Chris:

Why yellow? Well. if you are looking for a word to go with Y for your garden blog, why not choose the brightest color in the garden? Yellow, the color of pollen, is a magnet for pollinators, so yellow merits the honor of “Y.” Why, even flowers of other colors have yellow in the center.

I was thinking of choosing “Y is for Yucca,” but my yucca is a kind of spindly plant–though now eight years old–sort of hidden away in the side garden between a big photinia bush and the fence. It’s also overshadowed by the massive cherry plum tree and its glorious fruit and by the equally prolific apricot tree, that even now is teeming with red-green fruit that in a few weeks will become over a hundred orange beauties that will become pies, cakes, and dried morsels to satisfy us and our friends for the rest of the spring.

Apricots moving toward ripeness, April 2018

So, dear yucca, although you are not the focus of this entry, I will not ignore you, and I look forward to your stunning stalk of red-pink flowers that will appear in mid-summer.

The stunning red-pink stalk of the yucca in mid summer

But back to yellow! Right now, in early May, the garden is singing “Yellow, yellow, yellow!” The newly-planted marigolds and celosia, the sturdy perennial coreopsis and lantana, and more…

Marigold

Coreopsis

Celosia

Lantana

The new tomato plants, just ten days in the ground, announce to the bees that they are open for business with their yellow flowers in clusters.  As the spring and summer go on, the tomatoes will keep putting forth more yellow flowers, in the many hundreds, hopeful that they will become fruit. Even as the fruit turn from green to red, more flowers will come…

Meanwhile, the yellow rose bushes in front bloom from late March to late fall, cycle after cycle of buds and many-petalled flowers…

Oh yes, and the meyer lemons, who grow green in summer and switch on the yellow lights in December…

Meyer lemon bush January 2018

ripe Meyer lemons December

bowl of lemons and oranges January 2017

…and the nopales’ fruit, the tuna, that appear with yellow flowers in September…

…And forget not the day lilies, the peaches, the gerbera daisies, the zucchini blossoms, and even the tarragon, all yellow bloomers in spring or summer.

zucchini flowers

tarragon

Oh my, yellow, how magnificent you are!