Flowers for my sister

John doesn't usually pay much attention to flowers, but this display out of our kitchen window sent him out with his camera this morning. Left to right, summer-snow viburnum, wiegelia, laburnum (golden chain tree). Now, if only a few of these could be transported to my sister in Quebec, where she reports that a slow spring has them still waiting for the trees to sprout leaves, let alone blossoms.

It's been a rotten winter in the Quebec Laurentians, where my sister Betty and her husband Bert began battling snow at the end of October and are still waiting for true spring to arrive.

"We have continued to have cold and rain," she wrote me this week. "The leaves are struggling to come out on the trees but not really there yet." She has started some seedlings for a garden this year, but so far, they're "long skinny stems searching for the sun."

Meanwhile, in paradise, the best of the spring blossoms are in their glory. Lilacs, azaleas, wiegelia, laburnum, rhododendrons, snowball trees, pink and white dogwoods, poppies and bleeding hearts. I wish I could send her an armful.

Across the street from us, we are blessed with an avid-gardener neighbour. Her over-the-door wisteria just gets better every year, and her pink rhodos make a perfect foreground.

My back-door lilacs have scented the house for weeks. Always have a lilac tree.

The pink azalea at the front of our house puts on a spectacular show behind the boxwood hedge every year.

Also across the street from us is a neighbour whose front porch sports flowering clematis. In the foreground, Japanese maples (two colours), and behind them a pink dogwood. 

Our third across-the-street gardener-neighbour has Oriental poppies now in full bloom. We are a very lucky street to have so many passionate gardeners! A little competition, perhaps?

Another view of the wisteria house, with all the front plantings. As you can imagine, keeping everything looking like this takes lots of work, all done by Shirl and her husband.

Our next-door neighbours aren't gardeners, but they had great landscapers who completely reworked the front of their property a few years ago. They kept a wonderful gnarled old Japanese maple, put in lots of perennials like grasses and periwinkle, and plunked in the surprise of purple tulips every spring. I'm not a fan of concrete, but the long lines with tulips in front are interesting.