Shrooms Pop Up for Bloom Day

Thanks to a nice cool-ish and very rainy spring, I have blooms blooming away -- from roses to clematis to water lilies. The first coneflowers and liatris are opening. The Asiatic lilies and daylilies are showing off. The annuals are all filling out and performing well. But what has caught my attention the past few days are the mushrooms leaping up.

The one pictured here was so photogenic when it emerged in my Faerie Garden on Friday that it looked fake. (You may be able to just make out the Mardi Gras bead adorned Faerie house behind it.) In addition to this one, I have the classic red with white spots, lines of little brownies, and big cap white ones. They are everywhere -- in the moss bed, sprouting from the mulch pile, by the pond, and in full sun on top of hardwood chips. I aim to go out after lunch and take many more photos of them for a future story in the magazine.

Meanwhile, I'm spending the rest of the day going through the 100+ photos I took of other people's gardens last Saturday on the Garden Conservancy Open Days tour then sending out reminders to our tardy authors for pieces due in now for our July/August issue. Then tonight, I'm off to Brookside to preside over the Silver Spring Garden Club meeting. Our topic: Garden Design in the Digital Age. After that, we break for the summer and meet again in September.