What can I say? I took a blogging break for spring. I’m in a kind of writing rut. I write a gardening column and am stuck if I try to write anything longer/shorter than 2 double spaced pages or if I try to write anything inappropriate for the local paper. So my goal is to begin writing a daily or almost every daily post.

It’s late spring and things have calmed down a bit on the home front. The highlight of my garden right now are the hydrangeas. My vases are full of them and the garden glows with pearly white oakleaf hydrangeas in late evening.

We usually sit on the porch in late evening after work and inhale the enticing aroma of magnolia flowers. Around 6:30 the fragrance wafts through almost every neighborhood mingling with the last musky remnants of privet and Japanese honeysuckle.

Richard and I are particularly lucky to have a righteous grove of sweetbay magnolias growing in a wet area on our land. Sweetbay is one of my favorite native magnolias. I love the lemony overtones of its scent. Its leaves are a little bigger than a bay leaf and have the same spicy aroma when crushed. I’ve heard that country folks use them to season spaghetti sauce. The tree itself has lovely form and bark.

The grove came with the land. Yet another reason that I love native plants!