Was I rushing the season?

During a warming spell in March, when our favorite locally owned garden nursery opened up, I collected an assortment of fillers and spillers and two thrillers for my patio urns. The fillers, pansies and violas, are still going strong along with wire vine plants. Not so the bicopa spillers and miniature dracena thrillers. A couple of sub-freezing nights here and there took care of them in spite of a covering of old linen dishtowel.

Was I rushing the season? After forty-plus years in Eastern Washington state, this transplant from the Deep South still hasn’t learned her horticultural zoning lessons!

Since wire vine plants are trailers as well as ground creepers, I like to add a couple of these spillers to pots and urns for delicate grace notes, along with trailing vinca and creeping Charlies. This year I want to try stuffing one into an otherwise unsightly broken front walk, like this:

So what’s next? Pink Geraniums thrillers with a variety of spillers such as blue and white bicopa (fresh plants) . . .

or “Diamond Frost” Euphorbia fillers . . .

. . . shown here with overgrown spillers Dichondra “Silver Falls” for the front porch urns flanking my white Luytens bench.

On second thoughts, perhaps I’d better wait until May 30. What do you think?