I spent a greater part of the weekend raking up leaves and twigs and all of the rest of Old Man Winter's calling cards and was amazed to see how well the plants are doing.

Crocus, daffodils, pasque flowers, puschkinia, siberian squill, and even tulips are happily blooming, their petals turned up to the warming sun. I was also surprised to see how many plants survived that I feared our cold winter temperatures would have done in. Orixa japonica (an excellent understory shrub for deep, deep shade with nice glossy leaves) survived without complaint, so I think I need to order some more now!

Well, enough about my garden. Let's get to the real reason why we're here: the gallery updates! I tried to stick with a floral theme in celebration of spring, but as usual there are a few oddballs.

I should soon have new photos of first-time blooming plants in my yard, but I'm not sure if they'll come out. For the first time I'm trying to use a tripod regularly to extend my depth of field (make less of the picture fuzzy) when doing close-ups, but I've also been experimenting. Things could be really blurry if I did something wrong.

I also wanted to thank all of you who have contributed to the hort.net fund drive. We're not there yet, but we're making progress! For those of you who missed it, there's more information about the fund-raising process and options at

    http://www.hort.net/funds/

We're already started making changes for the better at hort.net, including plans to double our network speed (at less than we're paying now), getting a good backup plan in place (with more disk storage), and setting up user options on the site. Hopefully you'll be able to upload your own images directly to the gallery any day now! Any donations that you send will definitely be used and are appreciated.

Enjoy the warming weather!

Christopher Lindsey, gallery maintainer