Where do baby hellebores come from?

Click on this photo to see the tiny black seeds inside the leaves

For years I'd heard how hellebores drop their seeds when the flowers wither at the end of season and that, underneath, at the beginning of the next season, one would find baby hellebores. I looked every year and found nothing.

Meanwhile, every year I also weeded this mysterious small plant that was in my garden. There would be dozens of it in random spots.

It wasn't until I went to a garden club sale recently that I finally realized that what I thought was a weed was actually baby hellebores. I don't know how many I have murdered over the years. Apparently its seeds fly off everywhere and don't stay just under the plants. Sometimes they grow randomly and sometimes in clusters.

Happily I now have groupings of baby hellebores that will now live and, hopefully, thrive.

Info on hellebores: http://gardening.about.com/od/plantprofile1/p/Hellebore_Pro.htm

May showers brought these May flowers

Here are the flowers that managed to bloom in my yard this month amid the near-constant rain (which may have delayed the bloom cycle somewhat):

Chive blossoms

Peony

Clematis

Pansies (still going!)

Dahlia (annual) [a flower from the dump pile at a garden store]

On a rainy day, playing with gardening websites instead of playing outdoors

We've had 16 days straight of measurable rain, breaking all past records for most rainy days in a row. This means that, despite May being the prime time to plant seedlings, weed, etc., I've spent most of that time indoors.

While it's enjoyable to look on the misty and verdant scene outside my window, my gaze is not without wistful longing. The seedlings I've carefully nurtured under a grow light in the basement need to be transplanted--now. But I worry they might not survive a heavy deluge, and the rain is supposed to continue at least another three days. (Unfortunately, the organic basil plants I bought a couple of weeks ago have been damaged by an onslaught last week of hailstones as big as large pebbles, and haven't been able to recover in the sunless dampness. Other plants also look equally lethargic and waterlogged).

So this is a good time to look at landscaping and gardening websites and Pinterest pages. Here are a few of my go-to places, along with others I'm listing for my own future edification.

• For landscaping tips and garden plans, one of the first places I check is Better Homes and Gardens' landscaping pages: http://www.bhg.com/gardening/plans/ (I often find pertinent pages there by first using Google search for a particular topic, or via pinned pages in Pinterest).

• It's easy to get lost in Pinterest, especially if you start pinning all things related to your current garden wish list. Fortunately, it has become easy to find specific and related topics using the Google search engine. For example, here is what Pinterest sent me to when I googled "circular driveway landscaping": https://www.pinterest.com/explore/circle-driveway-landscaping/

• Fine Gardening magazine and finegardening.com are like porn for plant lovers. An especially useful tool on its website is the Plant Guide.

Here are other websites I've bookmarked to check out later:

• Gardens Illustrated 

• Garden Design

• Mother Earth News (not advice I can use all that much, given my shady yard, which won't allow me to grow much in the way of food crops)

• About.com's Gardening page

A Mother's Day tradition: a walk in the azalea garden

2016 Walk (screenshot of Google Photos page)

Every year, I only have one request for Mother's Day. That my family accompany me to the Brighton Dam Azalea Garden, where we pose for family photos. It's a nice way to mark the passage of time and, of course, it's a gorgeous way to spend a Sunday afternoon. (We were lucky this year that the rain stopped in time for our walk!) The azalea garden boasts 20,000 plantings.

Last year the flowers were more spectacular since we hadn't had weeks of rain. But I got to be with my family and with thousands of flowering plants. What could be better?

Screenshot of 2015 Walk

(You can click on the pictures above to see them in a larger format.)