full fathom five

Garden Spring 08

It's a spectacular season for blooms this year because of all the snow we had this winter, plus a rainy spring.  Our Miss Kim lilac, filling the whole house with fragrance, now reaches the eaves of our roof, and is covered with flowers. 

One thing that's good about the foliage garden fronting the lilac, is that the different hues of green make the lilac's blooms stand out.   

Below, Lupine rising on the hillside off our sunroom has just reached the tipping point of enough healthy plants to now spread itself.  So now I won't have to dig weeds out of the hard clay to make places for it to reseed itself, like I did last year.  Whew!  (That's a relief, because last year's marathon digging gave me a rotator-cuff injury to my right shoulder which took months of physical therapy to heal.  Lupine, despite the fact that it's a weed here in Maine, is hard to get started.) 

And below is our Aunt Dee wisteria in bloom, with many more flowers than it had last year.  Each oblong cluster of blossoms is an inch or two longer than last year's, and the smell is musky and addictive.  It's not a floral scent, but one like new-mown hay, making you stop in your tracks and think, "God, it's good to be alive!" 

   

That's all for now...

Cereusly beautiful

My husband and I recently got back from a week's visit to Islesboro, a beautiful island in Penobscot Bay.  When we came into our sunroom to check how the plants had fared while we were away, we noticed this long, ugly spent bloom hanging down from the top of our cactus like a short, black snake.  Typical, I thought.  We've had this ugly, scabby old thing - a gift of unknown variety that started out at only about six inches tall in a normal (little) pot - for thirty-two years, and it's never bloomed.  That's probably because I've tried to throw it out many times, but my husband, who seems aesthetically challenged re. colors and some plant shapes, always rescues it from the compost-heap.  He thinks the bulbous, prickly old thing's beautiful!    

The morning after our arrival home, we woke up to this unusual fresh-air smell wafting into our bedroom.  It was a clean smell, like a good, non-perfumed oatmeal soap.  We got out of bed and followed it to the sun-room, and on the other side of the cactus, toward the window, we found this bloom, big as a breakfast plate! 

I ran and got a step-ladder, and we took turns sinking our noses into the long, sweet filaments.  Their anthers left little peachy dots of pollen on our upper lips and bridge of the nose, and the curious impression of lesser fragrance than when we pulled away about a foot or so. 

   We looked it up on the internet as the dear flower closed green leaves over its white plumage during the next hour.  I thought we were witnessing some rare night-blooming centurion plant that only blooms every fifty or hundred years (I wasn't stopping to calculate), but we found out that it's a Peruvian Apple night-blooming cereus.  By about nine am., the thing was closed.  The next day we had another bloom, and we watched it over coffee.  And then they were gone. 

    This plant is smart, epitomizing the "leave 'em wanting more" trick, which totally won me over.  I mixed up a gallon of my primo fish-and-kelp fertilizer from the cold, nutritious depths of the North Atlantic, and rewarded our glorious beauty with the first meal of her life.  Then I marked the calendar, so I can feed her faithfully every two-and-a-half weeks.  I'm ready to slavishly follow the fertilizer instructions, which no other plant - even the chocolate-scented oncidium in top photo's left - has ever moved me to do.    

Drunk on lavender

Here's our swath of partially-harvested lavender that lines the brick walk in front of our house.   I'm cutting sprays of it and hanging them upside down from the ceiling-beams in our garage loft, to dry it for our daughter's wedding in October. 

   

I've learned to cut the lavender first thing in the morning, when the bees are not yet drunk on it.  By the end of the day, when I have been cutting it, the bees are staggering around, unable to get off the bouquets that I cut.  I literally have to scrape them off (fast) with the edge of my pruning-shears, and drop them back into the bed, because they are on automatic, unable to stop burrowing their heads into the purple clusters of pollen, even when they feel the pruners touch their backs or wings.  They seem completely oblivious, and their sluggish motions make them look inebriated. 

The Aging Gardener

I love gardening because the slow, repetitive nature of its tasks encourages reflection.  And the surround-sound of birds, insects, and relentlessness of weeds pushing themselves up through cracks in driveway and patio are humbling reminders of the limits of human control.  Nature fills the senses, taking away the pressure of ego, freeing us to discover what works.  And what works is definitely different here in my sixties, than it was in my forties.      

    Yesterday, I was weeding a big patch of lilies, and knew not to look beyond the square-foot of soil I'd lifted slightly with my spade-tip.  That was this moment's area of operations, and I knew that looking beyond it would only make me despair at how far I had to go.  In years past, I didn't know better than to survey the whole of any job, usually ending up going back indoors for a cup of coffee or even a nap from the sudden tiredness that overtook me.

    Now I know to wade in fast, isolate a small section, and keep my eyes on the prize.  Starting is everything; once you start, you've got a pattern, and that pattern makes for momentum, staying-power. 

    This way of working in the physical world influences my thinking as well.  Planning to sketch out a few scenes is more conducive to sitting down at the computer than planning to write a book.  Thinking of calling a dean of admissions for a program one of my students is interested in, is more motivating than thinking of finding my student a new career.  And planning to put stray nails and screws in a jar gets me down the cellar stairs faster than resolving to clean the basement.

    Besides breaking things down into parts, this year has brought a new acceptance of things as they are.  A few years back I decided that bloom was beyond me.  So I made a foliage garden, a landscape of texture and subtle shades of red and blue-green leaves that kept up its understated show all spring and summer. 

    But this spring the garden suddenly erupted in a plethora of foxglove seedlings, that must have been latent in the mulch I spread over layers of weed-barrier newspaper I bedded down the garden with last Fall.  For the first time ever, I left the seedlings to grow, rather than weeding them out.  I knew they'd change our garden, interrupt its design, but I was curious.  So I left them in and we got a wonderful crescent of raspberry-colored and white foxgloves curving around one side of the garden.  It was a glorious surprise, one I wouldn't have had in years past, when neatness and preserving established patterns was my focus. 

    Same with dandelions.  I've always fought them, until this year.  This spring I let them grow, bloom, and even go to seed.  I don't know why, but I think I'm just tired.  And old enough to know that it's easier to change myself than fight them.  Now I'm looking for a book on making salads with dandelion greens.  Anyone know one?                               

Moonglow surprise

It's such a pleasure to look out the window these golden Fall days, that my husband and I irrepressibly added window-washing to our annual Fall chore of taking the screens off yesterday.  It took us nearly a whole Saturday morning, but it was worth it.  Today I found myself putting off Monday's lesson-plan preparation by gazing out the kitchen window at our brick walk.  A swath of English Lavender borders one side of it, and a few plants are still miraculously reblooming, even after two night frosts we've had. 

   So I was surprised to see bees flying around the opposite side of the walk, ignoring the lavender blossoms for two stately juniper trees that frame our front door.  I've always been proud of the fact that I got these beauties on sale at Home Depot, as end-of-the season runts of the litter.  Only about a foot-and-a-half tall, they were ragged and droopy, with bare branches showing where their fir-tree needles had been stripped off in scrapes or falls.  The patches of needles they had, though -that silvery blue-spruce color that looks like they're perpetually under a full-moon - and their name: "Moonglow," were promising, so I rescued them from the clearance table and took them home.   

   Now, ten years later - with yearly pruning and Fall fertilizing - they're dense, bushy, eight-foot columns bursting with honeybees crawling through their needles and buzzing around them.  The trees don't appear to be blooming, so what the attraction is is a mystery.  I would think the bees would be crawling all over the few blossoms that are still hanging off the ballerina rose, the clematis, the cleome, and the flocks in the garden. 

    But no.  The bees are working the juniper, and I find the words of British writer Douglas Adams, memorialized in biologist Richard Dawkins' new book "The God Delusion," which I'm reading now, running through my mind: "Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"    

    Yes, it's enough for me to see that the garden is not only beautiful but full of surprise.  And these moments of gaping out the window, wondering why why why?,  seem to stretch in the Fall, knowing that bees and blooms will soon be gone.                  

when to stop?

Tabor, at her wonderful new landscaping blog http://taborsyard.blogspot.com/    caught the gardener's sensibility perfectly when she said something to the effect that she and her husband will soon be gardening in their new place, which means moving perennials and annuals around ceaselessly.  It occured to me this morning when I was transplanting Japanese Iris back to the original place I planted them just a short year ago, that besides the fact Tabor's lucky to have a husband willing to do unmotorized yardwork, she's spot-on about what I've been doing in my garden for the last twelve years.  In fact, my husband often reminds me that if I'd let things stay put a few years, then maybe they'd fill in like I want them to.   

   This morning's gardening reminded me that I've told my writing students something similar for the last twenty years, when they ask how to tell when a piece of work is finished.  I tell them when you find you're rewriting your revisions with the same sentences you used on the first draft, it's time to quit.  Michael Curtis, longtime fiction editor of the Atlantic, once told me (at a writer's conference) about his long-ago college roommate Thomas Pynchon, who had trouble letting his manuscripts go out the door because he never thought they were finished.  And I've heard plenty of painters say the same thing.  A friend recently saw one of his paintings he did for my husband about thirty years ago, and he asked us if he could take it back to his studio and do some touch-ups, make it better.   

   I've learned to deal with this difficulty to think things finished in my teaching, by literally not giving myself time to tinker or expand on ideas.  I wait till the last minute to grade papers and make the next day's lesson-plan, because I know that teaching can always be improved, and if I let myself, I'll grade, re-grade, and tweak lesson-plans all night.  If you let yourself, you can see a lesson-plan, a garden, a manuscript, a painting, and many other projects, I suspect, in perpetual development. 

   And that adds a new glitch to cutting down the size of the gardens to accommodate aging.  Cutting the garden space in half this summer has necessitated a whole new design, and I've transplanted more than I can remember ever doing in previous summers.  I keep looking forward to the day it's all done, but Tabor's post made me aware that that day will never come unless I change my own thinking.  I've got to shift from seeing the garden as a work-in-progress to finished.  Any suggestions (besides hypnosis)?        

In the Beauty of the Lilies

In posting the previous blog about last weekend's garden tour, I must have hit the wrong key and eliminated the lily-swath that lines our driveway.  Here it is, below, and the two species have always staggered their bloom, the yellow Dover blooming first, then the orange and red Franz Hals.  But this summer they've bloomed together - must be all the rain - and right on time for the tour.   

   

    I appropriated the title, above, from a John Updike novel of about seven years ago.  I didn't read it, but the sight of these lilies always triggers the phrase, so I like to think that Updike was visualizing daylilies like these.  Another memory that comes singing to the surface is the old Sunday-school hymn from fifty years ago: "For the beauty of the earth; for the glory of the skies. For the love which from our birth; over and around us lies."   

    These run through my mind each morning just after dawn when W. and I start up the drive from our hour's walk, our dog Cody careening around us in figure-eights, celebrating having "lead" us home.  It's a game he started a year ago, when he first came to us from the animal shelter.  After only the second or third walk, he recognized the drive, and from then on he'd race down the road and into the driveway, his legs slipping out from under him on the turn, then scramble back up into crazed figure-eights, running to us at top-speed then veering off at the last instant.   

   In lily-season, I always stop in the drive to deadhead spent lilies while W. goes in to make coffee.  This brings the lilies into Cody's trajectory.  Our daughter's new shelter-dog, Lila, when she visits, sensibly jumps the swath like a gazelle, but Cody streaks right through it, blasting orange and yellow petals into the air and trailing stems in his tail out the other side.  I turn and walk quickly to the front yard to lure him away, cringing as I hear him whip through the swath behind me.                     

And below, the jolly Franz Hals.

And prim, fragrant Dover (waiting to be deadheaded).

A friend was over yesterday to diagnose the unblooming end of the swath.  "You need to weed them," she said, getting down on her knees.  "They're being choked out by all this grass!" She rips and pulls at the stubborn quack-grass and vetch. Oh god, I know she's right. She's our town's daylily expert, with hundreds of thriving daylilies to prove it.  So much for White Flower Farms and other catalogues of eight years ago when I bought these, featuring beautiful pictures of naturalized daylilies running down hillsides amidst windblown grass. I was thrilled to hear that you could plant these right in your lawn or meadow, and they'd push up through the grass.  But now, it's dawning on me that this probably never meant no weeding.  That means a lot of work this Fall, digging out this unproductive seven-foot section, weeding, then dividing and replanting the lilies.

     Which makes these days of just enjoying them, smelling them and hearing long-ago snatches of song while snapping off spent blooms, all the more precious.    

Garden Tour '06

I'm titling this post with the date because I can see doing this year after year.  Having people oooh and aaaah over the house and grounds all weekend is the homeowner's equivalent to a paycheck.  And because gardens are always in-progress, looking toward next year's garden, picturing extensions or boundaries of existing color, shape, and texture, is a given.  So adding an audience to that process is natural.   

 

It's a wonderful development, because it's forced me to more quickly implement the only way my husband and I can continue to live this rural lifestyle as we age: to cut back the time and resources we put into home-maintenance.  So I've been down-sizing the gardens.  What I'm now calling "holding-beds" have been reduced about 50% this summer, W. very happy to mow over them on his new Hustler lawn-machine.   So that makes the one remaining area that I call "garden," doubly precious.  The garden tour has made me concentrate my energy there, making it handleable and fun because of the aesthetic payoff at the end.  Rarely have I decreased a project enough to get things neat, if not meticulous.  This time I came close, and it's gratifying.  Here's evidence:

W. has mowed things super-short and weed-wacked the edges to emphasize plants.

And below, the brickwork is weed-free for the first time in its twelve years.  The lavender swath on the left has gone by, but there's still a suggestion of blue to tie in with the main garden across the brick walk. In garden's bottom corner, I've taken out the yellow corner that complicated the photo I posted a couple of weeks ago, replacing it with blue-green sedum plants.  I'm counting on them to spread, working towards a blue-green/garnet color combination.   

Here's a close-up, below, of the two colors, composed mainly of a euphorbia or spurge called "donkey's tail" and heuchera (coral bells).  The idea is to have the blue-green fill in the mulched areas over the years.

And below is a close-up of the water-feature W. and I dug a few years ago.  We lined it and put in a pump from Home Depot, and a couple of years ago W.'s mother gave us the little statue that had been in her yard.  There are frogs at the boy's feet, shooting jets of water out their mouths. The yellow-green plant on the water is duck-weed, a welcome volunteer.

We had about 40-50 visitors on Saturday, and fewer on Sunday - maybe 15.  People were appreciative, and left me with some good ideas - for the "holding beds," in particular.  And I think we raised good money for the animal shelter, so it was a success all around.   

I'm left with a question, though: women outnumbered men 10 to one.  I wonder why this is.  Anyone care to speculate? 

Down to the wire

I'm getting our house and gardens ready for a garden-tour this weekend to benefit a local animal shelter.  I've been making myself put weed-barriers of newspaper many layers thick down wherever I've weeded this summer, then carefully shovelling on a layer of bark-mulch to hide the papers.   

   But now it's down to the wire, and I'm just flinging fistfuls of bark-mulch over the weeds, forget the paper!, then stomping it all down in my running shoes.  And I'm ignoring the weedy gardens adjacent to the centerpiece of my efforts, the foliage garden, by just calling these "holding beds."  I'll put up signs to that effect, and voila!  I've got a reprieve from more weeding.

    The six other gardeners on the tour are complaining that the thing's scheduled too late for the best blooming time in Maine: mid-to-late June, and most of their flowers have gone by.  That's why I've concentrated on the foliage-garden.

   So the daylilies, coneflowers, and flocks that are just coming into bloom now, are not even part of the garden; they're "on-hold."  That gives a kind of luxurious feel to the place, that blooms can be superfluous.  The real draw is the open space, the birdsong, the trees and stone-walls, the shapes and - nearer the house - foliage and texture.  What blooms there are, are gravy.  How's that for a work-saving strategy?    

 

     

Wisteria II

Our wisteria has just come into bloom, with many more flowers than last year.  We're doing something right. 

There have been several people led to this blog by Googling "wisteria," and some of them want to know how to duplicate the tree-like support to train wisteria to a standard.  My husband made the support out of threaded pipe we got from the plumbing-supply section of Home Depot.  Here's a close-up, below, of how the "branches" are joined to the "trunk," with t-shaped fittings and threaded "nipples," over about 1/2 inch diameter pipe.  We spray-painted the pipe black after fitting it all together, and sank it into the ground about a foot, with a bed of rocks around its base.      

And it's worth it to reiterate the strength, weight, and pervasiveness of this vine when it's full-grown.  Unless you have a brick or stone house, keep it away from buildings, because it will pry up clapboards or shingles, and smother or even bring down porches or outbuildings.  We expect to be pruning this baby back hard each spring as its trunk and branches thicken.