We're official! Our backyard is Backyard Wildlife Habitat #62367, as certified by the National Wildlife Foundation. As suits its new designation, there are all sorts of visiting birds that we've never seen before, like yellow-rumped warblers and rose-breasted grosbeaks. Most of them are rather unafraid of humans while they bathe in the waterfall.

I've planted "Little Midge" palm sedges and Pennsylvania sedge around the waterfall this spring, and the wild geranium and cinnamon fern I put in last fall came up not long after the daffodils did. The Bloodgood Japanese maple to the upper left is one of our last big plantings for the yard - hooray!

After all the early-spring flowers, the garden is a bit more sedate now. One exception is the Heuchera "Snow Angel", whose flowers look completely unrelated to its more sedate foliage. The Solomon's Seal in the background is flowering too, but much more quietly.

While this is sort of an uninteresting photo, it does show some native plants I'm excited about. In the lower right are some Solomon's Plumes (Smilacina racemosa), which I planted last fall. Towards the center is a mapleleaf viburnum, which are surprisingly difficult to buy. Even though it wasn't much more than a stick when planted last fall, it's popped right up this spring. A cinnamon fern is to the far left, and a blackhaw viburnum is in the upper right. I'm hoping this will all fill in really nicely over the next couple of years.

Late June update: All the hydrangeas are looking great. This is just one bed of them, with Annabelles to the left and oakleafs to the right, up against the house. Not all the oakleaf hydrangeas are blooming this year, but I'm chalking that up to their being planted last year, during a severe drought.

The bed along our north fence has quite a mix right now - I'm not sure exactly what I want in there, and the vines I've planted aren't big enough to reach the trellis yet. For now, it contains tomatoes, marigolds, thyme, oregano, and the ubiquitous bishop's weed.

The goldfish and shubunkins are bolder now then they were last fall. They swim right over to the side of the pond when we feed them, rather than hiding. I hope this doesn't make them more vulnerable to the neighborhood predators, but so far we have the same eight fish that we had late last fall.