Category Archives: my garden

Spiders, Perfume, and Hot Lips

my garden, nature, trees


Technically it is summer, and we do have days above 80°. The summer squash and Blue Lakes are producing, and we even picked a Persimmon orange tomato, so I shouldn’t complain. But it’s a good year to notice features of the garden other than vegetables.

The manzanita was peeling magnificently a short while back and we stared with unbelief at its ability to hold on to the peeled bark with some kind of magical glue.
fennel between manzanita and snowball

It’s in the part of the yard where over a year ago I planted a tiny fennel bush that has now grown into a mighty giant. Spiders have taken over that end of the garden this summer and they really like building webby bridges from the fennel to the manzanita and over to the rhododendron and the pine tree.

…also to the snowball bush, and back to the fence, and including the wisteria, and….if Mr. Glad hadn’t taken the broom to a dozen squatters yesterday I’m afraid they’d have wrapped it all up and out of my reach for good.

This morning I got entangled in the sticky threads just going through the door to take more photos in the mist. The red sedum is in bloom, and one of the two types of rose geranium that share a pot in the middle of the patio where we are sure to bump the leaves frequently and release that heavenly scent.

The hybrid verbena lived all through the winter, and the New Zealand Spinach self-sowed abundantly, so they make lush neighbors to the summer squash at the other end of the yard.

In the Spring I planted a new salvia, called Hot Lips, if I remember right. Each little flower is a half-inch across. 

Do they make you think of a kiss? Well, then, I send them to you as a greeting on this summer’s day.

 
 

The Balm of Home

food and cooking, home, my garden,

The mister and I have been camping and hiking and wearing ourselves out in the mountains, and I do plan to post detailed travelogues pretty soon. In the meantime I am my usual post-travel self, however that may be described; I’m too tired to try right now.

 

 

 

It was a blessed day today, with time to give a drink to the flowers, wash sheets and bake a pie. The green beans are coming on — I think I’ll pick a few tomorrow. The begonia is brightening a space several yards in diameter, and the ancho peppers look like small trees.

Even I am surprised at how soothed I am just to be in My Place.

Gardeners and Bells

my garden, poetry, reality, , ,
I prefer to write about beautiful things, so I don’t want to tell about the mess I made this evening of staking a tomato plant about two months too late. It is a robust Juliet cherry with branches 2-3 feet long that had started to send down roots where they were sprawled on the damp ground. I gathered up the legginess as best I could with gardener’s tape, around three splintery stakes. In spite of the chaotic result, I expect there will be fruit, thanks to the rain and sunshine that falls on the gardens of the just and the unjust, the diligent and the lazy.
Beautiful tomatoes from the past

A few days ago I ran across Leonard Cohen’s verse (below) that has been singing itself in my head ever since, making me notice many ways that our earthly lives fall short of the ideal, often in more significant places than the garden. We fail to do our best, others fail to love us, the banks and the corporations do us wrong — we populate this list day by day.

It’s an aspect of reality that can only be denied at the risk of one’s sanity. The humbling we experience when contemplating the “streets filled with broken hearts” and other destruction that Bob Dylan sings about in “Everything is Broken” is the best start toward mental and spiritual health.

 Then the Gardener, the Physician of our souls, the Light of the World, can do His work, and give us grace to keep working at repairing the bad jobs we’ve made. He also gives us Himself as the rejoicing of our hearts — and nothing is more Real than that.
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
    –from “Anthem” by Leonard Cohen

Brilliant but not blotchy helianthemum.

my garden, other gardens
My heart was set on a Chocolate Blotch — it is a variety of the little shrub helianthemum. After browsing nurseries both local and online, I became 95% sure that the one I have growing at church is that type, not that the name made any sense.

These plants are a genus in in the family Cistaceae, as is the cistus, which I’m also fond of. They are both called rockrose, but that confuses me, so this is one case where I think I’ll stick to the botanical name.


Whatever its name, I couldn’t find one to buy. And I love the way it trails over the side of the half barrel as in this photo where it is way in the background behind the poppies and everything. I wanted one for my garden at home, but my hope dwindled and I cultivated contentment instead of a shrub.

Then when I was fussing over these church plantings recently I noticed that the plant with deep orange flowers was trying to take over the container, not just spreading its branches but sending down lots of new roots, so why not cut it in half and take some home?

I did that just before I got sick, and the clumps of roots sat in a bucket on my patio for several days. I knew they had to be planted before I went to Monterey, so on the eve of my departure I went crazy with pots and trowels and Supersoil.

There are two colors of flowers that cause pain to my sensibilities when they are planted near each other: orangey-red and fuschia. My backyard rhododendron is fuschia, but it is in a corner with only blues close by.

The deep clear orange of this shrub seemed to me just what I need to bring balance to the many places crowded with blues and lavenders, and it won’t confuse things by adding any red tones.

My color ideas are no doubt strange; my husband says that all the colors in nature go together. But one year I had some red-orange bulbs blooming next to the yellow climbing rose and when I looked out the window it seemed to me that the two plants were spoiling each other’s beauty. So I dug up the bulbs.

I trimmed the divisions of my helianthemum prize back quite a bit, and planted one clump in the middle of the lambs’ ears and pincushion flowers, next to the lavender and the oregano. Four Oriental lilies have now pushed up in the back of that bed, where it seemed a few weeks ago only one would grow; I had thought that I planted my big bag of bulbs from Costco so late that most of them must have rotted.

I wasn’t in too big a rush that I missed noticing that nasturtiums are coming up here and there, glory to God! Last year I tried various colors of many varieties, plants and seeds, hoping that some would naturalize.

As I was writing this post I looked some more for photos of “my” rockrose, and this time I found many more and helpful photos, broadening the possibilities to include Welsh Flame and Henfield Brilliant. A good photo explains why the name C. Blotch, and makes it clear that I don’t have that. After clicking back and forth among pictures and sites, I’m now 95% sure I have a Henfield Brilliant. This garden detective work is my kind of fun!