full fathom five

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.   

Sun at last

It stopped raining last night, for the first time in three weeks, and today dawned clear and breezy, blowing the bugs away for our morning walk.  On returning up our drive, our home was totally new in the sun, the waterlogged blooms on lilacs, iris, peonies, and poppies having risen overnight.  The lilac below (the Asian "Miss Kim") has its "arms" up shouting in the sun, and its perfume wafts through the open window to the right, filling the house with sweetness.   

Below, I grabbed Cody to provide a contrast to the clematis, but he wouldn't stay long enough for me to get out of the picture.   But don't look at me; feast your eyes on the clematis, and you gardeners out there tell me, please, how I prune for horizontal spread  across our shed?

And below, a peek at our foliage-garden-in-progress.  Its plan was reds (heuchera) and blue-greens ("donkey-tail" euphorbia in foreground), but the garden always springs surprises.  And so the yellow-green sedum ground-cover at the bottom left has spread close enough in all the rain to show that it would make the more spectacular display against the reds.  But it's too late to tear out the blue-greens (we're on a July 22/23 house-and-garden tour fundraiser for the local animal shelter), so I'm going to have to plant some kind of transition ornamental grass or variegated iris to ease the yellow into the blue-green.  Anyone have any suggestions (for zone 3-5)?

Anyway, what a beautiful problem to have, especially in the sun!

Once more, to the yard

It's been pouring rain here for the last two weeks, and at our first break a few days ago, my husband got out on our new riding-mower after work and managed to get a few swaths of our front-meadow mowed before getting stuck in the mud.  After spending an hour with both of us pushing and pulling the mower out, then hosing it and ourselves off before finally stumbling into the house just as darkness fell, we didn't get to try out the mower again for another week.  Finally the rain stopped on Thursday, and we had a full day of intermittent sun to dry things off.  That night, W. took out the mower again as soon as he got home from work.  Avoiding the lower-lying edge of meadow where he got stuck last time, he was able to mow the whole front and back into a lawn-like collar around our house before darkness fell.  He came in raving about the new mower -called the "Hustler" - as "a revelation."  It's a zippy little thing, mowing more grass in less time, with a new steering mechanism that allows for tight "zero-radius" turns.

This past weekend, W. was out on the mower for a few minutes to lop off dandelion-heads that had sprung up in the intervening rains, and later at dinner with friends, he  rhapsodized about the new machine, that it's completely streamlined and revolutionized the mowing experience for him.  My friend Barb - who appreciates with me the seeming gender-based division of labor in yardwork that has men preferring anything with motors (power-mowers, electric tillers and weed-wackers, hedge-clippers and chain-saws, even leaf-vacuums) while women like simple hand-tools that we don't have to read manuals for and that allow for breezes, birdsong or our own thoughts while we work - gave W. a twinkly smile. "So," she said, "you had a mow-gasm on your Hustler?"       

Snowed out

I've spent all Fall putting my garden to bed this year, because next summer we'll be on the local garden-tour.  So I've been mixing a three-part fertilizer and sprinkling it around each of my perennials, then digging it into the soil with a shovel or trowel.

 

This necessitates weeding around each perennial first.  And the fertilizer mix can only be made in small increments so that all the parts can be stirred well into the mix.  Ingredients are rock phosphate, green sand, and lime.  This makes a late-release fertilizer that doesn't start working 'till six months from now, just in time to make a late-spring growth-spurt.  It's supposed to yield a great profusion of blooms.

 

But I've been weeding, mixing, and scratching it in all Fall, and still have half of the daylily swath that lines our driveway plus another lily-bed left to do.  I get into my work-clothes after school and do a few more lilies every mild day, but it goes slowly.  The last few sessions, I've lain a rake across the swath where I leave off, to show me where to start fertilizing the next time I get out there.

   

But today, the rake was covered up by our first snow.  I had put the possibility out of my mind, and planned to work some more today, but now I'm stuck inside.  But next week they're predicting another warm-spell, and I hope the ground will thaw enough to scratch in more fertilizer.  If so, maybe I can finish the job.  Then I'll rake dead leaves,  straw, and shredded newspaper over the lily and lavender beds, and give the gardens up to the snows for the year.   Only then, when they're all under what I like to think of as a warm blanket, can I rest easy for the winter.   

Wisteria

My husband and I took a chance on this wisteria ("Aunt Dee") three years ago.  Wisteria is very iffy here in inland Maine; limited to temperate zones 4 to 8, it thrives in the southern and middle states.  Pennsylvania's Longwood Gardens is what inspired us, where, in mid-May, long purple panicles of wisteria cover the walls of a stone farmhouse.  Its fragrance and ethereal color - pink and yellow-tipped lavender - makes the air like heaven.

Growing wisteria here in Maine, zoned 5 if you're lucky enough to live by the water, and 3 to 4 inland, is harder.  We had to find a spot with southern exposure to all-day sun, and solid protection from the North winds.  That would be right in front of our south-facing house.  But with a wooden house, we couldn't grow it to climb up the structure, because wisteria is so vigorous that it inches its way under shingles or clapboards and eventually pries them off.  Gardeners told us these vines can pull a house down.

So our wisteria had to be free-standing. After looking at pictures in gardening books, we went to Home Depot, and W. went straight to the plumbing-supply section.  He got a bunch of plumbing pipes, spray-painted them water-proof black, and built a tree-shaped frame.  We planted the wisteria right next to the "trunk." 

By the next summer (last year), the plant was putting out shoots long enough to cover the whole frame.  I consulted pruning books, and by tying the shoots to the frame and pruning away side-shoots, we fashioned a trunk up the vertical and branches along the horizontal supports.    

      

Here's the positioning of the wisteria in relation to the house: close enough to be blocked from the North winds, but far enough away (across the brick walk) so it can't send out tendrils to glom onto the shingles. 

All the careful positioning, protection, pruning, and plumbing-pipes pay off in panicles of heaven each late-June.  W. startled hummingbirds and bees at work this morning when he went out at 6am to take these pictures.

Sunburst II

Here's the Sunburst in pictures.  Below is our first garden, planted about ten years ago to wrap around this southeast corner of the house.  This garden gets the first sun of the day.  Asian lilac (the super-fragrant Miss Kim) to the right of the door; a hedge of lavender in the foreground, running along the brick walk.

Below, the garden in close-up.  My husband (W.) and I dug the little pond (only about 3-4 feet deep) about four years ago, putting in a liner and small fountain.  The sound of running water attracts birds, making weeding or any quiet activity, just pure delight. 

Below is the garden on the west side of the house.  Only two years old, it's on a rocky slope, which I tried last year unsuccessfully to terrace. We're low-budget gardeners, and not being able to afford  earth-moving machines, we found hand-terracing too time-consuming.

So I deemed this garden a failed experiment.  This spring, I decided to transplant the best plants to the dooryard garden and let the rest go back to meadow. 

Until the lupine and daisies bloomed.  Now I'm weeding in earnest, digging up all the dandelions and quack-grass from around the lupine so they have bare earth to drop their seeds into.  And the daisies, sensing the new space, fill in fast, so that I'm getting closer to the picture of heaven I've carried ever since I saw a hillside across from the yachtclub in Camden, Maine about eight years ago.  It was a billowing sheet of daisies, with a few blue lupine holding down the corners - the most uplifting garden I've ever seen. 

I came home and tried to reproduce it on our north slope, buying out the local nursery's supply of shasta daisies, but failed.  Now, it appears that nature is giving it to me on the west side.  In letting the wild daisies fill in, I see my way to the garden I've always wanted. 

This is the best of gardening, its irony and surprise.      

Further down the west slope (below), the old apple tree with a hard-to-see puddle of stella d'oro lilies that I planted to light up the tree's shadow.  I forgot that the lilies (yellow) "light up" for only short time, and the rest of the time - like this - deepen the shadow.

But luckily, the bones of our garden were here long before we were: the apple tree, the pasture, the trees in the background giving a walled-garden look.  So however our experiments turn out, nature keeps it beautiful.

W. built this little shed for our garden tractor and firewood about seven years ago.  The boards have weathered nicely, and because this side faces south for all-day sun, I've tried to get a whole series of vining plants to grow here.  But roses and earlier clematis all petered out; I didn't know why. 

This clematis ("Presidential," I think) is new, planted the summer before last.  The very rainy spring we've had shows me why our earlier vines failed.  (We're "survival of the fittest" gardeners, not watering regularly). 

But this beauty inspires me to rig up a longer hose, and W. wants to put up a bigger trellis now, picturing a whole wall of blooms.

The dooryard clematis (Nelly Moser) that we're trying to establish on the trellis arching over the back door.  Like the shed, we've tried a whole series of clematis here, and now I know the key: watering, the daily, patient, waiting for it to sink into the roots kind. 

Sunburst

After days and days of rain and low temperatures, suddenly the sun has burst out, the birds are singing, and a doe walked across our meadow while we were having coffee in the sunroom.  Lupines and daisies are blowing in the gardens, the late-blooming asian lilac perfumes the air, and it's impossible to stay indoors.  Life is beautiful. 

Slouching towards retirement

I've always taken "retirement" to mean the end of paid work, but I'm discovering that it covers our hobbies and volunteer-work too.  This spring I admitted, reluctantly, that I can't keep up with the gardening anymore.  At 61, I get tired after just an hour or two of yardwork.

So after getting depressed looking at beds full of weeds, I've decided to spend the summer consolidating our gardens.  That means transplanting all the best plants from two beds into a third, and letting the first two beds go back to grass and meadow.

However, while telling another gardener my plan of leaving the lupine and daisies in the bed I'm letting go back to meadow, hoping they'll spread on their own, I found my addiction taking over.  "Just expose the soil around the lupine as it forms seed," said my gardening friend, "and then it'll drop the seed into the freshly-turned earth and Voila!  next spring you'll have dozens more lupine." 

Oh boy! I thought, picturing neat circles I'd dig around each lupine plant, how the freshly-turned earth would set off each plant, especially if I went out to the nursery and bought some bark mulch to spread around them.

"And there's a sale on blue lupine up at the Garden Spot," my friend went on, catching my fever.  "Just a dollar apiece.  They have beautiful plants."

Oh boy! I thought.  I need to get up there before they're all gone.  I now saw the extra space I'd dig in the weed-choked garden to sit the new seedlings in.  And maybe I could dig circles around all the daisies too, before they dropped their seed.  Maybe the Garden Spot would have a few Shasta-daisy seedlings on sale.

So with the tacit encouragement of my addicted friend, I'd strayed from my consolidation plan to creating a whole new House Beautiful project that significantly multiplies my gardening chores.  But that's the nature of addiction; it takes over your life. 

How do you retire from that?          

To-do, Spring

Deadhead daffodils, prune roses, swab tent-caterpillar tents out of crabapple trees, edge gardens, plant out dahlias and calla lilies, install fountain, dig dandelions, prop up all climbing vines, stake peonies, weed gardens.

The order of this list has a purpose: by the time I make it to the last item, weeding seems like a reward!  Especially the way I do it: sitting on a little gardening bench listening to birds and the gurgle of the fountain, and taking short cuts around the perennials so that their bold shapes and textures stand out quickly, making only a few minutes of weeding infinitely rewarding.  The soil, after a month's solid rain, makes the weeds fresh and easy to pull.

The list is flexible, because there are always unplanned emergencies after a long winter that have to be fixed immediately.  Like the bluebird box blown sideways by the wind.  Or the birdfeeder's squirrel-baffle hanging by a thread, opening the sunflower seed to quick rifling by chipmunks. 

The only consistency in the process is being outside, pure exhiliration after the long winter.  Worth braving the black flies, which are just starting up and should be fierce this year after the long rains.

Meanwhile, the gardens are lovely even unweeded, with chartreuse beds of euphorbia interspersed with blue forget-me-nots.  These are unplanned colors, pure gravy when one gardens for shape, texture, and foliage, which I do.  Bloom is just a beautiful surprise then, more precious because it's entirely serendipitous.