flowers on Cape Breton Island

For 21 years of living on PEI, we avoided visiting Cape Breton Island Nova Scotia beacause we thought it was too far to drive.  This year, we finally got there, and the trip is really not so bad.  It takes about 6 hours to get to the start of the Cabot Trail.  We drove 1,500 km from PEI to Halifax to Port Hawksbury, around the Cabot Trail, and back home again.

The views are breathtaking - mountains, steep cliffs, and blue blue water.  We stopped over and over again, because every stop is worth photographing.  Although we were gone just 4 nights, we felt as refreshed and relaxed as if we had been away 2 weeks.

This flower bed at the Alexander Graham Bell museum in Baddeck is a lovely combination of leaves of different sizes and colours and textures, with hosta, ornamental grasses, purple smoke bush, Maltese cross, day lilies, and shrub roses.

These short shrubby akders covered with tiny cones grow close to the beaches.
The cones are an important food source for chickadees.

These blueberries need much more time to turn blue.

Harebells (Campenula rotundifolia) growing in a most inhospitable place between rocks on the shore.

Daisies, long grasses, and other beauties made me want to stop a while.

Elderberries will turn black when they ripen.  Birds love them, but we people need to cook them to make them palatable.

Evening Primrose struggles to grow through pebbles.

Pearly Everlasting has grayish foliage, a sure sign of a tough plant that can handle drought.

The Settlers Garden in North Highlands had examples of plants
the first European settlers would have used as food and medicine.

Honeysuckle flowers

Malva comes in white, solid purple, and purple stripes

Kalmia angustifolia was sprinkled all along the Skyline trail in Cape Breton.
It's common name is Sheep Laurel, and it is poisonous to livestock.

Native wild roses are found along the roadsides and close to the shore.

Rosa multiflora, a European escapee, is a beautiful plant
but can be invasive and crowd out native vegetation.

I picked wild strawberries at the shore near Neil's Harbour.

There are more wild flowers growing on the shores and forests of Cape Breton than I have room to show here.  It is worth a trip to find more for yourself!

funnel weaver

On summer mornings after a heavy dew, a whole new world opens up on my lawn.  Funnel Weaver spiders, whose homes are usually invisible in the grass, suddenly appear.

Here is what I found out about them at http://bugguide.net/node/view/1974 :  There are several genera of funnel weaver, and the most commonly found in Canada is Agelenopsis (commonly referred to as "Grass Spiders") Their webs litter the grass in summer to early fall, and are really noticable after an early morning dew. The small brown spider is striped with their eight eyes in two rows. They also have two prominent hind spinnerets, the silk spinning organ. The female spins the web and lies in wait at the bottom of the funnel for small insects to land on the web.  The males spend their lives in search of a female to mate with, after which they die.  What a life!

plenty of poppies

Poppies come in a huge number of varieties, and they look so different, it's amazing they are from the same family.  There are annuals, perennials, lots of colours, hairy or smooth. And the leaves are completely different.
Here's what pops up in my garden:

The first arrival is the Oriental poppy.  Each flower lasts only two days, but the delicate wrinkled petals are just beautiful.  Above is Patty's Plum, and I also have the more common orange one.  It's a tough perennial.  After the blooms are done, I cut the plant right down to the ground, because they can become a magnet for earwigs.  But by August, a new, fresh ball of leaves appear, gathering food for next year's blooms.  The leaves look very much like thistles - long and pointed, but with hairs instead of bristles.

I planted one Islandic poppy many years ago, and it has produced seeds so prolifically that it pops up all over my garden since then.  I try to keep the seed heads deadheaded, but I always miss some, which produce enough seeds for next year.  The leaves are very dainty and small.

This California poppy was part of a bee-friendly seed mix free from Vesey's seeds.  The leaves look almost like dill.

This beautiful pale pink annual poppy popped up in the vegetable garden.  Years ago, I snitched a ripe pod from a daylily garden, dropped the seeds around my garden, and only now have conditions been right for it to sprout.  The leaves are bluish green and ruffled.

the elusive Lady's Slipper

Deep in the woods, Prince Edward Island's provincial flower, the Lady's Slipper, blooms at the same time as our other iconic flower - lupins.  While the tall, spiky lupins can be seen in ditches from the comfort of your car when out for a drive in the countryside, Lady's Slipper is quite another story.

This wild orchid is present in only a few places in the shady woods, at a time of year when the mosquitos are at their absolute most ferocious. Even after spraying myself liberally with deet, I could barely stay still long enough to kneel down in the spongy green moss and focus my camera before feeling the tiny biters go right through the shirt on my back.  So these photos are hard won, but worth it!

is anything more graceful and lovely?

pale ghosts that need a few more days to become pink

A few other pretty flowers were also showing off:  this is bunchberry.  After the flowers fade, they are replaced with bunches of bright red berries.

blueberry blossoms are like tiny bells

I don't know the name of this one, but the three small balls of flowers are shaded by the taller leafy canopy above them.

This tiny star of a flower made a perfect shadow of itself on the leaf below.  I should have spent more time fiddling with the camera to get a better detail in the flower, but the mosquitos had moved in for the kill.

wet weather

It's been raining every day, which should be a downer, but when I look closely, the raindrops add a whole new dimension to the flowers.

the seed heads of prairie smoke are pretty funky.

ah - the tulips.  I can't get enough of them.

raindrops keep fallin' on these heads....

Serviceberry flowers turn to dark berries that taste like blueberries with a hint of almond

bleeding heart dripping rain

rose leaves drinking in the dew

I rescued these bulbs one spring from a dump.  They had survived on top of the ground for a whole winter.  I took them home, and they have rewarded me with beautiful colours for five years.

The black tulips last a really long time.

I just love this wavy leaf

the buzz

Last Saturday was a perfect sunny spring day, and the bees thought so too.  They were creating quite a buzz in my flower bed.

Bees in the Pasque flowers are dizzy with excitement.

check out the bundles of pollen this guy is carrying.

bee on a hyacinth

at the Lieutenant Governor's shindig

The instructors of the PEI Seniors College courses, including me (I teach gardening, natch) were invited for a lovely afternoon of drinking tea and nibbling sweets, a tour of the beautiful mansion, and conversation with Lieutenant Governor Frank Lewis and his wife Dorothy.  It was a truly enjoyable experience, and I was able to check out the gardens as well, which are just starting to come out of winter hibernation.  It's lucky we chose a nice day, because today, just a day later, it's snowing again!

The view from the house towards the garden.

The tulips are starting to push through.

the view from the garden towards the house.

the back of the garden has tear-shaped beds framing a large trellis with a seat to watch the world go by.

one of the few flowers in bloom:  Glory of the Snow (Chionodoxa) has bright blue flowers that appear before the snow disappears.  The tiny bulbs should be planted in the fall

perfectly clipped boxwood hedges frame the garden

The boxwood hedges frame an extensive rose garden.

The roses are protected with an extra mound of soil for the winter.
This will be pulled back when summer finally arrives.