Spring Blooms

In a stroke of luck and good timing, we moved to Seattle in the early spring, which is the peak blooming season for peonies, my favorite flower. We also happen to live in a neighborhood where practically everyone has a thriving garden, and it’s been so inspiring to see such beautiful flowers everywhere. Peonies, roses, blue thistles, anemones…so many of my all-time favorites! It’s felt like a tailored and generous “welcome to Seattle” gesture, one that I’ve been soaking in.

Here are some of the beauties recently spotted during our daily neighborhood walks:

Being surrounded by such pretty blooms every day inspired me to learn more about our own garden. Our new home has a beautiful garden that the previous owner clearly loved and maintained. While my husband and I both love flowers, we have practically zero experience gardening. So to start, Erik found an app called Seek by iNaturalist, which was created by both National Geographic and the California Academy of Sciences. We used the app to identify what exactly was planted in our garden. Then, I supplemented our findings with more online research on how best to take care of each unique plant.

However, I eventually hit a wall. You can only learn so much by reading blogs and watching YouTube videos. Plus, there were still some plants we hadn’t been able to identify yet. This is when one of our friendly and helpful neighbors came to the rescue!

Alison lives at the end of our street, and she has an impressive, flourishing garden of flowers, vegetables, herbs, and berries. I’ve really been enjoying her roses and poppies in particular:

She gave us a tour of her garden and then walked us through our own, pointing out each plant and patiently answering all our questions.

Armed with this new knowledge as well as Alison’s encouragement, I’ve been tending to our garden for the past couple weeks. In a strange turn of events, and much to my surprise, I’ve been bitten by the gardening bug! I actually enjoy it! So far, I’ve mainly been taking care of the roses, trimming the hedges and weeding the rest of the garden area. I still have a lot more to learn, but I’m beginning to see why so many find gardening to be both calming and rewarding.