Sedum, bamboo, thyme, and moss

Sometimes my posts have focus. A topic. Maybe they document a project. Maybe they have a central theme. Other times my posts do not. They're collections of non-connected mini-topics. Sort of a jumble of some small things I've noticed recently that don't lend themselves to a full post.

A catch-up day. Filed under "miscellaneous". Today's post is one of those.

***

Starting off with some sedum. The sedum 'Angelina' which during most of the year is a light green, almost yellow, but turns so colorful in the spring:

Its leaves get tipped in flaming orange and red, creating a beautiful gradient repeated hundreds of times on each plant.

It looks great with the 'blue spruce' sedum too.

This unknown sedum, which is probably sedum album 'Athoum' or something similar, is starting to wake up and get some of its spring color as well:

It almost looks like a bunch of grapes when magnified like this.


Next up, some small bamboo seedlings that I recently repotted:

These are Fargesia nitida seedlings from some seed I collected in Seattle a couple of years ago. The plants are ready for larger pots, and this one appears to be planted much too shallowly:

You can see how the rhizomes turn up and form a new shoot. You're not supposed to be able to see that -- it's supposed to happen underground. So this guy needs to be planted deeper in the new pot.

I mixed some corn gluten into the soil as organic fertilizer:

The plants are a little sparse right now, but you can see that the new leaves are already starting to grow:

The newest leaves are still rolled up, pointing along the line of the culm.

Once it warms up a little these should start putting out some new shoots, and a bunch more leaves:

It will be a couple more years until I plant these in the ground I think, as they're just not large enough. We'll see how they do this year before I decide.


Do you like moss? I sure do, and this is the best time of year for it here in St. Louis.

It will be mostly dormant by the middle of summer's heat, but the cold wet weather of early spring it really loves.

There's a lot of moss on these blocks this year, and some stringy stonecrop (another sedum) has climbed up the wall too, creating a very nice effect:

I'm not sure exactly why there's so much moss here this year -- maybe there's extra moisture, or maybe the blocks have finally been here long enough to build up some moss. I don't really care why it's here, but I'm glad it is!


Last up is some thyme:

It's called "Archer's Gold" and for a few years I wondered why it was called this, or if I got a mislabeled plant. You see, it's green for most of the year. No golden accents, no yellow highlights.

For a short time in the spring though, it's about as golden as a plant can get. I only noticed this last year for the first time. How could I have missed it before? I guess I'm too busy in the spring to notice every single detail. I'll work on that.


So that's my "scrap pile" of post topics cleaned out for a little while. I hope I can put some decent and coherent posts together now, because I've just used all of my "extra" images and mini-topics.

I better start thinking...

.