More early bloomers

There’s more early bloomers happening in my garden. The showy blue-purple flowers in the foreground are commonly called grape hyacinths, even though they’re no relation to the bigger, more fragrant garden flowers known as hyacinths. These are scientifically categorized as Muscari, a group of bulb plants native to Eurasia but grown in gardens all over the world.

These grape hyacinths were part of a group of flowering plants in a pot that was given to my wife as a gift years ago. I recognized them as likely perennials and planted them in my yard after they finished blooming in the pot. Among those plants were the crocuses that I posted a picture of in a previous blog. In fact, the white-striped leaves surrounding the grape hyacinth blooms don’t belong to that plant. They are the leaves of the crocuses that are no longer blooming. Somehow, the corms of the crocuses got mixed in with the bulbs of the grape hyacinths, so the two plants are now mixed together in my garden.

In the background are wild violets, a great ground cover for those of us who don’t want turf grass. I’ve been trying to collect and plant other colors of violet besides purple. I have one and maybe two successful ones so far. I’ll be posting photos of them in this blog as they bloom.