What’s blooming now

The early morning sun strikes through emerging iris blades and sets them aglow.

The Lenten roses, true to their name, are blooming again.

Tiny yellow flowers that look like miniature daffodils to me, are confidently called Buttercups by my grandson Luke, who’s three.

Larger daffodils are beginning to flower.

Pink hyacinths begin to bloom, their fragrance yet to make itself known.

The garden is coming up green.

And periwinkles carpet the woods across the way.

Even after the coldest, harshest, longest winter, spring, at last, comes again.

What’s blooming now that it’s September

It’s been a while since I photographed the flowers in our gardens, but to be honest, it’s been a rough summer on them and they haven’t looked all that picture worthy.

Before

After

Recently Mark and I spent a couple of days digging out the last swatch of Chameleon Ivy tangled with the roots of the Liriope and Daylilies in the Angel Garden. Halleluia. I think we are done with that for the most part.

Knock-out roses

Sedum

In our St. Francis Garden the roses have made a come-back since earlier scorching heat followed by a good drenching, or vice versa, pretty much decimated them. I cut them all back and they came out in full force a week or two ago. They are starting to fade now. And the Sedum are starting to turn color. Otherwise it is pretty lean pickin’s in the garden. We plan to plant some mums again this fall. For some reason we’ve not had good success with them here.

Hosta

Liriope

Out front the Hosta are blooming and so are the Liriope. We have quite a few Liriope around the yard and in the garden.

We added a few Caryopteris to the Angel Garden last year. I’ve always loved this blue misty bush.

Zinnia from seed

The last few daisies

A sea of Marigolds

And finally a single zinnia bloom made it to the light of day. I think the deer have been pruning the plants that sprouted from the seeds I planted in the spring. I like to cut zinnias to bring them inside. Perhaps a bud vase this year. I dead-headed the spent daisies a few weeks ago while we were working on the ivy, but a few are brightening up the garden still. Let’s hear it for the late bloomers. We put marigolds in a bare spot that we are trying to decide what to do with. We may keep that area for annuals. It’s nice to have color you can count on all summer.

I was thinking about abandoning the Woodland Garden. It is just a lot of gardens to take care of. But I walked up there today to see if there were any wildflowers blooming. The Woodland Garden looks so inviting. I startled a robin that was perched on a tree. I may take my camera and camp out on the bench some afternoon to see if any of my winged friends come to call. I think I may keep the garden after all.

And my final bloomer isn’t a flower at all, bu the berries that came after the flowers on the Gray Dogwood trees (or shrubs). I think they deserved mention. Don’t you?

How are the flowers doing where you are?

Adrift — an exercise in association

One thing led to another. I was walking Arthur this morning, allowing my mind to wander, when I noticed someone’s spent irises in a garden. They had not pruned theirs back or cut them down.

I wonder if I should trim my irises down, I thought. I’ve done that in the past. The long slender leaves are browning at the tips, and some are bowing down at the waist.

I know you can, and should, trim them when you transplant them, but I think you have to do that within a certain time frame of the blooming.

I should look it up online.

It would be a lot easier to leave them as they are like this person has done. I have irises in the the front landscaping, the St. Francis garden, and the Angel garden. I should see how the irises I planted last year that J. gave me from his garden are doing.

I wonder if the new owners of Mom and Dad’s house will keep the irises that J. planted beside the patio last fall. Maybe they’ll turn the whole swatch of ground beside the patio into a little garden. Or maybe they’ll cut the irises down or take them out and replant grass.

I should drive by and see.

I could take Arthur and park my car down the street and just stroll around the block. It’s not like I would be stalking anybody; I’m just curious how things look at the house.

I just want to be close to the house again.

I can never go back again.

And once more I am in a small boat in a dark sea, moving away from the homeland that contains the comfort of my parents, the guidance of their wisdom, the memories of happy years, and any future with them.

I am adrift. The spinning of the earth and the pull of moon move me yet further and further away into the dark.

Then I notice a light shining. And I realize I am not alone in my little boat. It is bigger than I thought.  My sisters and brother are here with me. They have a lantern that glows in the night.

The light shines as we move away and the distant shore to which we will never return fades into the darkness behind us.

There is more light now. It’s Mark. He holds a bright light in the front of the boat showing the way, showing a way.

And then I hear laughter.

My boat is quite large, I see, as it fills with the light my children and grandchildren shine who are still here with me.

And we travel on together.

Here’s the thing about deer

If you’ve kept up with my blog at all over the couple of years I’ve been cluttering up the internet with minutia, you already know that I love deer. I have a whole page devoted to my deer posts, I spend a lot of time running for my camera and trying to capture the image of these beautiful creatures in a digital file.

However, if you’ve been keeping up, you also know I love my gardens, and rejoice in the surprises they offer me, like the recent volunteer sunflowers, for example.

June 22 – volunteer sunflowers in my garden

We’ve never been able to grow sunflowers here before because of the critters. I’ve been running outside with my camera and shooting the progress of the sole sunflower bloom so far.

June 22 – morning

June 22 – afternoon

June 24 – morning

Can you guess where this post is headed?

June 25 – morning

This morning I was greeted by sunflower stalks with leafless stems poking out.

June 25 – morning – deer track in garden

And it didn’t take a lot of detective work to figure out who did it.

June 25 – afternoon

I think I should just make this point perfectly clear to the four-legged creatures dining in our garden — you’re not the only ones who like the sunflowers. Leave something for the rest of us.

So far so good. The buds and blooms are still intact.

However, I am not going to be a happy camper if I wake up one morning to find them missing.

June flowers — what’s blooming now

My gardens are colorful and lush this time of year before the summer’s heat starts to wreck its havoc on the leaves and flowers.

The most striking things right now in my St. Francis Garden are the volunteers you see stretching up to the sky in the middle of this shot.

These sunflowers sprouted from seeds distributed by the birds and squirrels who frequented our bird feeder this winter. I suspect we’ve had these volunteers before and unwittingly yanked them as weeds in early spring. This year I allowed the little sprouts to stay out of curiosity.

The buds are forming. I’m very excited about these, especially considering the sunflower seeds I planted have never prevailed due to small creatures eating the seedlings.

These little annuals are visible in the bottom left corner of the above garden photo if you look hard enough. (Clicking on the photo helps). I don’t know their name and forgot to keep the tag.

I have high hopes for this Mandevilla on the trellis. They’re supposed to attract hummingbirds I’m told.

If you look down past the feet of the sunflowers, you might be able to spot these bright little daisies. I used to have three nice bunches of them along the stone steps through the garden, but the bird feeder placement had a detrimental effect on them.

These are the same daisies Mark and I planted at Annie’s grave, where Mom and Dad are now also buried. Since the cemetery is  about an hour and a half north of here they bloom a little later. I will wait about a week or two and then make the trip to see them blooming on the gravesite.

At the bottom of the garden near the woods, these white astilbe are blooming. I think I need to plant more of these for next year. The other shade plants here—sweet woodruff, lilies of the valley, columbine, bleeding hearts—have all had their moment in the spotlight and are now done for this year.

We have a nice little patch of yellow Stella d’Oras blooming at the end of the garden before you get to the back yard.

I love the flowers on this variety, although the lighter cream or vanilla colored stella doras in our Angel Garden are my favorite. They have a lot of buds, but aren’t blooming quite yet.

You probably noticed the spot of color provided by these purple petunias. I added this hanging cone-shaped basket last year.

I’m trying to use more containers, but am not as vigilant as I might need to be to be successful at it. I rely heavily on Mother Nature in my perennial gardens.

I think these are verbena, but don’t hold me to it. You’d think I’d know not only the common names, but also the biological ones for my plants— but, no.

In the background you can see my biggest splash of color this month – the oak leaf hydrangeas.

They bloom all along the upper edge of the Angel Garden. We have our home’s original owners to thank for them.

Our daisies in the Angel Garden are doing quite well. This is the shorter variety like those we have in the St. Francis Garden. We also planted a taller version that haven’t started blooming yet. Initially we had those behind the shorter ones, but we transplanted them this season to the far end of the garden where they won’t be competing with the Stella d’Oras when they all bloom.

We put in a little patch of vanilla marigolds in an open area near the far edge of this garden. Some of them are doing fine, others not so much. You might notice an occasional orange or yellow one interspersed. Someone wasn’t watching the tags on the flowers very closely when we bought them.

Here is our little section of chameleon-ivy-infested liriope. Last year, or the one before, we dug these up and cleared this section of the ivy, but apparently not well enough. We will have to do it again. Most of the rest of the garden we worked on two times. I don’t think we’re going to see the end of the chameleon in our lifetime.

We have a few princess spirea bushes that are blooming now.

I love to run my fingers across the soft flowers. I think we must have had these somewhere when I was young, because it brings back an early memory.

I’ve taken my container-gardening to the deck. We always had the railing boxes, but I’ve added several other pots. I’m starting to appreciate all those articles I used to read about the joys of container gardens. But they do require constancy in their care. You can’t neglect them for weeks at a time and hope they’ll get by with an occasional rain shower.

This one is particularly demanding. I think it is some kind of rudebeka, so I assumed it would be low-maintenance. No so. It wants to be watered every day. And if you forget, it reminds you by completely wilting. At least it has the courtesy to revive in short order once given some water. I have a bad feeling about this one in light of the weekend trips on our calendar.

Container gardens can still present a surprise or two. Could these be more volunteer sunflowers?

What to do?

I planted a lot of red on the deck this year to encourage the hummingbirds to stop by. They don’t seem to be that crazy about the geraniums though.

Here’s another Mandevilla. I have to give it occasional haircuts at the top or it starts looking like it has a mohawk.

You can see why the hummingbirds like these.

Here’s a little gallery of the rest of the pots on our deck.

And finally, the little container I found under our deck and planted with red petunias sits on the table we got from Mom and Dad’s yard, and the glider Dad loved to sit in—just one more reminder for me of those I loved and lost.

I hope your world is filled with color. Send me links to posts about your flowers.

May flowers

I just looked at my last garden update for you about a month ago. The spring bulbs are no longer blooming, but amazingly enough the lenten roses are hanging in there. The irises are in full bloom and the knockout roses have started flowering. The columbine, one of my favorites, are blooming in the shade with the sweet woodruff and lilies of the valley. The bleeding hearts are long gone. The Siberian iris have also bloomed. And the peonies have just started.

I love May.

I took photos on three separate occasions beginning May 10th, but am just now getting around to posting them. I hope you enjoy my May flowers.

May 10th

The columbine bloom at the lowest level of the St. Francis garden in the shade.

A close-up of one variety of columbine.

Another columbine.

Sweet woodruff and lily of the valley

An early iris.

A second variety of iris.

May 17th

Irises. . .

Irises. . .

And more irises.

Don’t mind the little white dog with his tongue hanging out.

May 21

The Lenten Roses are still in bloom.

Perrenial sage is a lovely accent, but it will get scragly and have to be trimmed later.

Knockout roses look good this early.

Siberian iris followed the other iris.

The peonies have started blooming.

Believe it or not, we still have areas of Chameleon Ivy to contend with. Mark experimented with using landscape cloth covered with mulch. He thinks it is working. I think the ivy is just tunneling under it and coming out the other side. This is especially apparent along the steps to the woodland garden. I’ll have to get outside with my ivy extraction equipment.

We do have a few sunflowers coming up. At least I think they’re sunflowers. I think they sprouted from seeds the birds dropped from the feeders. They’re not planted where I might have placed them were I doing the planting. But I always love volunteers.

We’ve planted a few other annuals here and there, and have switched out the pansies in our deck flower boxes for red geraniums. I didn’t include photos of the annuals, even though I love them and think they add wonderful and usually dependable color to the garden, but they are predictable and come from a store (unless you grow them from seeds which I attempted to do yet again to no avail).

The perennials rise from the earth like magic and then bloom. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it.

What’s blooming in my garden and in my galleries

I meant to throw these photos in yesterday, but the post got long, and my neck got tired, and you know how all that goes. So I’m going to try out a gallery or two. I’m not sure if I can put different galleries on the same page.

As you will see, our blooms right now consist of the daffodil and hyacinth bulbs, a few pansies we put on the deck, the Lenten Rose powerhorses that have done remarkably well this year, and the beginnings of the bleeding hearts. Those are one of my favorites. You’ll sweet woodruff near the bleeding hearts, it’s a pretty bright green color and will produce a lovely little white blossom.

This is a tiled-mosaic gallery. I had to delete a few pictures and add others to be somewhat satisfied. I don’t know if there is a way to choose exactly where the photos go, so it was trial and error. I would have liked to exchange the large deck picture with the smaller bleeding heart one. You might miss it altogether. If you find it I do hope you’ll click on it to see the bleeding hearts larger. They’re just coming out. Once you’ve clicked on a photo, you can scroll through them all if you want. And I could have used captions, but just got lazy.

The hyacinths are beautiful, but the best part is their fragrance. Arthur thinks so too.

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This is a slide show I did with just two photos. I was a little slow at the start-up, but I think I’m really going to like the fairly new galleries at WordPress. Question answered. Yes I can put different galleries into the same post. This may not be news to you, but I am in a remedial blogging class over here.

Have you made it out of winter yet and into spring in your neck of the woods?

What a difference two weeks makes and the tale of a tree

My last post about spring was two weeks ago when I was Looking for Signs of Spring.

The tree with the swollen buds outside my kitchen door, is in full bloom. Last year this little tree only had one solitary flower. It’s interesting to note that I photographed and posted about that single bud on March 19th last year. We are nearly a month behind on spring this year. That’s the last time I pay attention to Punxsutawney Phil.

March 30

April 10

April 15

Last year on March 19th, I took a photo of the magical green veil as the leaves in woods begin to unfurl. I called it “an elusive green mist where fairies play.” I’ve been waiting and waiting to see it this year, and the mist has finally arrived. It is rushing forward into full-blown leaves. The trees are trying to make up for lost time.

April 10, 2013

Five days later

Here’s a sad part of the story. Last year from my window view as I sat at my desk, this little tree was blooming brightly across the lane on our stretch of property there.

About a month ago, I was sitting here typing as I often am in the morning, and I heard and then saw about 5 or 6 township workers with chain saws working across the lane clearing things out. This wasn’t completely unexpected because the manager had stopped here last fall to talk to us about cutting down a big dead ash tree up on the hill. We own the majority of the hillside, but the township owns the top where there is a small pioneer cemetery that is overgrown for the most part. But as I sat and watched the workers, I saw a man come up to the little tree that was not yet in bloom but beginning to bud. “I hope he’s not going to cut that down,” I said to myself. And no sooner were the words out of my mouth than the deed was done. Some things just don’t have do-overs.

Mark was not a happy camper. He loves his trees.

As you may be able to see from the above photo, there was a LOT of honeysuckle over there.

The workers managed to decimate about half the dense growth over there before Mark and another neighbor put a halt to it, resulting in a half thick, half bare view across the way. We had them finish the removal of the honeysuckle from our property.

But Mark had them mark the small trees they were to leave standing. They had been removing the smaller diameter trees as well as chopping down the honeysuckle. The yellow tags around the trees indicate they are to be removed, the pink means they are to be left alone. Our neighbor had them completely block off his property with yellow tape. Now it looks like some kind of marriage of a crime scene with a used car lot across the lane.

After much to-do, several emails, and a township trustee meeting over there, the township will be replacing our blooming tree that they leveled with a comparable one. Mark marked the place for it so they could check on underground utilities.

Being something of opportunists, with the removal of all the undergrowth, Mark and I went out yesterday and bought then planted  a peach tree shown above

and a cherry tree. They are both self-pollinating, which is an interesting idea if you stop and think about it. I’m thrilled about the cherry tree because we grew up with two cherry trees in our back yard. My mom made cherry jelly.

“You won’t be making cherry jelly with these,” Mark said. “We had trees like this at our last house and we never reaped a harvest.”

“I’m going to make cherry pie,” I said, undeterred.

“The birds got all the cherries,” Mark said. “You won’t get any.”

I can taste that cherry pie already.

Meanwhile, a robin kept watch.

“And peach pie too,” I added, “I can’t wait.”

Looking for signs of spring

I can see a spot of color from my view outside my kitchen window.

Swollen buds, I don’t know if they are leaves or flowers, are visible on the tree outside our kitchen door.

The cheerful pansies I planted yesterday beckon me outside to look for signs of spring.

I marvel at the contrast between the soft bright color of the pansies as they catch the morning sun, and the barren woods behind with its long shadows.

Mark’s garden below the deck with its freshly turned rich brown soil is a sign of spring. It hides the seeds he planted yesterday. They wait for water and sun, like little parcels of power from which green shoots bearing vegetables will appear.

My St. Francis Garden is showing signs of life shooting forth from the brown dried leaves and stems yet to be cleared away. Perhaps I’ll do that today.

The irises are inching upwards on schedule for their May parade.

Bunches of daffodils are ready to turn, one morning, into a riot of bright yellow.

Soon. Maybe today.

The hyacinths with their sweet, at times piercing, fragrance are preparing to bloom.

The bright spot of color I saw from my kitchen window is in fact daffodils, as I suspect you guessed. The first to bloom. They are the best harbringer of spring in my garden because, unlike tulips which never made it past a few inches of green before being eaten, the deer won’t touch them.

This year I outsmarted the deer. I planted tulips in a pot on our deck. One of two things will happen. The deer will walk up onto my deck, or I will have tulips.

Are you seeing signs of spring?

Of Guardian Angels, Gardens, and Gratitude

Pecan pie (made by my daughter Anna) minus one slice, from Thanksgiving 2011.

‘Tis the time of year to think about gratitude. Gratitude always reminds me of the time I spent volunteering at Our Daily Bread in Over-the-Rhine, downtown Cincinnati, in 2006. Our Daily Bread provides a warm meal, social services and socialization for neighborhood residents.

You know from some of my recent posts about Cincinnati that Over-the-Rhine is making a resurgence and that Mark and I frequently visit the local restaurants or entertainment venues there now. But in 2006, it could still a bit rough in some parts of the neighborhood at times. What follows is a short op-ed I wrote, submitted, and was published in  “Your Voice” in the Cincinnati Enquirer, December 24, 2006.

~~~~~

Guardian Angels in Over the Rhine

Guardian angels come from unexpected places.

This fall I volunteered at Our Daily Bread in Over the Rhine where I met Ted, a well-liked and regular guest.

“I am 75 years old and proud of it,” Ted claims.  He has a limp that he acquired from a war wound in Vietnam and walks slowly with a wooden cane.  A long black rosary hangs around his neck and a royal blue ball cap rests on his head with his wiry gray hair sticking out of the bottom.  Ted’s eyes are brown and his smile is genuine. He has street smarts and is quick to laugh during conversations.

Ted’s financial difficulties come from the fact that he’s an alcoholic and has made bad choices in the past.

As I was leaving Our Daily Bread that day I witnessed a fight.  One man was pressed up against a car yelling, “Help!  Call the police.”   People were standing around on the sidewalks just watching.

When the men separated and I saw the gleam of a knife in one of their hands, I hurried back inside Our Daily Bread to get help.  A few minutes later the situation diffused itself as one of the men left.

The following week I spoke with Ted again.  I asked him why nobody wanted to do anything to help this guy who was taking a beating.  The people, Ted said, “Don’t care.  Don’t want to be involved.”

“If I was in trouble, do you think someone would help me?”  I asked him.

“I would,” he said.

As I was getting ready to leave, Ted asked, “Are you going to be all right?”

“I’ll be fine,” I said.

He stood up and started walking behind me.  He wanted to know where I had parked.  I reassured him that my car was just across the street and a few car-lengths away.  He continued with me as I went outside.  He stood there on the corner on that chilly autumn day and watched me get into my car and drive away.

I smiled as I thought, “What is Ted going to do, at his age and with his disability, if I need help?”  And then I felt my eyes begin to fill with tears at his noble gesture.

Ted returned my wave as I drove past, then he turned around and slowly walked back into the soup kitchen on a corner in Over the Rhine.

~~~~~

I mention Ted’s story today when I want to remind everyone of gratitude, because on any given day you could ask Ted, “How are you?” and without fail, he would answer, “I’m blessed.”

As my American friends are getting ready to celebrate a day of Thanksgiving, and for my international friends for who it is always a good idea to remember and be grateful, I thought I would leave a couple of “Pocket Positives” from another one of my little books:

“I am an optimist. It does not seem too much use being anything else.” ~ Sir Winston Churchill, British Statesman, Prime Minister and Writer

“I have become my own version of an optimist. If I can’t make it through one door; I’ll go through another door — or I’ll make a door: Something  terrific will come no matter how dark the present.” ~ Joan Rivers, American Comedian

“May I a small house, and large garden have. And a few Friends, and many Books, both true, both wise, and both delightful too.” ~ Abraham Cowley, English Poet

“How to be happy when you are miserable. Plant Japanese poppies with cornflowers and mignonette, and set out the petunias among the sweet-peas so they shall scent each other. See the sweet-peas coming up.”~ Rumer Godden, English Writer

I give thanks for parents who raised me, a husband who loves and supports me, children who enrich my life, a little dog who keeps me company and all of nature that surprises and thrills me, friends who lighten my spirits, and all of you for sharing this time of your life with me. Happy Thanksgiving.