The hydrangea, the owl, the dead grass

Early morning, chilly but clear, and a woman wanders among the amazing plant displays at the Portland Nursery. She is alert with coffee AND in possession of a birthday gift-certificate.

Another clematis? I think not. No room in the clematis inn.  Something for the shady fence though. Climbing hydrangea Moonlight? Cell phone search finds a post from Carolyn’s Shade Garden. Carolyn totally recommends this vine. Deal done.

I love it.

I planted it here, with lots of fence in both directions for coming seasons, shady sun one side and shady shade on the other.

But wait, there’s more–

A sudden deep subconscious undefined need demands purchase of a concrete owl. (No, I do NOT know why.)  The sweet nursery employee with a British accent cheerfully loads up the very heavy owl, along with what I now think of as Carolyn’s vine.  And except for the owl kind of sliding around in the Insight’s hatchback during sharp corners (dog being also in the back, it made him a little nervous) we got home okay and didn’t get arrested or anything, having just updated the car license stickers after a police warning about the December expiration.  (Time flies.)

Owl in his new habitat:

I know he looks a little stressed–the sweet man at the nursery suggested Prozac which I guess is what they use professionally with anxious statuary in general but I may try sprinkling on a little rum instead since that’s what I have in the medicine cabinet.

But back to the gardens.

So Alistair in Scotland once recommended the Burkwood viburnum, which I bought and almost killed through dehydration and then moved, and this year it bloomed.

The flowers are the softest pink opening fully to white and the scent is unique but wonderful like lilacs with an aftertaste of marshmallow and plums. I love it –thanks Alistair!– (I didn’t really eat it).

In case you are wondering how my pine tree bed expansion is coming along I will report that I have done nothing.

Moving on to the vegetable garden, it came to my attention that my VGBP (Vegetable Garden Beautification Project) had fallen prey to evil grasses, death and weeds, a powerful pack of adversaries.

[Oh those arrows. They got too big so I wrote on them.]

Immediately if not sooner I put on my Super Garden-Woman cape,  and I put Max’s little Super Garden-Dog cape on him too, and we decided this was a case for cardboard and sawdust, a kind of abbreviated version of lasagna gardening.

First I brought out the loss:  a Ninebark shrub that received too much sun and too little water.  RIP.

Next I shall attempt to delineate my version of the complex lasagna bed process.

Slap down a bunch of flattened cardboard while saying “take that you grassy opportunists” then toss on all the sawdust that’s been accumulating in Mr O’s shop sawdust collector machine…

…which I happen to know will remain orange all summer so then sprinkle a load of Compost Variety Mix (leaves, grass clippings, ashes)…

…which I carefully extracted from what is not just the compost pile but rather the compost district or perhaps the compost county– honestly I cannot even photograph it for you for lack of a wide angle lens plus it’s embarrassing.

Overall this layering process was disturbingly reminiscent of the “ghost tour” of York (England) I attended once, where the guide described a woman who was executed in the street by being flattened under a weighted board. (There is simply no part of life that is guilt-free, so far as I can tell.)

semi-Spring

Sometimes we have cruel (or kind: pick your poet) April showers, and dark quick storms with thunder and lightning and hail. I brought a few cherry branches inside where they have bloomed cheerfully in the kitchen to help me survive the meteorologically difficult moments.

Out in the garden, I don’t know what the winter-grown cabbage plants have been reading but someone has convinced them to abandon normal cabbage behavior in favor of mass seed production, which I suppose is nice for their (apparent) goal of Earth domination (the cabbage apocalpyse) but utterly inadequate when it comes to my spring salads. These mutant cabbage plants (cell phone towers…?) are taller every day and each about to burst into some sort of bloom instead of any sort of cabbage head. (I don’t expect to like the flowers.)

Nice polite lettuces have come to be quite an embarrassment to the cabbages.

Now we move on to a stand of onions known far and wide (from the picket fence clear to the greenhouse) as the Great Onion Forest. It includes three varieties of happy onions who aspire only to become parts of my suppers, growing there in the shadow of the perennial herb bed, which is just beyond (chives, French sorrel, chard, Greek oregano…)

You may observe that the onions were all clipped before the Gardener planted them outside and the reason the Gardener did that is because some onion expert book-writer guy told her to and she just hopes he was right about it even though he’s been wrong before but we are not going to talk about cucumbers right now.

Next, exciting news from the Fate Department, which is where we find this report on the new accidental bean trellis.

You may sense that, once upon a time, this bean trellis had an incarnation as a farm gate…

But that was before Mr. O drove the tractor down the lane to pick up and transport a huge length of a fallen oak tree and the tree snagged the gate as it traveled past and reconfigured it to a perfect 90 degree angle thus morphing it (the gate not the tree) into the free-standing bean trellis you see here. Add to that the fact that I bought bean seeds this year. (There are no coincidences.) (ps: the gate was not in actual use as a gate before it underwent the fortuitous transformation.)

Now. That is quite enough press, or screen, about vegetables so we will move right on to the cute little maidenhair fern clump (adiantum capillus-veneris) which was languishing last year but is smiling in its handmade tufa pot (which if it looks like a mixing bowl is because it was cast in a mixing bowl).

In other news, the fruit trees are all thinking seriously of blossoms but discreetly waiting for just a bit more security, weatherwise. Only the ornamental cherry has wrecklessly, no of course I meant recklessly (with a tip of the bottle to  Kininvie), opened all flowers and I do appreciate its brave forging ahead into heaven knows what sort of next weather but of course there is no fruit at risk here.

The native trilliums are in various stages of upness, this (Trillium ovatum) one getting the prize for earliest blooms.

It is simply the time of year when everything is growing like crazy and I like to wander around the gardens and see which things I planted in the fall on top of which then-dormant spring things so that now there are lots of places with two things growing together, so interesting and kind of like attending a botanical prize fight.

Oh I suppose I will rescue the astilbe from that pushy delphinium–