If you are looking for erudite botanical advice and explanations and technique and authority– you might be lost. But welcome anyway. You me and the weeds. It’ll be fun, you’ll see.
I have a bunch of gardens. These are places I’ve dug up and planted with more or less whatever I like. Sometimes this works and sometimes it looks pretty bad. I haven’t signed onto any garden tours yet, but part of that is because my house and gardens are in the middle of nowhere. Also because of a few other things I don’t want to talk about. But I keep digging and nurturing the plants I haven’t actually killed yet.
All this takes place in a very green part of Oregon called the Willamette Valley. We have a saying to help you with that: it’s Wil-LA-mette dammit. And if Iowa gets cold in winter (and it did when I was there once knocking on doors to elect Howard Dean) then western Oregon does indeed get rain. But there are also long and totally awesome springs, and often sunny, brisk and colorful autumns and some terribly dry, intermittently hot late July-Septembers in between. A lot like England I am told, but I was only there for a week one summer and it rained. (This paragraph aside, I pretty much never travel.)
So we, that’s Mr. O. and myself and Max the terrier, we have this odd couple of acres surrounded on one side by a field of mercenary Christmas trees, the kind that are sheared with machetes so you have to glue the ornaments onto their surfaces. (I don’t really have a problem with the Christmas tree farm now that they hand-spray the herbicides to kill the grass instead of using helicopters in the wind on bad days like the year they defoliated a few things such as all of the raspberry vines and maple trees and roses at my house.)
The other three sides of our land is surrounded by sheep pasture. This means we have to get out of the car and open and close two gates to actually leave (or return) home, which does pretty much discourage solicitors. After you get out the gates the lane wanders through still other people’s rural land and after most of a mile of gravel finally reaches the paved highway. (I pretty much never ever travel.)
The way out, and in. Looking out.
Women Who Run With Delphiniums 