Double Cream

Do you know the wonderful dessert called "Tres Leches" ? Here is the floral variety, double cream and looking scrumptious. I can almost sense the scent of vanilla wafting gently around the flowers.

For those who never heard of "Tres Leches", it is a sponge or butter cake soaked in three types of milk: evaporated, condensed and heavy cream. It is a rich and decadent dessert that will get you hooked even if you don't have a sweet tooth and packs a serious sugar punch.

You don't realize as you enjoy it how calorie loaded it really is, only to find out after you delighted in the last bite that it is not as easy as you thought to get up from the table.

The flowers, however, are lighter than air, delicate and poetic and no, they don't smell like vanilla, they are not fragrant at all.

The hybrid daffodils came a long way from the classic yellow jonquils, some double flowered, some rose or white colored, some fragrant, some painted, some unfolding tulip like petals, some fringed, some ruffled, but all wonderful.

Gentle daffodils straight from a poet's fancy, soaking your garden in happiness.

When spring finally shows up, it does it in style: from one day to the next the dormant garden turns into a lush paradise filled with color and fragrance.

Painted Ladies

Here is a daffodil variety that my daughter picked out last year. The pictures looked so nice and I was looking forward to seeing it in the garden. Of course, since spring bulb planting happens in October, with no immediate results, I almost forgot about them and didn't expect to see them, what a beautiful surprise.

Painted flowers are an acquired taste for some, they can feel noisy and distracting to the serious gardener for whom very precise color harmony is essential. The painted flowers have their own individual harmony and can produce quite jarring effects in mass.

Each flower in itself, however, is a work of art and looks mesmerizing up close, take a look at this combination of yellow, bright orange and white. The joyful, bright eyed rosettes are the garden's cheer leading team, announcing beautiful developments to come.

I should have planted a lot more, I always underestimate the number of bulbs needed to make a true impact in a planting. No worries, though, every year new bulbs are added to the existing ones, I'll get there eventually.