It rained just about three inches in the first three days this week. That total is three times the amount of rain we received in the prior three weeks of September. That seems to be our new normal: Rain that rarely makes it through the leaves to the ground and then a sudden catch-up. Not the best pattern for the garden or the gardener.
The big question is how many days can I go without watering again, given that we're going into October with sun and temps in the high 70s° and low 80s°.
The leaves haven't started seriously turning color and most of my fall flowers are still in the bud stage. But the seedheads are looking great.
Diphylleia cymosa - American Umbrella Leaf. This has huge leaves and clusters of tiny white flowers in spring. But it's the autumn berries that are the glorious surprise.
When I went looking online for the proper name for this plant, I discovered it's been changed and now appears to Podophyllum cymosum. Mine is getting too much afternoon sun due to the loss of a neighbor's tree. I am going to have to move it if I want to keep those giant leaves from getting fried.
Paeonia japonica has small seedheads but I love watching them make their appearance.
Even though they're small they make a bright pop of color in the garden.
Paeonia obvata var. alba is the star of the show with its glossy blue seeds. They are the fertile ones, not the red ones.
For the first time in the many years I've been growing P. obvata var. alba, it sent out a pod that only had infertile seeds.
If it wasn't on the same plant as the more typical seedpod, I might have thought that's just how they typically were. I'm wondering if it did this because this big plant was grown from seeds that appeared in the garden.
Every time I saw a recognizable leaf, I grabbed it and planted it with another baby leaf until I had a big, full-size Peony plant in only a few years.
The "Wild Time Border" is the name I gave to the front garden that borders the street. Initially I imagined it as a more Shakespearian "wild thyme" garden. But it turned out to be a repository for any debris drivers felt like tossing out of their car windows; thus "wild time." (The old Sugar Maple in the center of this photo came down in the fall of 2021 and the Pagoda Dogwood on the left is doing poorly.)
Luckily we knew from the get-go that the city actually owned the first 14 feet of our property; typically the sidewalk area. So we planted things we could easily replace should the day come when the city arrived. That's been pretty much the last nine months since the first crew came to measure and mark the street for the roadwork. This is how the garden looked in late June (below). One of the crews damaged the curb on the left and so that was replaced which meant the bottom strip of garden along there was removed as well.
We're almost at the finish line. At the end of the first week in September, the crew filled in all the spots where equipment had been digging in our front garden with lovely topsoil.
These guys were very pleasant and asked questions about our garden and the ground cover Geraniums.
Next we put in a sign and hot pink flags to alert the next team that we did not want grass planted in our space.
The tall stick with the ribbon marks the access to the water line. We left the marker in place in case they need to know that location again.
Mark immediately got a load of cedar bark and we spread it over the new soil to protect it from washing out in the forecast rain. Luckily the initial rain was more like a mist and we worked right through it spreading the mulch.
We then spent a chunk of the weekend and into the next week replanting the area. Mark had dug out all the Hostas and Hakonechola macra grass in the area where they were going to dig in June. I stuck them in my stash of plastic pots that big plants and shrubs had come in. They've been sitting in the shade since then; getting watered when it rained or I remembered them. They were so huge when we removed them that we broke them into sections in order to make the job manageable. Rather than put them back in the ground as big plants, I spread them around so it will take them a while to fill in again. I didn't want to have to turn around and divide them again next year.
We hadn't quite finished replanting this area when the next stage of the project hit our end of the street.
Multiple loads of gravel were spread and graded to get the roadbed ready for paving this week.
I told Mark I thought we should plant the replacement Geranium macrorrhizum plants on one foot centers. He was shocked and said that meant we would have to put in a good 300 plants. This is where he started and he clearly was planting much closer together than my suggestion.
Since half the front garden is planted in big root Geraniums, I continued the planting at one foot intervals if not closer. Those plants are so easy to pull out and we had so many available that it seemed silly not to fill the space fairly heavily if we had time and energy to do so. It looks like the rest of this month is going to be nice and warm so I may get out there again and fill it in a little more.
What the big root Geraniums look like right after they're pulled out. Easy to see where they get their name.
They were supposed to start paving the street this morning but it's raining. I want the project finished but I am happier to get some needed rain instead.
Too little rain, too many days in the 90°s and now too cool and cloudy. It means a lot of flowers are half fried and many are not yet blooming. But the road work is nearing an end and it's pleasant gardening weather, so I'm not really complaining. However, as a result of the weather, I did decide to just use this recent vase as my Bloom Day offering.
It is filled with sprays of the massive Thalictrum 'Splendide', Agastache 'Blue Fortune', Anemone japonica 'Max Vogel' and the first flower of Tricyrtis 'Togen.'
Also in bloom in the garden are Anemone japonica 'September Charm', Kirengeshoma palmlata, Caryopteris 'Snow Fairy', multiple varieties of Heuchera and Geraniums and swaths of Calmintha nepeta ssp. nepeta.
The more pleasant weather has seen me working in the garden for hours at a time: Watering, weeding, pruning, deadheading and working on beds where I ripped out half the plants last fall and need to get them replanted to my new design before the weather cools down too much.
If you noticed the headline on yesterday's post you will have figured out that I republished my very first blog post to acknowledge my 15th anniversary of blogging. I started my blog after a 30-year career in journalism that ended as my liberal local newspaper left print behind and went digital. They needed to seriously reduce the staff and my job was eliminated as they reconfigured the newsroom.
Most of the people who left were like me: long-time journalists who were nearing retirement. None of us was ready to leave and we definitely were not ready to see our daily paper fade into the ether.
All this is to say that I taught myself to blog to show that this old dog could learn new tricks. If you go back to my early posts you will see that they read like newspaper or even magazine articles; long, literary and covering a variety of subjects. Over the years I've pretty much concentrated on gardening as that has consumed more and more of my mental and physical energy.
I used to check my stats but haven't done it for years. Mark, however, took a look. He said that in fifteen years I've put up 3,005 posts or 200 times per year or every 2 days; however one wants to break it down. I've averaged 222 page views per day or 404 per post. You've commented 16,328 times or 5.5 per post. Not exactly an influencer or as influential as a number of you whose excellent blogs have resulted in books, lectures and more.
These days I'm self-publishing my own garden books but I was on the lecture circuit for years; going back to the early 1990s using slides. I've got a library of over 7,000 slides that are all archivally filed, labeled and cross-referenced and I'm on my 26th volume of hand-written garden journals.
All of which is to say that I'm 76 years old. If I want to read more, draw more, make more books, see friends more — do anything more often — then blogging needs to happen less frequently. How much less?? I'm not sure; but definitely on a more random schedule when I have something to share. I know many of you only at a distance. But I've met a surprising number of you in person because you brought a tour here (Daniel Mount), were visiting Madison (Flingers, Kris in Kansas City) or you live here and read my newspaper columns long before I stared blogging.
I may be ready to blog less but I'm not ready to give up all these blog-related relationships. My e-mail is listed on the blog so we should all be able to keep in touch easily. I will try to see if I can find a system that works for you to sign up for notifications when I post. And you can also do what I do on many blogs I read, just periodically stop by to see what's happening and leave a comment. I will still be here and I know you want to see how our road construction project finally turns out!
Let me close by saying that the idea of blogging less makes me feel panicky. For 45 years the first thing I've done almost every day is sit down at a computer of some kind and start writing essays, op-eds, editorials, lifestyle stories, columns and blog posts. It is going to be a hard habit to break.
The first image is a snap of all of us who left the newsroom in 2008. Some of us, me included (in the blue sweater center left), are automatically smiling when faced with a camera. But you can see on some faces what a very bittersweet moment it was.
The third photo shows Wisconsin native Daniel Mount leading a group of PNW gardeners on a tour of Midwest gardens and prairies.
The fourth photo was taken the day Daniel Mount's tour group visited our garden. Blogging has resulted in me becoming interested in photography and in preserving the history of our garden, in words and pictures.
The last photo shows the crew putting in the new storm sewer in front of our property. They've now started to prepare the roadbed for paving, but that's still a ways away.
For the mind, by nature stagey, welds its frame
Tomb-like around each little world of a day;
We jump from picture to picture and cannot follow
The living curve that is breathlessly the same.
— Louis Mac Niece / 1907-1963
What little world?
EACH LITTLE WORLD that collides with mine:
The world of interiors and exteriors; bibliophiles; china and dishing; Domino theory; feasts and fests; food; flowers and gardens; material possessions and textile obsessions; worldly goods and bads.
Your worlds and mine.
Let the collision begin.
The above quoted text is the 2nd stanza of Louis Mac Neice's poem, "August," as it appears in A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry.