May Day Blues

Last fall, as I dug up the grass to create the garden along the fence, I discovered a few drifts of this plant growing amongst the sod. It looked familiar to me, though I couldn't identify it right off...and so far, I still have sorted that part out. (What's an identity, anyway, right?) I was pretty sure it was the same plant which I'd hosted a little bit of in the Eastham orchard garden, the one that provided the tiny blue flowers...and it appears on that score, at least, I was correct, for look what appeared to welcome the May!!

While I don't know it by name, there was enough of this plant that I was able to rescue four or five good-sized clumps of it, which I replanted in the foreground areas of the new border. I'll do some more research later on (like after I've been treated for what is becoming a rather annoying sinus infection), but in the meantime, if anyone else recognizes these tiny beauties, I would be glad for your thoughts. (I know they are NOT forget-me-nots, though...)

Meanwhile, although we had a frost warning last night/this morning, it was still time to graduate that first class of ten sunflower plants (at bigger than a foot each, it's hard to still think of them as seedlings) who've been growing by leaps and bounds on the window sill. So I cobbed together some little greenhouse types of things with some branches I trimmed to size, and these great plastic bags.

Today, the bags were mostly protection against the winds, which were a little brisk, and threatened to bend my sunflowers right to the ground...but I can also pile dirt around the bottom of the bags for the next time we're warned of cold temperatures. But hopefully, that is nearly done, and these sunflowers will be towering high above the garden before long.


It's hard to believe the grape hyacinths are already fading, their little blossoms shriveling up and turning to seed. They never last quite long enough, I think, which might be why I plant a few more of them every year.

I was sorry to learn today that the blog Cooper's Corridor has closed its doors. The reasons are a little more than I'd like to get into here (you can check out Joe.My.God columns of the last two days for the details). I am very sad to see Coop leaving our blog circle (hopefully temporarily), as I could always count on him to bring a smile, or some bit of inspiration. However, his reasons are understandable, and I wish he and his family all good things!

Friday's Progress

Rain continued this morning, but fortunately tapered off just before noon, and so I was able to get back to work on the new garden border...which is starting to look like one now. It will be fun to have all this done, so I can enjoy the business of deciding where each plant will go, as I plan out how I might like it to look.

Growing amongst the grass beneath the fence was this creeping plant. It looks a little minty, but also seems vaguely familiar. I wonder if its some form of campanula. Anyway...I was able to salvage a few nice clumps of the stuff from the weeds and grasses and have replanted those along the edges of the bed. Even if they don't bloom, the green is nice.

I also discovered an old rose root amongst the plant matter I was sorting out from soil. If not for the tiniest leaves to identify, it would've found the debris pile. But I spotted it and replanted and we'll see how it does.



Here's the sum total of today's accomplishment, which was a good one. I should be able to finish the other end tomorrow morning and maybe have a little time left to work around the lamp post.

Either way, the plants are arriving on Sunday. Everything will work out fine: the universe sent me a sign.

Mystery Bug

Kelly and I spotted this strange insect outside of work this afternoon. She calls it a "dinosaur bug" because she'd seen one before and been surprised by its flight. We really know nothing about it, though, so I've uploaded a copy to BugGuide.net and, as always, will post the answer here.

EDIT: (9/28/07) Well, the opinions are still coming in, but it appears that this is a Western Conifer Seed bug. Despite the name, it has, in recent years, spread across the northern part of the country, including here in the east. So, there it is...a dinosaur bug no more!

Something Wild and Yellow

 

I've been keeping my eye on these plants. I spotted them early in the season, round furry basal leaves growing in a cluster, and have been interested to see what they would turn out to be. This morning, a few of them have burst forth with these flower clusters on two foot stems.

The flowers themselves seem to be quite similar to hawkweed (shown below), but that has a different leaf (tho the same basal arrangment), and the flowers bloom singularly on the stalk. So, back to the species guides to see what I can learn.

 

More Bugs I Don't Know

 

 

Busy bee. 

A Mystery Flower Quietly Blooms.

Here's a picture of our most statuesque (at nearly six feet!) mystery flower. For a while I was thinking this might be Joe Pye weed...but now that the flower's blooming, I'm not at all sure...which is a recurring theme this year! Still, it's an interesting little flowerhead, isn't it? 

New Month, New Mysteries

New month, new mystery plant. 


Mystery Plant #2 for August. 

What A Difference A Week Makes

Tassles on the corn! 


Ah, can't you just hear the sweet strains of Dinah Washington? A convergence of heat, no batteries for the camera and a bit of late July laziness has created a void in the blog this past week...but oh, how the garden has continued to grow...and to teach.

The big thing a garden teaches any gardener is humility. The more you know, it turns out, the less you know. The tiny blue mystery flower is indeed a member of the spiderwort family. While escaping the heat this week, I was thumbing through an old North American flower guide, published in 1950. It tells me that this little fellow is known as Dayflower.

Other lessons abound. The mystery plant transplanted from the meadow months ago when tiny, is now a towering monster that is starting to look like the same guide's drawings for Joe Pye Weed. It's another butterfly favorite, so I have no problem with that.

Mystery Pye? 


The small seedling I've been nurturing for months, thinking it the lone survivor of some helianthus seedlings from the 2004 season has turned out to be a stalk of physostigia (gas plant), which I'd thought to be lost in the last move. Oh yes, and the plant I recently called "ironweed" is NOT that at all...but St. John's wort.

An abandoned pot near the greenhouse shed has overgrown with some kind of weed. In the midst of it, I've discovered a lovely purple impatiens plant (also following us from the last location...but in a pot that had been replanted since then!), as well as a pair of ginger root seedlings...something I'd forgotten was down there at the bottom of that plant.

In the week that's passed, we've had enough rain to make nearly none at all...so the morning's daily water duties were never optional...but the effort has its rewards. Each day the tomatoes beg to be tied up once again, and they are becoming heavy with clusters of green fruit. I enjoyed a tasty handful of fresh picked green beans the other day (not enough to steam for dinner, but a nice pocketful to give me energy in the garden!). I built a new section of fence to hold back some of the "Oregano That Ate Eastham", as it flopped over to crowd one of the tallest tomato plants.

Butterfly weed is blooming nearly everywhere. So far it brings mostly bees and a few large wasps, but I saw a monarch butterfly fluttering across the surface of the pond yesterday (as I went peeking for the recently spotted family of baby ducks). The cosmos is coming into its own...including those from scattered seed (some in typically unlikely places). There's a first bud on one of the sunflower stalks.

I've talked to a robin...and been visited by a pair of juvenile chipmunks who were playing around the greenhouse (I think they live underneath...or perhaps under the woodpile nearby). Dragonflies disappear from above the pond surface with a surprise splash, the closest we've come to spotting the banjo-throated bullfrogs who call across the pond each night (it does sound, for the record, more like "Hein-e-ken" than "Bud-weis-er", tho. Maybe that's just me, or perhaps they had a taste from the earlier season's slug traps!). Today, an oriole lunched at one of the hummingbird feeders.

And it turns out, the reason the nursery rhyme sings about "4 and 20 blackbirds baked in a pie" is because when the cook went out to the garden to gather berries for the baking...all that remained was a skyful of sly and sated looking blackbirds! What a surprise for the king indeed...

 

A rudbeckia cultivar recently saved from smothering by oregano.

Anticipation...

Anticipation builds as this transplanted mystery flower from the old garden in the meadow prepares to bloom. It's not at all the shape of flower I was expecting...and the leaves seem to be doing an interesting alligator sort of thing. Can't wait to see what this will look like. 

New Arrivals

This white phlox has come up out of a patch of wild strawberries, only just this weekend revealing itself by its flower. A light, spicy scent from these lovelies, at a height of almost four feet. 

In front of the new phlox have appeared these shorter stalks (about 2 ft), which have now brought forth these teensy little blossoms. It makes me think of catch-fly, but my memory serves a different shaped flower for those; the hot color is the thing in common there, I think. 

Mystery Flower: Another Look

Another shot of that tiny mystery flower. Here a whole stand of the stuff flourishes, with an apparently white flower on the way. Does anyone recognize this plant...?  

(7/15/05: thanks to my pal Lili, for pointing out that this plant is something from the family known as spiderwort. Still haven't completely identified this particular strain...but now I'm on the right track!)

Tiny Blue Mystery Guest

A late arrival to a variety of our gardens...some shade preferred. Better shots as they become available. 

Mystery Guest

Here's another lovely mystery plant. This one looks familiar enough. We have two of them on the western side of the house, unevenly growing shrubs in need of pruning. I'd wondered earlier if they were honeysuckle, but I don't think that's THIS. Anyone...anyone. Bueller...?? 

Mysteries Anticipated

There's a lily come up around the back of the house that has me intrigued. At first it looked like all the others. But it's thicker than any I've seen in a bunch of years, and I can't help but hope that it's something a little different, maybe one of those eight foot tall turk's cap lilies that you just don't see often enough. Will be fun to watch and see how it turns out.
 

Let The May-ing Begin

Ahhhh, May Day. How can it possibly be here so quickly? A weekend wet with rain (3 inches in Wellfleet) draws to a close with a lovely sunset. Work kept me away most of the weekend, but there's been time to look, sometimes by flashlight. It's the most exciting time of year, things have grown, it seems, every time you look.

In bloom today we have pansies and violas, a recently planted english daisy (red), daffodils fading, hyacinths, dutch and grape, primroses, dames rocket, forsythia, myrtle and trillium. And all around them the gardens are thriving, spaces filling in (some on their own, some with some subtle direction from this humble gardener)...the show this year will be grand, to be sure.

It's funny, I look forward to the work, and so I'm longing for Thursday, the one day off I can spare this week. There's something about clearing room for plants to grow, to show off a little, and hopefully do their thing and settle in as happily as possible. And it's while I'm weeding that the chickadees fly down to see what I'm up to.

I get to listen to all of their bird brethen exchanging news about weather and wind, predator alerts and birth announcements as I work. Lining the beds, moving the rocks, identifying seedlings, training vines, planting seeds. Getting down in there, my fingers in the dirt, carefully feeling out the persistant grass roots that grow (thankfully not too thickly) in the proposed new garden. I'm keeping an eye peeled for coyotes, as I listen for chickadee babies in the birdhouse nearby.

And I wonder what color the peonies will be from the stalks that seem to be rising in so many places about the yard. The many roses are a mystery, too. As are the irises, the foxglove, the sweet william and so many other things. What colors will they bring to the landscape? I can but imagine.

I want to train the grape vines that are growing haphazardly in the area. I have at least taking them out of the tree...is it apple, or a late cherry, perhaps? Soon we'll see. I was thinking of an arbor, for the grapes, but perhaps some sturdy bamboo tripods would get the vines up high enough to braid them from opposite sides of the path. We'll see. As always, the garden's a never-ending experiment.

There's a new bird in town...quite the fancy song...hard to see clear, as it's sticking to the upper canopy of the back yard. The steep angle makes it tricky, even with binoculars...but my money's on either a female yellow throated warbler...or maybe a female northern parula warbler. Anyway, it's a darned pretty song. An'twill be a damned pretty month!