked during the freeze.