One week to opening!

It's the last week of April...next week we officially open for the season.  Despite the past 2 weeks of wet, cold weather, there are a surprising number of flowers in bloom.  Several alpine flowers are open both in the alpine house as well as in the outside rock gardens.  Foremost among these are various primroses.

In the shade garden, it is the hellebores that are stealing the show.  The earliest ones, the "orientalis' types, have now commenced flowering but several other species may not be blooming for a few weeks.

Now that spring is underway, the Garden is thinking about the annuals we will be using in our various containers, window boxes and flower beds.  This week we started the first of these which included impatiens, coleus, lobelia, petunia and pansy.  These particular annuals require about 8-10 weeks from seeding to planting out.

If you recall back to our very first blog, the Garden is involved in a project called 'Plant Watch'.  The purpose of this project is to record blooming date of certain key plants as a way to monitor climate change.   This year the Garden plans on providing three 'Plant Watch' species to various schools as a way to involve them in this worthwhile project.  One of these species is white birch.  In late winter we started trays of birch seed and this week we started moving these seedlings to plug trays.  Below is a picture of our MUCEP student, James Wall, transplanting the little seedlings.

James also transplanted many of the Friends of the Garden heath/heather and dwarf conifer cuttings which were propagated last fall.  Look for these plants in future FOG plant sales!

 This past weekend the Garden had a booth at the Landscape Newfoundland and Labrador Trade Show, held at the Remax Centre (Curling Club) on Bonaventure Avenue.  Friends of the Garden sold tickets on a park bench made by the carpentry group while the Garden sold blooming primroses from our alpine primrose collection.

REMEMBER, WE OPEN TO THE PUBLIC MAY 1...SEE YOU THEN!