May flowers reprise

Always thrilled to see butterfly mating rituals...

Farkleberry bloom....

This fast-growing invasive Japanese honeysuckle is busily covering my garden fences... Over-whelming the desirable native coral honeysuckle, and it really doesn't seem to matter how much of this stuff I pull... seems to stay ahead of my efforts to control...

I have poison ivy covering the ground in the newest expansion of the veggie garden....

The poison ivy is actually easier to control than the nasty Japanese honey suckle... It all comes out easily with a mattock...

Poison ivy flowers...

Also... a bit of poison oak... I'm not especially OCD about the toxicodendrons... I dug this out of the yard... but it's such an interesting plant that it's worth keeping some around for observation....

I left some background on this indigo pic to demonstrate the unlikely happenstance of a garden-worthy plant growing in a desolate patch of sand where little else grows...

Wild collected Coreopsis lanceolata... When I divided this beauty (last Spring),  and planted the divisions in the garden soil the voles got busy eating them... I rescued this one and it's been container-grown since...

Penstemons (group of 3) Also subject to vole depredation, 2 of these are in containers (after the voles ate the other divisions)...
 Hoping for crosses... I just need to figure out how to get the seeds to come up... Was not a problem in my previous garden... something about this sand...

After posting the iris damage (see previous post) at facebook... one person suggested "permatill"... But the drainage is already so extreme... and just how many bags of that stuff would be needed?   I keep hoping the cats will get a better handle on these horrible little animals...

Mulberries!
I grew this tree from a little baby I wild collected... I've got plenty of babies coming up in the garden now... which I'm moving into my yard... and plan to move into the front meadow...

I didn't get a patch of poppies sowed last autumn... But I have little groups here and there anyway... I've been weeding out colours... where I have single colours in each little group...

Interesting thing, though... The blooms seem to be lasting longer in the self-sowed patches then in the patches sowed in town... where there was a big flush, and then nothing...

I suspect that the dropped seeds are dictating timing... Whereas in town... the seeds were all collected at the same time... and sowed at the same time....

I've noticed that the columbines seem to react in a similar manner...