What's Growing: April 2025
april is the purplest month
I’m not sure if it’s midlife, or the fact that I’ve moved back to natural landscapes of my childhood, but I notice trees and plants far more than I used to. Each month here on Home Again I share a photo roundup of what’s growing around my home, neighborhood, and city. Glad you’re here!
It’s a prolific time of year for the flora around us, isn’t it? Allergies notwithstanding, I love the constant sensory surprises that springtime offers. I hope that even my friends in the northernmost places are starting to remember the delights of a budding branch or a brave crocus. Do send me your photos!
Here’s what’s growing around my home and neighborhood this month. I’d love to hear what’s growing where you live - hit reply or leave a comment below!
1. Born For The Moment
I never know what I’m going to find when I begin researching the names and attributes of plants and flowers I photograph around town. I certainly wasn’t expecting to identify so personally with this description of the rockrose (or rock rose, or cistus):
They are evergreen shrubs with flowers "born for the moment", opening early in the morning and dropping their crape[sic]-paper-like petals by mid afternoon to decorate the surrounding ground through much of mid spring into summer. … They are evergreen low-growing to large shrubs with showy yellow, pink or white flowers that open in the morning, fall off the plant by mid afternoon, and are replenished with fresh new flowers the next day.
Dear reader, me too. I also open early in the morning and drop to the ground by mid-afternoon. What delights me most is that, for each rockrose bloom, that appears to be it. One and done. They don’t even make it until nightfall. It’s up to the next day’s blossoms to try again.1
2. Pride of Madeira
Finding out a flowering plant you admire is actually an invasive species is a little like learning of some seriously problematic behavior attributed to one of your favorite artists. It requires a gut-check, some reflection, and the ability to hold multiple feelings at once.
Or, you can admire the beauty, abhor the behavior, and keep on walking, which is what I do when I encounter the echium candicans, native to Madeira and the Canary Islands and definitely NOT to California.
3. Neighborhood Avo-Share
I shared in my February What’s Growing post that it’s going to be a bountiful year for our three old Haas avocado trees. As such, I've reinstated a secret drop spot for a neighbor friend who walks his dogs by our house every day.
Charles knows to check behind the last fencepost for his freebies, and I try to space out the harvests so that we all have one or two ripe avos at all time - no more, no less.
4. Wisteria Lane Alley
Another definitely-not-native but everywhere-in-Santa-Barbara springtime sight is wisteria. When it’s in full bloom it’s magical looking, but the vines get very woody and scraggly looking at other times of the year. I’m not sure I’d include it in my own home landscaping, but to encounter this wall in a back alley of a failing shopping center was a sweet spring surprise.
5. Poppies, After All
Last month I noticed that California poppies were making themselves known by the end of March, and I acknowledged sadly that the seeds I scattered in February had not yet produced any actual poppies in my yard.
But look!
I have no idea if and when I’ll get blooms, but it was exciting to see the familiar leaf-shape sprout from the earth.
And just to feast your eyes, here’s some poppy glory from my kids’ school garden earlier this month:
6. Silver Fern
Isn’t the symmetry and predictability of this fern satisfying? I learned that the silver fern is native to New Zealand; this one grows in front of a giant tudor-style house I pass on my walks:
According to iNaturalist:
The Silver Fern was first discovered by the Māori people, who are the indigenous people of New Zealand. According to the legend of the Māori people, the Silver Fern ‘once lived in the sea’ and the Māori hunters would ‘...use the silver underside of the fern leaves to find their way home…’. When bent at an angle, the leaves of the fern would catch the moonlight and ‘illuminate a path through the forest’.
7. Oh, yes. The garden we planted this month.
We did some spring planting this month! Ordinarily that ‘we’ would be exceedingly royal, but I actually got my hands dirty this year.
Bryan is the garden designer and overseer, and designed+built these raised beds himself about three years ago. (He uses the Garden Grid system for watering, which also helps space out planting - I think it’s genius!)
We’ve got lots of herbs and lettuces in, blackberries continuing to do well on the vine, marigolds in a futile attempt at keeping pests away, some peppers and cucumbers and a few other things. Tomato planting will happen a bit later.
8. The Children
The humans are growing, too, and rapidly.
But they’re not too big to hunt for eggs in the front yard. Glory hallelujah, indeed.
What’s blossoming in your neck of the woods? I’d love to know!
More in the What’s Growing series:
Also I once lived on a street named Rockrose for six years and never thought to look up the namesake flower. It was a different time.
Pride of Madeira is big here, too, despite our fog. They're all over Alcatraz!
Your garden looks beautiful, Sarah! Love all the plant pictures. My tulips are coming up! But we've had to cover them for a few nights because it keeps freezing. Hopefully, no more frigid nights, but we will see. ;)