Time to Build an Ark.

3-11-11 SHORT HILLS: Yesterday we had another soaker that dumped another 2.25 inches of rain. That totals to 4.8 inches—more than 10% of our yearly predicted rainfall in one week. Needless to say, the yard is a quagmire again. The temperature got into the fifties today and the snow piles are now just little patches. All over the state and the Northeast there are flooded towns.

On the ninth I bought two Japanese flowering cherry trees, Prunus serrulata ‘kwanzan’, at Home Depot and planted them today in the area where we lost the spruces. The loss of the spruce trees, which were huge, has given us s patch of sunlight that I will fill with small flowering trees, perhaps six. There are already colonizers there, ash tree shoots, viburnum, spice bushes, burning bushes which will take off as will three English holly volunteers, forsythia and hemlock and Douglas fir and rhododendrons, leucothoe and a large boxwood. After the plantings, I finished the Holly-Tone fertilizing of the acidophilic shrubs.

The forsythia canes and buds are getting yellowish and wild strawberry leaves and claytonia shoots are poking up out of the soggy ground.

New blooms: crocus.


Crocus slowly cracking a smile.