So many newly sprung buds and flowers to be seen around here — also some not so lovely, even ugly things in my garden. One of the most pure and fresh is the bloom on the plum trees:

I spent hours in the garden over the last few days; one task was to provide some more strings for the snow pea plants that keep growing up and up and have even formed two infant pods so far. Why do they keep on – how do they do it, on the stems that seem rotted and dried near the ground?

I wouldn’t be surprised if I go out one morning and find that they have keeled over, but strangely, life flows through those brown and emaciated tubes. The sugar snap peas did not survive long enough to get flowers, and I removed them yesterday as well.

Evidently being beaten down by rain and then frozen every night is not their idea of seasonable weather. Truly, October is the month we are supposed to plant peas in our area, but this hasn’t been a typical year weather-wise….

For a week we’ve been having more frosts, so I brought the Christmas Cactus indoors by my computer table and it is giving us Christmas in March.

The arugula and pak choi have gone to flowering, so I pulled them out and planted some parsley and new pak choi, purple this time. From the flowers you can guess that it is in the Brassica family.

This first week of Lent we have so many wonderful services, I’ve been at church a lot, and am glad to have my phone with me so I can save images like this. Somehow the camellia escaped getting brown spots from being constantly wet. It is giving us a picture of the purity and beauty that is God’s will for our souls.