A Day in Summer

About six months ago, on July 16, 2015, a gardener wandered outside with a camera and took a few photos in no particular order. It was not a significant day. There was nothing noteworthy about the date. It was a very ordinary summer day --- "ordinary" herein having the meaning "spectacular".

Clematis 'Henryii'

Crocosmia 'Lucifer'

Knockout Rose 'Blushing Pink'

'Henryii' clematis up close

A red dahlia grown from seed

A scented daylily

Hot magenta garden phlox 'Nicky'

Nicotiana alata - flowering tobacco

Shasta daisies 'Becky'

The front walk

The other way down the front walk

A yellow dahlia from seed

A copper red daylily

More Crocosmias

An ordinary day in summer. Indeed.

Birch Garden

We didn't get much snow from the big blizzard that crippled the midAtlantic, but we got some, and the ground is covered in white. It looks more like what January should look like here. I've been inside going through old photos, and here are some of the Birch Garden.

I call it the Birch Garden because it is a mixed planting in the middle of three white paper birches that had originally been stranded in an open patch of lawn.

2006

We did not dig out a garden, we simply had some dirt brought in and dumped in a sloping mound on top of the lawn. That was in 2007. Two years later, in 2009, the dirt mound was mostly mulch, dotted with some struggling perennials and tiny shrubs.

2009

But I had a vision, sort of, of what it could be, and over the years that vision has emerged.

Many plants have been lost, others have been moved and taken out. Annuals have been added, new plants put in. Each year the garden is different, but it keeps the sloping shape I had intended, with tall green plants in back and mixed flowering things in front.

2015

Jim calls it the Butterfly Garden because I originally put in things that would attract butterflies.

We had two unusual yellow butterfly bushes ('Honeycomb'), and an agastache plant that drew them in swarms. The butterfly bushes are gone, and the agastache is gone too, and other plants have taken their places, but he still calls it the Butterfly Garden. I call it the Birch Garden. We speak different languages and communicate fitfully on most subjects.

I think I like the Birch Garden best in fall, when Sweetspire iteas in the center turn deep red but the whole effect is a muted, soft one, with all of the plants at their fullest.

Earlier in the season it is more colorful and more chaotic looking as various annuals and perennials bloom. It wants to be a purple garden, and I counter that with red flowering tobacco and a dwarf red rose, and some yellow sundrops that bloom briefly in summer. But left on its own, purple would dominate.

I need a piece of hardscape in the front, where there is a gap at the point in front where the garden is lower. All the billowy small leaved, small flowered plants need something solid among them for contrast. Something visually weighty. What could I put there? Winter is a good time to shop.

This jumble of a garden changes all the time, but here is what was growing in the Birch Garden last year:

Shrub layer

Itea virginica - Sweetspire - anchors the middle
Aronia arbutifolia 'Brillantissima' rising just above the iteas
Acer palmatum 'Orange Dream' at the very back
Two dwarf white pines that you can't even see, they've been overtaken
Abelia grandiflora 'Edward Goucher' also unseen below the chaos, needs to be moved
Buddleia 'Blue Chip', three small dwarf butterfly bushes
Caryopteris 'Worcester's Gold'

Perennials

Baptisia pendula 'Alba' filling up the left side, it's huge
Paeonia 'Blaze' peony
Rose 'Red Drift' - a tidy low dwarf
Salvia 'May Night'
Nepeta faassenii 'Dropmore'
Aquilegia - various columbine cultivars but they all went to purple except 'Black Barlow'
Oenothera - yellow sundrops and pink evening primroses
Aruncus - two kinds of goatsbeard, a large billowy one and a ground cover dwarf one
Pardancanda - candy lilies, self seeding all over now
Digitalis 'Milk Chocolate'
Heuchera mostly 'Sparkling Burgundy' coral bells, but a few other red leaved ones too
Sedum 'Autumn Joy' I took it out and it just came back anyway
Garden Phlox 'Nicky' - hot magenta colored
Nipponanthemum - Montauk daisy
Dianthus - red Sweet William from a wildflower mix, and a dark red one called 'Sooty'

And a big tall self seeded volunteer purple aster

Bulbs

Iris 'Immortality' (white) and "Beverley Sills' (peach)
Scilla - mixed colors but all my woodland hyacinths turned purple
Colchicum - one single pink one that blooms in fall
Ornithogalum - Stars of Bethlehem scattered throughout

Annuals

Nicotiana - I plant the tall sylvestris, and sweet smelling alatas in white and in red
Coreopsis 'Jethro Tull' - I treat coreopsis as an annual, it rarely comes back for me

Good grief, this is all too much now that I see it listed out. And I'm not even listing what has been taken out, like a lot of field coreopsis and Siberian irises and other things that keep popping back up here and there. Of course the bulbs and perennials bloom at different times, but no wonder it all looks so chaotic at times.

Yellow 'Honeycomb' butterfly bush and 'Purple Haze' agastache, seen here in 2011, are both gone now.
They looked not just chaotic, but rangy . . .  but they were beloved by butterflies.

Now that I am reviewing everything planted in this garden, I think 2016 will see some serious editing. And a piece of hardscape for the middle front.

Bathtub Plumbago

Snow coming today -- first of the season.

A spot of winter sunlight caught my eye a few mornings ago. There in the corner a bit of greenery lit up a dark spot in the dining room. It is a pot of plumbago, Cape leadwort.

Years ago on a whim I bought two potted Plumbago auriculata plants that were already in full flower, and placed them in their pots outside in the garden.

They climbed small trellises stuck into the pots and got tall and arching and were covered in the clearest blue phlox-like blooms all summer. I fell in love with these pretty flowering shrubs.

They are not hardy at all here, so each year I have bought new ones and each year I have tried them in different spots -- I had two standing sentinel at the entrance to the gravel garden, and I tried them twining up a twig trellis with orange nasturtiums one year.

I tried growing plumbago in a pot and pinching off the long growth so it would mound into a bushier shrub.

And I tried it in a container with a small tower to climb.

Each year I would put my new little plumbago plants into containers outside in May or sometimes planted into the garden, and then wait. Plumbago won't even think about getting going until very hot weather arrives, so my plants never did much until August. By September they would start to look like something and then succumb when October frosts came.

Finally last fall I decided to bring them inside and see if they would winter over inside the heated house. Instead of buying new each year, I'm trying to save the more mature plants I already have. They'll be toasty in here until June, when I can set out larger, bigger, more mature plants when it gets hot in summer.

So two of them are living in the bathtub this winter, where there is some humidity, afternoon sun comes in the window, and wet soil drains right into the tub when I water the pots.

It makes for a crowded situation when I take a bath, but they don't seem put off when the aging gardener gets in the tub for a splash. Each plant had been cut back to the soil line when I potted them up to bring inside, so I am pleased to see so much green growth shooting up now.

The third plumbago is in the corner of the dining room and only gets that little bit of eastern morning sunshine in winter. It's not as robust looking as the two bathtub plants, but it too is showing some nice growth after having been cut all the way back when it came inside.

I'll try to keep the bathtub plants cut back to form bushier shrubs, and I'll let this one vine and eventually get it to go up a small trellis.

The test will be to see if I can keep them going all winter, and to see if I do have bigger, more flowery plants to put out in summer when it gets good and hot.

Industrial Site / Garden Oasis

Cold and windy, and no snow yet this year as we approach the end of January, but they are predicting quite a snowfall coming up this weekend. Ah, winter.

I've gotten really good at taking garden photos that do not include any shots of the utilities, but occasionally, as in this early spring picture from last year, the electric meters and a/c units are visible, and there is no question they are always visible when sitting in the gravel garden.

I've gotten pretty good at planting around them to minimize their visual impact. Dwarf Alberta spruces are in front of the meters, but don't enclose them completely.

The complexity of plants and their maturing size along the side of the house helps distract, but not hide, the ugly mechanics. For the most part.

I did try to find ways to completely hide the big a/c units, but tall grasses, which did obscure them totally, ended up creating a repair bill when the units weren't getting enough airflow around them. So the grasses came out and the units are no longer hidden.

Pretty alchemillas, Japanese forest grass and flowering low shrubs do the work of distracting the eye as you pass down this walk. It's okay I guess.

On the house wall I have to hide something that looks like the Large Hadron Collider, and it's installed a good seven feet up. That's a lot of vertical height to camouflage, but the Alberta spruces in front of it at least offer dense height if not complete screening.

And the lower end of this power station complex is the ugliest of all, so the ground level needs screening, which the dense Alberta spruces also provide. How on earth is this wiring tangle acceptable, featured on the outside of a house? But all the homes are wired this way.

The obvious solution is some kind of structure to enclose the meters and there are great examples on Pinterest, although they don't look to be seven feet tall.

I thought about something like this, but the cost (these are custom made expensive constructions) and the source (where to find a local woodworker who could even build one of these?) and the maintenance (another outdoor structure to preserve) and the lack of space behind the spruces nixed the idea.

I don't want to take the Alberta spruces out -- they do more than partially obscure the meters, as they offer color and height and greenery along that long flat wall. And there's little room behind them for meter houses bigger than some garden sheds.

And look . . . . from some angles you can't see the utilities at all. Behind that line of Alberta spruces at the top of the driveway is the power plant, but you wouldn't know.

An area I can't camouflage at all is the entrance to our property.  A forbidding purple Norway maple stands sentinel over electrical boxes to welcome anyone up our drive and into our garden.  For years I've wanted to paint Welcome on the biggest box.

Whaddya think? Would the utility company mind?

There is simply no way to disguise these boxes. That corner of the road and drive is not wide enough for large, tall shrubbery, and the plow piles giant snowbanks right there. Perennials would have to be huge, (miscanthus again?) to hide anything, and the snowplow would make a mess of anything there.

Fake fiberglass rock covers are expensive and would only fit the little green box. The bigger one is the size of a small refrigerator and hums all day, and probably shouldn't be enclosed.

I do love turning  the corner into our driveway, coming up the small rise to the paver section at the top where the low stone wall invites you to stop. It's such a short entrance, but particularly in fall the plantings along the drive draw you in and there is a sense of arriving in a special place.

But it all starts at the corner entrance from the road, and that's just ugly. At night the streetlight illuminates the boxes, and only the boxes, as it throws very little light. It really does spotlight them.

Wait, you say. You're the same homeowner gardener who put hulking shiny black solar panels smack on the front of the house?

And you think metal boxes on the corner spotlighted by a streetlamp are kind of ugly?

You're right. The utility boxes are probably the least of my garden's blights. The panels and the electric boxes actually kind of balance each other in a feng shui kind of way, offering blatantly utilitarian hardscape contrasted with greenery and repose.

Welcome to my garden, where industrial vibe meets garden oasis. It's intentional.

Bigger Beds

One of the things I need to remember to do next spring is to dig out a wider area under one of the paper birches. The planting bed under the birch tree has Chinese junipers on one end, fragrant sumac 'Gro-Low' at the other end, and a swath of burned lawn around it on one side.

I never remember that this area needs expanding in spring and early summer. The grass always looks fine for much of the early season, and I forget that when high summer comes it will burn out.

The thirsty birch roots are taking all the water in this patch of lawn, and no matter how much we run the sprinklers, it never helps. I need to remove the sod here, expand the planting bed to incorporate this dry area, and then let the 'Gro-Low' sumac spread out into the newly dug area to fill it.

Rhus aromatica 'Gro-Low' has been a wonderful groundcover plant that fills several areas of my garden. It is tough and tolerates dry conditions, so I have no worries that if I allow it to grow into an area that obviously struggles with enough water, it will still look great.

The best season of all for Rhus aromatica is in fall, when it colors beautifully.

October 30, 2014

I like how two birch trees framing the central garden are anchored by colorful sumac shrubs. In the fall picture above from 2014 the grass was once again green in the trouble spot, so again in 2015 I forgot about doing anything to expand the bed. Then it burned out, predictably, in summer and I remembered.

If I make the planting bed under the right birch tree bigger, I need to do the same with the planting bed under the left tree. The symmetry of the two birch plantings is what I like, and they will frame the center garden even better if I bring them out into the grass, toward each other a little more.
Like this -- the shadows on the lawn show me just where I'll need to dig.

I did spend one afternoon last fall starting the expansion on one side but I can see I need to make this three times bigger to make sure I've removed all the grass over the dry spot. And then I need to start on the other side.

Put it on the list of jobs to do in spring:
                                           Make bigger beds!

An Old Mossy Bench

It's been an odd winter. No snow yet, other than an ice coating for a day that then slid off the roof and made a mess. The local ski area couldn't even make enough snow to open until last weekend, and then it poured rain when they did. Some beautiful sunrises lately, though.

I decided to decorate the potting bench. I don't know why -- it's a work station and it gets dirty and attracts whatever junk a garden uses, so spiffing it up is pointless.

I experimented with putting some tchotchkes on the potting bench, because I had them. Like a small collection of license plates from cars we either used to own or never owned.

The mesh wire across the top of the bench is there to hold hooks for hanging garden tools. But my tools always wound up somewhere else, not on their proper hooks, so I abandoned that organizational bright idea and took all the hooks down.

On the top shelf I put four brass garden ornaments, because I see the top of the bench from inside, now that the desk is right up against that window. Now I look out and see a shy ladybug, a brassy cricket, a sleepy dragonfly and a morose turtle. They are company as I type at the desk.

The bench itself is weathering into an old mossy ark of a thing. When it was brand new in early 2007 the cedar was fresh and bright and the tool hanging system on the mesh backing held promise. Jim built this for me in the basement and then we couldn't figure out how to get it up the stairs and outside, but we managed.

Over the past nine years the wood has weathered and darkened, as cedar does. It has also grown quite a crop of lichens and moss, since the bench is up against the shady north side of the house.

I dig the moss out and transplant it into the garden in small spots where I want some mossy ground cover, and each time I do that, the moss regrows on the bench, as well as in between the pavers below it. I think it is Leucobryum, pincushion moss.

I like the moss, actually, and the lichens and the aged darkening of the bench. But the cedar planks are constantly slimy and slippery and that's not good on my work surface. The north side of the house really keeps this area dark and wet.

Dressing it all up with garden ornaments and license plate displays isn't helping with the slime and mossy decrepitude. But I like the aged look and I am fascinated with how moss grows, and the four little brass creatures just outside my window do make me smile.

Herb of Grace

Last month I read Henry Beston's small book on Herbs and the Earth. It was charming, old fashioned, and he wrote about nature and the garden in beautiful, poetic images.

We got discussing it at my garden group and when I mentioned that one of the herbs he rhapsodizes about, Common Rue, is a plant I'd never even seen, the whole group was amazed. Every one of them told me it's a plant I should have in my garden.

It's ancient; the Romans knew it and grew it. Medieval herbalists did too, and sprigs were sprinkled on people in Catholic masses, giving Rue the beautiful name "herb of grace".  In Shakespearean plays characters plant banks of Rue for weeping queens. Modern gardeners love it for its curious blue foliage and low bushy habit.

So . . .  definitely.

I trust the gardeners in my group, all of them far more experienced than I am, and all of them in love with this plant. I immediately went home and looked online for sources where I could buy Ruta graveolens to plant in my garden next spring.

Yikes. Really?

The foliage is interesting, ferny and dissected. Okay. The flowers are small and yellow. Right. The habit in most images I found made it look a little weedy. Um, fine.

I really value the opinions of the gardeners in my group, and the writings of a famous naturalist like Henry Beston as well, not to mention Shakespeare and the ancients who adored this herb. I must be missing something.

So I researched Common Rue some more.

Eek.

Everyone in the group mentioned that handling the foliage gives some (but not all) people a skin rash, and the online sources all warned "wear gloves". The rash, if you are one of the unfortunates who gets it, is awful and lasts a long time. Sunlight triggers it after touching the leaves.

Rue is also toxic if ingested. Although Mediterranean cultures have used small quantities of the leaves in cooking for centuries, it is actually highly toxic if you ingest more than a little. Another set of warnings from my research: do not eat or taste the leaves.

But I really want to have this beloved herb despite it being weedy looking, rash-causing, and poisonous. I really think I do.

So I did more research and found it is advised to plant Rue where you have problems with animals in the garden because it stinks. The smell of the plant is described as unpleasant to humans, and repellant to cats.

It may be repellant to bugs too. Rue is often planted in front of roses to keep insect pests away.

Now I am giving up.

Common Rue stinks, causes horrible rashes, is toxic, and I can't find a picture that even comes close to Henry Beston's description of a plant "like nothing else in the garden, for it is a dark and somber tone of blue green lightened with a silvering of gray. Mysterious in color and strange of leaf, potent, ancient, and dark, Rue is the herb of magic, the symbol of the earthly unknown . . . " (he goes on).

But it is the recommendations of my garden friends that I struggle with most. All six of them said this is a stunning, fascinating, easy plant for the front of a sunny border or along a walk and it is absolutely something I would love.

And because I so treasure this group and their botanical experience and their consistently good advice, I am going to buy Ruta graveolens, maybe one plant of it, and try it to see what is so beloved about this herb.

If I get a rash though, or get sick to my stomach, or find the thing is too smelly or too weedy . . . . herb of grace or no, friends or not, there will be unholy retribution.

Big Plastic Bag

I get annoyed when trash and papers get snagged in the woods behind our house. A busy road runs behind us at the top of a short hill, and I am forever cleaning up stuff that gets caught in the branches of the roadside trees.

That white plastic bag stuck in the trees in the center of this photo was particularly irksome. It was caught midway up, very noticeable in the barren winter scene, and it was a cold day to go out there and detangle it.

When the bag fluttered in the chilly breeze, it looked odd. Then I realized it was not trash at all, but a big red tailed hawk checking out the back yard.

My photo is terrible. How I wish I had a camera and the quick moves to capture this scene without scaring the hunter off. This hawk was huge, which means it was probably a female. The female Buteo jamaicensis is a third larger than the male, which is typical for hawks in general.

Here's a better, professional photo of a red tailed hawk, found on the internet via Jerry Liguori:

I couldn't get over how big the hawk looked out in our back yard. I think she had fluffed out her feathers in the deep cold, making her look even bigger.

Red tailed hawks are common here and are the best defense against vole populations. The hunting is excellent in our yard. We see more red tailed hawks in winter when northern birds join the resident birds here. In summer we hear the high wild screech of red tails overhead often. It's the sound movies use for raptor calls -- when you hear an eagle on TV, it's usually a red tailed hawk you're hearing.

These hawks normally hunt by soaring overhead in wide circles, and then attacking in a controlled dive with legs outstretched. I didn't expect this hawk to make any catches from her perch in the tree, and when she flew away her wide wing span and sheer size in the air was quite a sight.

That was no roadside plastic bag out there.

I Was Afraid of This

I was sitting at the table having lunch the day after a sleety storm. Boom. Thud. Shudder.

It was the sound of a dull explosion a few blocks away. Again. Another deep boom. It happened several more times and I looked outside, a little alarmed, to see if tanks or military vehicles were passing by lobbing explosives.

This is what I saw.

Chunks of ice had slid off the roof and littered the front walk. I was afraid this would happen.

Our solar panels are on the front of the house, directly over the front door. A thin coating of ice and sleet barely covers the lawn, but adheres in a solid coating to the panels. When it warms just enough, the coating slips off.

The reason the panels are on the front of the house is that the house has a full southern exposure, and gets unobstructed sunshine full on. But it's oddly just angled away a fraction, and the slope is just shallow enough that ice and snow stay up there and don't melt, even when all over town similar solar installations are clear the day after a snowstorm.

After this minimal bit of ice from a minor storm, everyone's panels were clear but ours. The incredible deep booming sound came from ice slipping off those six lowest panels. If the rest loosen there will be more thudding booms. It's hard to believe what a thunderous sound the falling ice makes.

The worst of it is that the icy debris lands on the front walk and needs to be cleared. Ugh. A shovel won't do, it has to be scraped up.

And the very worst of it is that my benighted weeping Japanese maple is right under the front eaves. It got clobbered. At least the dense Alberta spruce in the corner is tucked away out of the path of destruction. Icy landslides would certainly maim that stiff little tree.

Twigs of the Japanese maple, with lacy leaves still attached, were simply sheared off and littered the ground.

It will be interesting to see how the tree looks next spring after this kind of pruning approach. I can live with twigs being shorn -- it's an overly twiggy, branchy tree anyway. But I don't want icefalls to break the trunk in half or lop off whole branches, and it's in serious danger of that happening.

I was afraid of this from the beginning. I knew putting solar panels smack over the front door was not ideal. But it never happened all last winter. We had so much snow last year, but never had ice chunks fall off.

This year we're getting ice slides, at least on this one occasion. The shuddering booms are startling. The debris is troublesome to clean up and tree damage is worrisome. Not to mention the possibility of injuring the UPS guy when he comes up the walk.

And, most annoying of all, I knew this could happen.