Beastly

Mulch underlay or recycling . . . 

Ah, the sound of packing tape ripped from cardboard.  The essential trawl of local take-away options.  Mlle DoodleFace doing zoomies with a gigantic poster tube in her mouth while Mizzy BunnyButt climbs a Seuss-ian stack of clothes.  Mr BigNose sighs from a safe place on the couch.

Yes, it's done.  My worldly possessions, the critturs & family've been shifted to our new locale.

I desperately want to explore the garden.

Alas . . . moving coincided with the Beast from the East.  The new garden hides its secrets under snow, so your first tour will be to see how the travelling plant show survived.







1.  First order of business, feed the birds.

Dinner's ready!

In addition to the feeder, we've sprinkled raisins outside the dog area, & piked some fine apple halves.  Our water dish still hides in some unknown box.  Prayers've been offered for its resurrection.


2.  The Little House

On the day, the movers gave me untold grief about what they referred to as my Little House.  Any advice I offered on how to manhandle it  - something I'd done myself, I might add - they immediately disregarded.  Only an idiot would own such a stupid thing, & they certainly weren't listening to an idiot.

Ill treated composter.

It didn't surprise me to see how unceremoniously they dumped it in the new garden.


3.  A new dearly departed.

Not a pet this time.  For all the movers' dyspepsia with me, initial inspection of the potted forest reveals only one fatality - an Asian pear (in this photo, the horizontal stem).  The tall vertical sticks are bamboo cane to ward off bulb-eating fox.  The short stub of a twig near the label (about the same height as the daffs in the pot), that's what's left of the trunk.

Formerly known as an Asian pear.

This particular tree failed to thrive last year.  On calling the nursery for advice, it was determined that the tree, not myself, was at fault.  A free replacement arrived at my door in November.

Prior to the move, I'd thought the original still had life in it, but seeing how easily it snapped, perhaps a bit optimistic.


4.  Frozen Fatsia

On moving day, our last plant load happened close to midnight.  My thoughts were on duvets rather than dahlias, so it wasn't until the next morning I saw the spider fatsia.

This poor fella needs a fainting couch.

I've wrapped the pot in fleece & cover the plant itself at night.  Hopefully it'll perk up when the weather changes.


5.  Optimistic future.

For all the drawbacks to snow, it does give the garden a surreal, exotic feel.  The ordinary looks familiarly unfamiliar, maybe like we do in fancy dress.

Snow-improved lavender. 

The day before the move, I lifted a failing lavender & stuck it in a pot, rather than leave it behind to some unknown fate.  With the bare stems coated it snow, it suddenly looks like it has its whole future ahead of it.  Which I suppose is what even dying things have.  What else would be ahead except the future?


6.  Lovely in death (or dormancy).

And just look at dear creeping Jenny, herself tucked in for winter, worthy of a Victorian death portrait under her bonnet of snow.

Sleeping Jenny waiting to creep again.

So there it is, a week of delaying gratification.

Apple delights.

Next Saturday, the landlord comes to discuss the garden.  There's rumours of weed barrier & pea gravel, so I'll use the week to fortify my alternate plan.

Until then, there's a community of wonderful gardeners featured at The Propagator whose own Six on Saturday haven't a speck of snow on them.  Run over & find out why.

See you next week!

Falling in Love Again

When it comes to the garden, I've given my heart away too many times to contemplate monogamy.  This week, I look at what's currently active in the garden that also, somewhere along the way, captured my heart.

Earlier in the summer, goldenrod w/queen of the prairie.

1.  Goldenrod is that boy who's friends with your brother, the kid you grow up tripping over & treat like family, but never fancy.  Before I emigrated, goldenrod covered acres of field along my drive to work, putting on its yellow headdress at the height of summer.  A coupla months later, frost would outline every stem & seed head in breath-stopping beauty.

A few years after arriving here in the UK, the sudden sight of that unmistakable yellow gave me a different feeling.  Not acres, but 4 lonely plants in a neighbour's garden.  I'd never seen goldenrod in captivity before.  As it would happen, the very next place I lived had a huge flowerbed taken over by the stuff.  When I left there, this time I took some with me.

My late father called it wild mustard, the familiar name learned from his herbalist mother & said it in his gentle southern accent.  I never met my grandmother, a woman born in the 19th century, but she gives a 4 generational provenance between the mustard family & my own.  Goldenrod & me, we're two old friends reunited in this new & strange place.

Goldenrod as it looks now, w/o a hint of frost yet.

2.  One of my many UK homes had a flagstone area outside the back door.  Some stones had been removed at the far end to allow space for what, to me, was an extraordinarily exotic plant.  Because of its pink blooms, I called it the Gigantic Mauve Thing.  Makes no sense, but that's me in a nutshell.

After learning its Latin name, I called it Roger.  As is my habit, I lifted a few Roger rhyzomes each time I moved.  Then at my last place, taking a little bit of Roger would ruin the balance of his flowerbed, so I left him behind.

Once settled here, I enticed Roger's more handsome brother, Bronze Peacock, into my garden & planted him by the water feature.  Perhaps knowing my heart belonged to his brother, he frittered & frazzled & threatened to die, so I plucked him from the bog & stuck him in with the tomato plants.  No bloom this summer, but knowing I've left all thoughts of his brother behind, perhaps next year Peacock'll do better.

Rodgersia reminds me of nights on the flagstone patio, waiting for the tawny owl to cry, of mornings watching the pheasants feed, of a time when I thought Good was bigger & stronger & more likely to happen than was Evil.

Rodgersia Bronze Peacock - when it's healthy, it is bronze.

3.  One of my moves took me to a smaller garden than before, overshadowed by my neighbour's love of trees (& dislike of pruning).  I confiscated the one small sunny area of lawn & put in a circular rose garden with lavender around the edges.  Starved for room, I plugged the spaces between lavender & roses with the creeping thyme I'd brought from my last place.

By the next summer, the thyme filled the empty gaps in the bed.  I'd sit on the lawn & pull the few struggling weeds from it, brushing up against the lavender as I worked.  Those three scents mingled, the creeping thyme & lavender with an afterthought of rose, it made me drunk with pleasure.  I'd often lay down in the grass next to my rose bed & breathe breathe breathe them all in.

Smell is as important as colour in my garden.  The trio of rose, lavender & creeping thyme is one I repeat over & over in every place I've lived since.  When I weed each of those subsequent beds, I remember that POW of the first time I fell in love with that smell.

Red lavender as it looks now, & white creeping thyme underneath.

4.  I used to live near Gertrude Bell's family home, Rounton Grange.  The house is long gone, but the area of the kitchen garden has been taken over by Dark Star Plants, a nursery that specialises in plants with dark foliage.

On one of my visits there, the seller said that they were prohibited from propagating a certain plant for 30 years so that the folk who developed it could make money first.  In my memory, that plant was this little black mondo.  We bought three of them.

Some time later, a friend came over to get plant ideas from my garden.  Based on what she said her design would be, I thought little black mondo would be a good choice.  While leading her over to check it out, I told her about how it wouldn't propagate so unfortunately, I couldn't give her any plants.  Yet there mondo grew with 5 babies sprouting out all around it.  That's the first time a plant ever called me a liar.  At least, to my face.  And yes, my friend got some of the babies.

On that day, little black mondo exposed the frailty of my memory, but also the delightful fictions it writes.  When I see mondo, I think of my friend, a remarkable adventurer.  I think about Gerturde Bell, who wouldn't've had the patience for me, but whom I admire nevertheless.  And I think of how rules & regulations can't stop life from being itself.

Ophiopogon planiscapus 'Niger' - Black mondo.

5.  Everyone should have one outlaw romance.  Mine actually grows in the empty lot next door.

From what I can see through the upstairs window (not that I'm snooping), the lot used to be an Edwardian garden, now gone to the foxes.  In addition to roses & fruit trees, it has several climbers scrambling the wall between the properties, attempting murder by strangulation of my potted shrubs & trees.  All summer, I waged merciless war against those climbers until the leaves turned colour & the Virginia creeper turned my head.

Its beautiful crimson calms me.  I have reckless thoughts of taking cuttings, of growing my own dashing creeper.  Then my potted shrubs & trees stage an intervention, after which I make some focaccia, open a bottle of wine & revisit a box set of Last Tango in Halifax.

My outlaw romance.

6.  Once, while foraging for dead plants to use as Halloween decorations, I found a hunchbacked shrub growing under some mature trees at the edge of a field.  Its seedpods looked like earrings made from dried blood drops, perfect for our Halloween party.

When none of my gardening friends could identify it, I assumed birds had facilitated its escape from a nearby Edwardian greenhouse ruin.  I tried growing the seeds, but no joy.  It took years to identify it as Himalayan honeysuckle.

That long ago Halloween party celebrated a short film collaboration by several of my women friends.  The various Himalayan honeysuckle incarnations since that first discovery, they've all connected me with the excitement of group creation, the shared experience of women, humanity's bloodchain spark in all of us.

Seedpods from Himalayan honeysuckle.

That brings us to the end of my garden's #SixonSaturday.  Be sure to drop by the instigator of this hashtag, for his Six.  In the comments to his blog, you'll find links to other gardeners' collections of Sixes.

There but for the Grace of God . . . street view of the Creep.