Sunday Garden Report

Through some unfortunate set of circumstances I've yet to completely comprehend, I found myself awake at 6:30 this morning. Not a bad thing, per se, unless you've stayed up until 2:00 a.m. watching the first Michael Keaton Batman movie on television.

But that's okay, there was coffee, and I had a project I wanted to tend to before heading off to a day of fun in Happy Function Land. You see, the mails brought a treat this week, from my friend The Rhet. She'd been to an iris swap recently and, aware of the minimal show of irises currently available at the Midnight Garden, put together a small sampler box of roots from her Baltimore garden and sent them winging in my direction.

They'd arrived in fine shape, if a little parched (it was a hot week to travel in a box, after all). To prevent any nasty Maryland buggies from gaining a beachhead here in Massachusetts, I set them up for an overnight soak in water, with just a capful of bleach.

This morning, they were ready to be planted and so after that all-important first cup of coffee, out we went to the border to find suitable homes for each of the new additions.

Who knows? Perhaps numbered in this bunch will be my first scented iris, or maybe one of those new-fangled re-bloomers for the 2009 season! Already I'm giddy with anticipation...

I'm especially fond of the Rhet's unconventional plant tags. I'm also quite fond of her unique handwriting, which I've known for more of my life than not at this point...but I also simply enjoy the economy of it all.

After all, once the roots are planted, the leaves should be cut right down (and were...by the way, if you've not already done so with your irises, now's a fine time of year for that...it'll tidy them up and you'll have new green leaves by August...) to push that energy down into the roots. No doubt in a week or two, new leaves will form to gather solar energy for next spring's show.

In the meantime, I have some possibilities to drool over. I love the one that says "Probably Purple", but the Polish Princess with gold, yellow and lavendar sounds pretty delightful, too! Thank you, my dear!!


These happy golden marigolds echoed the color of the cloud-obscured sun this morning, as the temperature was already climbing toward the 80s in the early hours. Humidity never really abated in the night, as our tropical wave continues.





This purple hydrangea is still a bit overgrown, but certainly flowering nicely now that I've freed it from the bonds of the rampaging bindweed.





I know I've shown off these pretty portulaca before, but just look at it. What a spectacularly perfect little flower, how could you not love it?


Of course, if I get enough protests from you who are sick to death of them (yah, it's a challenge...you wanna take me and the Nicodemon on, do you? Heh heh...), I'll stop showing them off. Maybe.



More of the bachelor's buttons continue to reveal themselves each morning. What's better than a flower you grew from seed?

There are more than a few of these delicious blue guys, but some of the other colors continue to reveal themselves, like this bright rosy pink version.

Sorry the pic is a little on the crappy side, but with the tropical humidity we are also seeing a lot of gusty winds (filed under Y for "yay, a breeze!"), which make flower photography a special challenge.

Meanwhile, in another part of the garden, another variety of sunflower has joined in the great chorus of July. Purty, ain't it?
Last evening, it was the Turkeys. Tonight, while Emily and I were on our walk around the block, we crossed paths with a family of gray ducks. Again, a momma with six young ones, no longer babies, but still not quite the size of their parent. They herded together at the sight of us and waddled off through the hedge of someone's yard.

I didn't have my camera with me. I think you'll understand that wrangling eighty pounds of Herself as well as managing bags of poo is really quite enough, without having to juggle pricey electronic equipment, too. I went back with the camera when our walk was through, but they were gone.

On an unrelated note, a few of you have encouraged me to be kind and treat myself as I travel this path away from the Cigarettes (day three went well, thanks!) and I wanted to let you know about one of those treats. I've recently discovered the Green Machine, one of the juice smoothies from the folks at www.nakedjuice.com at one of our local convenience stores.

At $2.99 a bottle, it's not cheap, but it's still half what I was spending on a pack of cigarettes and so much tastier. As an added bonus, it's got spirulina, which for some reason I just love. It makes me feel all good inside. Plus, it's green!

Here's the windblown garden as I returned from my half-hearted search for the ducks. It's looking a bit overgrown just now, since the edging needs to be done, the grass is ready for mowing and plenty of the allyssum are ready for deadheading. But the dianthus are beginning a second flush of blooming and with the bachelor buttons coming on strong and the cleome taking center stage, it's still quite a lot of fun.
In the foreground (at the base of the closest sunflower stalk) is a nearly invisible blue-green cloud of thistle foliage, which is simply covered with flower buds that'll be opening into little purply-pink blossoms sometime this week, too.

That Magical Light

There is much written about the quality of light here on Cape Cod. Because we are surrounded on three sides by water, there's an extra reflected light that plays across everything. This is particularly evident in Provincetown, where the water is so close on every side.

It was this light, after all, that inspired the modern impressionist painting movement that took place in PTown in the early days of the last century, which in turn was one of several factors that transformed that fishing village at the very tip of the Cape into an artist colony.

Every now and then, I come across a bit of this magical light and it seems to transform every image I capture with the camera into something almost unreal, too beautiful.

My photographs end up looking more like paintings than more realistic depictions of the world around me. It's pretty amazing.

Today was one of those days, morning and evening, when the light was just incredible and I was a little dumbstruck at some of what I found on my camera's memory card at day's end. You get the best effect when you enlarge the images, so go ahead and click 'em.

By the very nature of it being June, there's tons going on out there in the garden. Although that blasted "witch grass" is staging a massive comeback almost everywhere, there are also plenty of other seedlings taking hold.

Every morning I spend at least a few minutes carefully teasing at some of the grass, trying to get rid of it. It will clearly be an ongoing project.

Meanwhile, here's one of a number of bachelor button seedlings I am seeing here and there. I've tried to be extra careful about weeding out the grass too fervently, as these guys are a little thin and strappy in their early stages, and I've been known to accidentally weed all but a few out in early June purges in past years.

In the past two days, I've noticed that some of the snapdragon plants have doubled in height, surpassing that lower fence rail as flower buds appear at the top of their stalks. It will be interesting to see which color is going to bloom first. I suspect it will be the yellow ones, but the next few days will tell.

In addition to a few more milkweed seedlings, I've also spotted a few rosettes of evening primrose foliage. It's sort of weedy around these parts, growing wild here and there. Last year I had some good luck with chopping it back fairly hard to get it to branch out more, so I'll try to remember to do that sometime in the next day or so. I've noted the oregano plants are ready for that, too.

On the chosen fence posts, the morning glory seedlings are doing quite nicely, making some nice headway in their climb toward the sun.

In the bedroom window are a last six or seven of them, started later for a second wave of bloom as the summer progresses, which are ready to be planted out adjacent to these.

On the side of Mount Dump-It (that lumpy little hill in our backyard that houses the septic system), several massive clumps of tickseed are thriving, their golden flowers glowing in the bright morning sunshine, bobbing easily on the gentle breeze.

In another part of the forest, more of these red roses open every day. I'm just thrilled with the way this rose bush has responded to being trained along the fence. I've mostly read about working/playing with roses and rarely had the conditions to really see what they could do, which makes this season kind of exciting to me.

Also, between these and those ubiquitous little white roses, the air is so strongly perfumed this week that it almost makes me a bit giddy to walk out into the front yard, morning or night. Isn't it fascinating how this product of attracting pollinators in turn makes us all a little gah-gah, too?

The season of love, indeed.

If you enlarge that shot above, you can see in the background some big shiny leaves just above the top rail of the fence...which would be the sunflower seedlings. They are really too big now to be reasonably considered "seedlings", but they are still my babies.

Monday morning I took a photo of them to show you they had almost come level with that top cross rail...but by the time I got home in the evening, the photo had become obsolete, as the seedlings were by then several inches taller than the rail of the fence!

Don't get too close!


Not far from that rose, in the shade of a clump of shasta daisies creeps this itty-bitty (it's maybe a quarter of an inch in diameter, if that)orange flower.

Somewhere, I have an old wildflower guide book from the 1950's, which has been pretty helpful for me in the past, in identifying the tiny blossoms like these, which are often a little too obscure for other more general plant guides.

However, that old book is MIA just now, likely displaced during last winter's move and not yet resurfaced. I'll have to dig around, though--I'm pretty sure it'd help me name this one.

On one of the five mounds which are home to the Three Sisters garden project, the first bean seedling burst out of the ground this morning. I noticed by flashlight this evening that several others came out during the course of the day.

It makes me happy to see this coming along so nicely. Once a few more of those have emerged, it'll be time to add the squash seeds...and then the game will be truly afoot.

It bums me out just a little that the peonies won't be blooming this year, due - I believe - to the trauma of moving. They would be making their own heady additions to the perfumey air this week, if they were, their hot pink flowerheads lolling and bobbing on the breezes.


Another aspect of June has things a little busier at work, but fortunately, I'm still able to steal the odd moment here or there to wander into the garden and catch a few images of the magic happening there.

The purple irises have never been more prolific than they are this spring, it seems. Actually, I'm hearing from a variety of people that irises are having a particularly stellar spring. But still, their time will have fled before too long, as they clear the stage for other flowers to have their moment in the spotlight and I couldn't let that go without another look at them.

Here you might note some of that rose grandiflora (I think that's the name of those little white guys I keep talking about, though it could be multiflora), and this particular plant is a good indicator of how vigorous they are.

I've worked at the restaurant for seven years now. When I started there, this particular plant--now better than two feet high, equally wide and smothered in blossoms--didn't exist there, but has arrived via the birds and taken hold rather quickly. Kept in check, it's not a bad addition to the garden.

Did I mention the fragrance?? I do hope you are all seeking out some nicely scented roses to thrust your noses into this week.

It's also fun to realize how much this spirea has grown in that time. I'm wondering if it is the same variety as the ones I have along the fence at home, which are not quite blooming yet.

Those, if memory serves, are a little darker than these, though they have also grown in some high shade areas in recent years. Their colors might've been a little richer for that. We'll see how they do in this year's full sun.

I transplanted these wild daisy plants at the base of the pond wall about four years ago, and they have filled in the whole area quite nicely.

This is their first wave of flowers, but with deadheading, they'll continue to blossom right through the summer. Who could ask for anything more?

I took a longer route home this evening, allowing me to pass by the overlook of Wychmere Harbor, not far from our house. I knew the full moon was low in the sky and was hoping for some decent reflection to play with from the water. I hadn't thought to be lucky enough to find things so nicely lit.

There was also some sort of celebration going on down by the water, with the happy, lively sounds of people and their merriment echoing brightly across the harbor in the dark.

The golden power of the sun, the heart-tripping scent of roses and the goony glow of the moon, could there be anything more magical?

Clouds Across the Moon

Last night we hosted a barbecue. Not a huge affair, nothing to trouble the neighbors with, just a chance to spend some time with some friends outside the workplace, celebrate the arrival of the warmer months and have some laughs.

There was good food, good drink, good company, good tunes, hammock swinging, bird poo and hot tubbing. Pretty much everything a proper party requires.


There was even a garden tour or two, with guest appear ances by the nibblers, who were in stealth mode with all the parked cars for cover.


My morning watering routine always includes emptying the cruddy water out of the bird bath, then rinsing and refilling it so it's always fresh for the birdies. So I always take the cap off, and so I was surprised this morning to discover this elaborate network of spiderwebs inside the flower pot-base of the birdbath, where none existed yesterday.

I thought the pattern was pretty cool, especially the way it turns invisible close to the edges and seems to just hang in midair like some anti-gravity science project. I wonder what sort of bugs you catch in a dark, dank space like that.

It turned cool last evening as the party was winding down. In fact, we even caught the scent of skunk drifting on the air. Fan of classic cartoons that I am, I'd love to be able to say that the distinctive scent drifted through the gathered guests and the cry of "Le Pew!" went up, causing a cloud-raising stampede for the cars. But really, the party was just about put to bed by the time the skunk seemed to pass by.

A nice surprise this weekend. You may recall that way back on April 1st, when I planted those first sunflower seeds, I also potted up a ginger root that my Granny sent me. After two long months, it has finally burst through the surface of the potting soil in this big pointy nub.

Before long, there'll be several stalks, each one about two feet high and as the summer goes on, there'll be purple flowers. I look forward to sharing them with you.

Always one to take a cue from the Universe, I poured myself another cup of coffee after the watering was through and called Granny in Florida for a nice phone visit. She sounded great and we had a terrific chat, mostly about gardens but also about life in general. She turned 89 a few weeks ago and this spring also decided to give up driving...which she hadn't been doing for all that long.

With the price of gas being what it is, she doesn't really miss the expense of driving, but definitely some of the convenience. I counseled caution when she talked about crossing four lanes of traffic to go grocery shopping. We've encouraged her to take cabs with the money she saves not having a car, but she's always been an independent thinker and does what she likes.


This afternoon at work, I heard a lot of bird activity outside and discovered this red tailed hawk perched up on the power pole. He was taking a break from deviling a few crows' nests in the area, causing the black birds to start mobbing this bigger bird when it resumed soaring through the air.

I was able to hear that distinctive cry a few times...what a sound! You can hear it here, if you like.

The rose bush which was here on the property before I built a garden around it is now covered with buds, many of them about to unfurl. I wonder if it will be scented.


Did you know that June 14th is commemorated as Flag Day here in the U.S.? It's the anniversary of the date that the Stars and Stripes was adopted as the flag of the country in 1777.

The holiday was established nationally by Woodrow Wilson in 1916, but made official by Harry Truman through an Act of Congress in 1949.

I'm sure you know that seamstress Betsy Ross designed the first version of the stars and bars in 1776, inspired by the misadventures of Bugs Bunny and a garden rake.

Our temperatures remained on the cool side today, in the sixties and clouds are drifting across the moon this evening. In fact, the forecast suggests that the week ahead may be a rainy one. It'll be a busy week at work, so this is not bad news to me.

However, some troubling news did come this evening, in a phone call from Mom.

After our conver sation this morning, Granny was heading over to the Publix, and while crossing the afore-mentioned four lanes of traffic, was hit by a car.

She's in the hospital this evening in Gainesville, and we're all feeling a bit helpless here in the north and awaiting word on how she's doing.

If prayers are in your kitbag, I ask you to share one for her good health and speedy recovery. If not prayers, then any good thoughts you can spare in her direction would be most welcomed and appreciated.

Although I'm worried as hell, I expect she will be just fine--after all, this morning she told me she was planning to beat her elder sister's lifespan of 90, making her the longest-lived on that side of the family.

Yellow

Thy Neighbor's Garden

Mornings have become so entertaining here on Not Wisteria Lane, now that the irrepressible Bosun has arrived in the neighborhood. There's always at least one sighting, when she joins her parents to walk their little girl out to the school bus.

It's the best time of day for a good solid watering (it's now officially a week since our last fall of rain) of the garden, so I get to see and participate in all the fun.

At the risk of turning this into a blog about dogs, I'll related the latest. Today, on the way back from the bus stop, there was a convergence of neighbors and Bosun decided to try engaging Sophie in some rough-housing.

Sophie is really the Grande Dame of the neighbor hood and despite her dimi nutive stature, she wasted no time in laying down the law to this younger, over-enthusiastic new generation.

We all laughed as she gave her sternest "arp arp arp" and chased Bosun right out of her yard.

Out of breath and more than a little surprised, Bo came running back out and cowered behind her parents and me in the street. It's good she's learning the pecking order in the neighborhood and certainly great fun to watch.

When the watering was all taken care of, my camera and I wandered down the street to explore some of the neighbors' gardens, particularly the one with the dark iris I spotted on Em's and my nightly walk.

These pink roses are certainly beautiful, but I was disappointed to discover they have no scent to them. Fortunately, I'd also discovered that our east and west hedges--where the weigela and spirea intermingle--are also home to some of those wild white roses, so the air was already delightfully scented. I told you they were everywhere!!

On the way to the irises, I met another of our neighbors, G. His yard was beautifully gardened by the former owner, and is in a sort of wild, overgrown state these days, but still home to a wonderful assortment of blooms. G admits to not being much of a gardener and also believes that the former owner is more than a little annoyed about what he sees as neglect.

However, the wild state of things there hasn't discouraged these big oriental poppies even a little. Over the course of the spring, I've also spotted an assortment of crocuses, irises, daffodils, hellebores and all manner of other things growing quite happily. Isn't it nice to see a well-established garden doing its own thing, too?

G told me there was, at one point, a band of wild turkeys who wandered into the neighborhood. All the neighbors were keen to keep them around, until they started marauding and attacking people...which probably explains why I haven't seen any sign of them during our brief residence here.

Check these red and yellow columbines--pretty fancy, huh? After a nice visit, it was time to mosey along and I came to that big iris, which turns out not to be purple at all, but in fact a very deep, dark red. And yes, it's true--some irises are scented. This one, to my great surprise, smells of root beer! Amazing!!


I'm not sure if these blue irises are scented or not, as they were located deep in the bed and I didn't want to trample anything. But they sure are wonderful to behold, and look how nicely they play with the royal blue columbines down in the lower right.

When I returned to the home garden, I was thrilled to discover this swallowtail butterfly looping and diving and soaring over and through the sections of the fence. It seemed as happy to see a garden where there'd been none last year. And I took this activity as a hearty endorsement of my efforts.

After fixing a second cup of coffee, I went back out to the garden to do some more weeding and reviewing, carefully pulling out the little bits of grass while trying to identify and avoid the new seedlings which are coming up all over the place.

I also got the pole beans planted at the base of the sprouted corn stalks, Step Two in the making of the Three Sisters Garden. In addition to the butterfly, I also noted a greater assortment of various pollinators visiting the garden today, as well as some of the first bees I have spotted here so far...definitely good news there.

Being the twelfth of June, today was also my half-birthday. That's not something I usually celebrate or even take note of, but as it turned out, today was a real nice day for me. I'll even go so far to say that it was a vast improvement over my actual birthday last December, when I had screwed up my back and was not only hosting Christmas parties at work, but in the process of making the move from Eastham to Harwich.

As it turned out, I had a massage scheduled for the early afternoon, a free one from my pal, British Jane, who's just getting started. It was quite delightful, not only to have a bit of a visit with her, but also to enjoy a little pampering and relaxation. I'm happy to highly recommend her services--if you live locally and need a massage, send me an email and I'll hook you up with her real name and phone number so you can make an appointment!

To carry the relaxation theme afterwards, I felt it necessary to see The Ocean today and so I drove to Nauset Beach in East Orleans. I didn't stay long, as that would've entailed me paying for parking and all that (it's June now, after all, and the government likes to regulate access to the ocean at this part of the Cape, it being the National Seashore and all...), but even just a few moments gazing out at the vastness of the Atlantic was wonderful.

Too soon I was back home and tending to some less glamorous aspects of a day off, such as laundry, dishes, cat box and some window cleaning. But as soon as I could, I made my way back out to the garden, for that fantastic late afternoon light.

I gave the garden another watering, for better picture-taking (the wet soil is darker and photographs better, plus everything glistens a little...) and promptly discovered that my batteries were almost dead, so headed back inside to charge them.

Fortunately, it only takes 15 minutes, but in that time I missed capturing quite a show, naturally. As I stood looking out the front window, I spotted a goldfinch pecking through the dirt near the tomato plant closest to the driveway. It flew over to another tomato, lighting on one of the stakes...and a second, female, goldfinch joined it. Then a third appeared, this one male, and a fourth, another female. Just then a fifth flew across the yard in an up-and-down rollercoaster sort of flight pattern...and a sixth one joined the first four in the garden.

They all took to the garden bed, pecking and rooting through the soil, plucking out little bugs and slugs and worms and seeds and whatever it is they enjoy most. Out in the "lawn", a juvenal cowbird pecked through the grass.

Such fun to see the Garden so full of life. Flowers are wonderful and all, but they are not the whole picture. This time of year, the garden is a full-on community.

Although it was frustrating to have the show end just as I finally heard the battery charger shut off, it was great to be able to enjoy it. And these catbirds showed up for a visit to the birdbath just as I returned with my camera.

I also had noticed, while I was waiting, that the carnations had begun blooming today, and the dappled sun through the trees was focussed perfectly on this first blossom.


Here's some of that wonderful purple allyssum. I've noticed this week that the allyssum plants I bought at the nursery are now beginning to fade from their first flush of blooming, just as the ones from seed are beginning to flower. What good timing.

So, part of my weeding time has also been spent pinching off the fading flowerheads of those early nursery plants, and scattering their seeds further around the beds, in hopes of creating massive drifts of tiny scented flowers by summer's end.


Another exciting discover today--several milkweed seedlings have now appeared here and there throughout the garden.

The butterflies will be even more excited than I, as milkweed is one of those plants critical in the support of the monarch lifecycle. Plus, their flowers are wicked cool and weird.

In the back ground of this pansy photo, the first sweet william flower has emerged. But the colors are only just developing, so I will save a nice close-up as something to look forward to on another day.

All in all, a most lovely unbirthday. I hope you all had nice days, too!