Covering the Ground

Until a few years ago, I was one of those crazy kids who enjoyed edging the lawn, the stepping stones, the borders, the mole hills.  What satisfaction, delineating my space!  Then I contracted CFS which keeps me out of the garden for an eternity at a time (okay, for days at a time), so I've had to come up with energy saving hacks.  Here's what one of those ideas - ground cover - is doing this week.

1.  Way back in the spring, I did a test pit in the flower bed of both chamomile and Irish moss.  For those more knowledgeable than myself, you may scratch your head over the chamomile, but it was sold to me as ground cover.  At the beginning of November, this is my chamomile test pit (the brown stuff with a few lingering white flowers). 

Chamomile with cosmos & iris.

Even as it fades, it hits me mid-thigh, so about 24 inches tall.  Its height kept it from entering the ground cover areas of my garden, but I really did love the spread & lightness of the blossoms, so here it stays, waiting for next year.

Chmomile with Mizzy BunnyButt for scale.

2.  The Irish moss did what it said on the tin - grew like a barn on fire, covered itself with lovely, tiny white blooms, then stayed a tightly packed, delicate foliage.  I moved it from the pit to between the stepping stones where it kept most of the weeds at bay.

Irish moss with only a few weeds after weeks of neglect.

3.  Excited that my anti-work idea was, well, working, I scoured the internet for ideas (here's a good site) & filled some other spaces with Leptinella Platt's black brass buttons.  I'd discovered these bad boys too late in the season to see them bloom, but by golly, that didn't matter.  Look at that divine foliage!

Platt's black brass buttons

In a very short time, these beauties were swamped by grass & weeds.  This week, I rescued them & safely potted them up for winter.  I'm thinking that next year, they may live with one of my potted trees.

4.  After moving the brass buttons, I filled the gaps with my old friend, creeping thyme.  My favourite combo for creeping thyme is lavender.  The combined scents during weeding makes me swoon.  Couldn't really plant lavender here unless I wanted hopping, rather than stepping stones.

Purple creeping thyme.

5.  There's a pretty ugly cement path from my back door.  Not only is it ugly, but it's in a shady part of the garden.  Apparently, purple New Zealand bur is shade tolerant, its foliage colour varying according to how much light it gets.  I planted it along the cement path where it proved a fast grower & gave even the creeping buttercup a run for its money.

New Zealand bur smudging the path edge.

However, grass fights a better fight against it.  Even so, both these photos are after weeks of neglect, so not bad at all, in my opinion.

New Zealand bur fighting the grass.

6.  You've been so helpful in identifying the strangers in my garden that, as in previous weeks, my last entry will be one of the Great Unknowns.  This plant has woody stems about 12 - 15 inches tall, had small yellow flowers on it mid-summer that reminded me of miniature Rose of Sharon, & now has these wonderful red seed pods on it.  Its rate of spread would indicate it has a World Dominance gene.

This week's Great Unknown.

Thanks for stopping by again this week.  If you enjoyed my Six on Saturday offerings, drop by The Propogator for his Six & links to other gardeners' Six on Saturday posts.

Six Things Great & Small

Big Nose Dog ready for trick-or-treaters.

Oh my goodness me, it's nearly Halloween!  A day everyone in this house looks forward to, including the dogs.  A garden wouldn't be my garden if there weren't a pumpkin patch in it, but since moving to the UK, the results haven't always been what I'm used to.








Which brings me to my first of the six.  The pumpkin.

1.  This variety was billed as prolific, with fruit the size of footballs.  I'm nothing if not gullible & got several plants.  One lone, tennis-ball-sized midget is the year's full crop.

My jack-o-lanterns will be courtesy Asda this year.

After only 18 years, I need to admit defeat & research growing pumpkins here.

2.  Here's something tiny that I'm not going to complain about.  With the various critturs that run through the garden, it's a gift, finding one of these fellas intact.

Fancy little parasol.

3.  The last of the small guys, the bugle weed always meets black tie standards.

Creeping across the pavement, headed toward the lawn.

4.  Now for the big guys.  I got chard seed as a stocking stuffer last year, not something I knew much about.  

Beautiful foliage.

It grew like wildfire, so we gamely looked up recipes, cooked our hearts out & came to the conclusion we aren't chard eaters.  The neighbours were grateful, however, and I love how it looks, so'll probably plant it again next year.

Stunning colours.

5.  The other large finalist is a thistle that self seeded in the border.  Enticing to gold finches, I tell anyone who looks askance at it, but secretly, I simply love a good thistle.  

Love the flowers.

My phone camera doesn't do the colour justice, the darks & lights in one bloom.  This one's a beaut (although the fuschia behind it might disagree).

6.  The last selection will be one of several Unknowns in the garden, most inherited, though some self seeded.  These lovely, delicate things grow in any pavement crack they can find, have bloomed most of the year and even now, valiantly resist the cold.  Any idea what it could be?

Tubular yellow blooms, leaves similar to a bleeding heart.

Hope you enjoyed visiting the garden.  Our Artistic Director & I look forward to next week's Six On Saturday.

Mizzy Bunny Butt, aka our Artistic Director.

Check out all the other Six On Saturday contributors at The Propagator's site.

The Perfectionist and the Misanthrope

Dodgy book sellers

The Butler loves community activities => pantos in the village hall, safari suppers, pop-up restaurants, carollers, table quizzes, fetes.  Me, I’m a bit of a misanthrope.  Our compromise is that if I participate, I can insult our host when he discusses his wife’s frigidity over dinner. 

Three guesses, what the Butler’s reaction was when the notice came about the open gardens. 

In preparation, our initial focus was on neat and tidy, but about five days before the dread weekend, the penny dropped that perhaps more were expected.  We’ve never really gotten the hang of June, you see.  In spring, there’s all those wonderful bulbs.  In late summer and autumn, we’re a bee and butterfly paradise, but June?  Everything holds its breath and waits. 

I laughingly told the Butler I couldn’t believe that people were paying money to see the expanse of dirt in our flower beds.  Later, I looked up from weeding the gigantic mauve thing and found myself alone.  I went inside, suggested the Butler get off his ass to help if he wanted the resident misanthrope to behave herself when company came.

After that, the Butler would jump to his feet whenever I came into a room and like a kid who hadn’t done his chores, announce he was headed to the garden.  He seldom made it outside before 2pm and seldom stayed.  The same man who loved all these goddam village events and being civil in his Irish accent to UKIP neighbours and putting his body between mine and the guy at Burns Night who said trans people were selfish.

Something weird, this way comes.

Something weird was afoot. 

The Butler hadn’t always gardened.  Presumably his superhero regime of work-by-day, single-parent-by-night had something to do with it.  I remember our first gardening projects – a dubious Butler watching from the sidelines, concerned the neighbours might look over the fence and see me showing my arse.  Figuratively, of course, although on occasion . . . well, that’s a different story altogether. 

Then a brazen hussy of a red dahlia sang its siren song to him and he believed he could make beauty happen.

To be honest, I’d led the poor Butler astray by approaching gardening the way I do manuscript drafts.  I tinker.  I toy.  I try to find the best place for ruffled basil by setting up plastic bottle mini-greenhouses in every flowerbed, only to learn there’s no best place and we really have to consider getting a life-size greenhouse one of these days.  Pansies live between the onions, and corn?  Well it grows in the meadow because it’s a grass.  The rose bed is carpeted with creeping thyme while glads preen themselves among the pumpkin vines and a nasturtium sprouts from the neck of a statue that lost her head.  Nature’s feedback means an oak grows in a pot where a passing squirrel planted it, and the feverfew knocks itself out hiding the oil tank.

Pansies & onions, o my!

People laugh, but I never think their derision is about me.  Ever.  Firstly, it’s a reflection of how rigid their minds are but also, it’s a boundary issue because the Butler and I should have a garden we enjoy, not one that meets the needs of Mr UKIP down the road. 

But with the open weekend days away, I now suspected the Butler’d taken it personally all along.  Worse, that my own laughing sent him off the ledge.  When did this stop being fun for him?  Had it ever been fun for him?

When we talked about it, the Butler reminded me of when he was off work a few years ago because of his back.  He literally convalesced while curled up in a ball, taking copious amounts of painkillers, imprisoned with his own thoughts.  During those hours of not being able to DO, he realised that he took about 80% of his self worth from what he did, and only about 20% from who he was. 

That 80/20 mentality got him through his superhero years of resuscitating patients during the day, cooking meals and ironing uniforms at night, squeezing in patient transports overseas while the kids were at school.  The open garden weekend brought this all back to him, the conviction that to be a good human being, our little space needed to be a horticultural wonderland.

Gigantic mauve thing.

Skipping forward to the weekend itself, when he and I trespassed in our neighbours’ gardens, the Butler was full of curiosity and wonder.  See how they do that!  Oh, I love that species of astrantia.  I’ll distract them, Lora, and you steal the seeds.  He didn’t have a word of criticism for anyone.

So why for himself?  Why do any of us set our own standards so mea culpa mea culpa mea maxima culpa high that we will never be enough, so that whenever the Butler’s asked to bring a covered dish, he brings two and when we go to the barbecue, I ask him later how often I embarrassed him and when either of us stand up to protest that someone has treated us Less-Than, we’re ashamed that we made such a fuss.

I could blame familial/societal indoctrination.  As a trauma therapist, I saw this over and over, that the legal system and the family and society as a whole placated the person acting out, expected the target of insanity to always keep her cool, be reasonable, never respond in a sane way to the bastard.  It boggled the mind.

But I believe we’re more than that, more than the recipients of indoctrination.  If we see that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothing, we certainly can be audible activists about the whole sordid affair but more importantly, we can take care of ourselves in the situation.  We can nurture our lives and seek out what we need, what we want, what we dream about. 

It isn’t easy.  And it isn’t a failing on your part if sometimes you hide in the house and think with dread about visitors tromping through your back garden.  It’s your back garden and it’s precious to you.  So while they’re kicking pots over and tugging branches off the buddleia, remember the lusty red dahlia you brought to life, the beauty you inspired in the space around you.

The weekend brought us lots of visitors.  I listened raptly when anyone felt compelled to say that an oak would outgrow a flowerpot.  No one who asked where I came from, then sang Country Roads got shoved ass first in the pond.  I feigned surprise that the statue had lost her head and couldn’t explain how a nasturtium took root there.  The poor creeping thyme will undoubtedly need therapy, considering the number of people who groped it to see if it were scented.

It’s thyme, people.  An herb.  Ergo . . .

Your own brazen hussy.

But there were people who were kind about annuals hastily planted in the bare spots, folk who appreciated that we’d welcomed them into our back garden – in effect, offered them hospitality.  Others shared their knowledge of pruning or species of holly or pond care.  People interested in the Latin name for the gigantic mauve thing (something only the Butler could answer) traded the Latin name for that yellow stuff we’d always called Vigorous. 

And a few people said as they left us, that we’d created a space of calm and welcome.  That’s what you want in life.  Not perfection, but a place that’s home.