17 June 2011 - The Fragrant Garden

Over the years I have been trying to add scent to the yard. In late March, the yard is so filled with the scent of lilacs that when the bloom cycle is over and the smell is gone, the loss is palpable. I have been adding plants with potent fragrances to fill in throughout the rest of the season. I have sought out roses that actually smell. Right now when the breeze is out of the south I can smell the roses when I sit on the deck.

I also have a wonderful rose that absolutely surrounds you in a sweet light perfume when you approach it. Not only is it wonderfully fragrant, but it is a many color rose. The tight buds are orange, they open yellow, turn pink, then darker rose, and finally end up with white on the outside of the petals and dark rose with red speckles as it passes peak. It is hard to believe all those colors come on one plant.  

In addition to that, the honeysuckle is now in full bloom. It is a white and yellow variety like Mother Eee had growing next to her kitchen door. Its sweet essence wafts about the yard now. Love it! The scent of these potent sweet nectar flowers reminds me of warm summer nights watching the big night moths work over the flowers. As kids we used to pull the flowers off and suck the nectar out of the tubes. Such a happy smell!

The catalpa is in full bud and should burst this weekend. That will add a spicy bouquet to the mix. The flowers are astounding, looking like clusters of miniature orchids. They are exotic.


What next?  I filled one of the raised beds with petunias. Here is a vintner-ish description of petunias: This is a sweet light floral, blended with just a hint of green for a soft, pleasing scent. Great for Summer. Soothing, spirit recharging, uplifting.

Speaking of recharging, I saw the first lightning bug tonight! Such magic.

So I am luxuriating in the heavenly scents from my garden but there is a major omission. We have no bees. By this time of year, my yard should be awash in bees. Bees bumping into each other in their pursuit of nectar and pollen. Honey bees, bumblebees, solitary bees, carpenter bees, sweat bees-- many different kinds of bees that are usually in great abundance among the flowers. Nothing!  We have seen two bumble bees, many black mud daubers, but bees? They are among the missing.

I am mystified. Yes, I have read all the articles about the decline of the honey bee, but for all the many different kinds of bees to just disappear? Was it the overly long, cold winter? Did they bees starve? Did they come out and get frozen? What?

In other news, because it is June we are getting snow. Cottonwood snow, that is. Even the slightest hint of breeze brings squalls of cottonwood seeds that float like snowflakes and create drifts.  When I drive to work in the morning, the side of the road under the big cottonwoods is usually covered with white drifts. These piles of seed are accompanied by flocks of sparrows and other seed eaters. It must be either a delicious treat, or just easy pickings, as the birds barely get out of the road when I drive by.

12 June 2011 - Cauls, cromulent and crapulent

I have a flower that I have always called a Persian Frittilaria.  Today I discovered it isn't a Frit at all, it's an allium. Allium bulgaricum, to be exact. Sometimes called a Sicilian Honey Lily. It is a sweet smeller, all right.

Funny, I didn't notice it had all the proper characteristics of the allium. Seems like a no-brainer now. But, I bought Persian Fritillaria bulbs, apparently that wasn't what I was sent, and I didn't think to question it.

What I think is interesting about this plant, in addition to the good looking flower, is that the bud is wrapped in a sheath, much like a caul. As it gets closer to opening the caul turns translucent, and you can see the individual buds inside.



As it begins to open, the caul is slit from top to bottom and the buds are packed in like sardines. One by one each bud breaks free and  bounces out to its proper place. Finally all the buds are free and the caul hangs on by a thread for a couple more days, then falls off.


In other news, I was humbled at work this past week. Grr. I hate being wrong!  Someone had used the word unpossible. Being in a snarky mood I sent an email saying "Unpossible? Really?"  The reply I received was "What? It's a perfectly cromulent word."

Cromulent?  What the heck, I'd never run into that word before. Look it up-- it's a good one. On the way to cromulent I discovered another interesting word: crapulent. And it has nothing to do with what you think it does. Just about the time I think I'm darned good with grammar, word usage, punctuation et al, something usually smacks me upside the head, shaking the complacency right out of me.  But hey, had I not been snarky, I would have missed out on two great words.

Hughie had her kittens yesterday. With all the available hidey holes in the yard and garage, she chose to ignore them all and had them under the dog house. For day-old kittens they sure can squall loudly, and do so every time Hughie leaves the nest. It will be interesting to see what and how many she has.

I have mentioned earlier what a fabulous rose display is happening in my yard right now. This weekend, Blaze, a climbing rose by my bedroom window burst into bloom. It is making a lovely arch. Reminds me of Burnett's Secret Garden.

This was another hard working weekend. Taped all the window sashing in the living room. Jack started to paint those while I taped the windows and door in the dining room. We took a break to mow the lawn and do some weeding. Painted some more. Then took another break for a trip to the Little Yellow Stand. Came home with a flat of mixed color petunias, two flats of impatiens for the berm and a few fill-ins for the perennial bed.

I washed the mini-blinds for the dining room. Took them outside, laid them out on the line and took the hose with the nozzle to them. Sprayed them with Simple Green, hit them with a scrub brush, turned them over, repeated and hosed them off. Then I hung them from pot hangers in the maple tree to dry. Worked great! 

Today, Sunday, I got up and before I finished my first cup of coffee I was out planting all the petunias. You can't just plant. It turns into weeding, digging grass up, working the soil. Two hours later I had not only planted all the petunias, but weeded the perennial bed, watered everything in and even filled a yard waste bag with my weed piles.

I find I am channeling mother when I weed. Pull it up, pitch it behind me. Makes quite a mess. Jack wants to know why I can't pull them out and make a tidy, easy to pick up pile. Dunno. I always wondered about it when mother did it, but it never occurred to me to ask. And now I'm doing it. Mostly it just gets them out of the way.

After cleaning the yard, went back in hoping to finish the living and dining room today. Jack started in on a second coat on the window sashes. I pulled everything out of the windows around the front door, washed all the shelves, went outside washed that side as well. Taped up the ten window lights around the front door and painted all the woodwork and shelves.

Took the largest set of living room blinds outside to wash. Little Fluff was most interested and walked across them to see what it was all about. The blinds have a path of dents across them now. Great. Clean, but dented.

Jack screwed the mini-blind brackets back in the windows while I cleaned out the built in shelves to get them ready for painting. All that is left to do is the built-ins plus another coat around the front door. I pulled all the tape off the windows and other woodwork where we were through and I must admit, it looks nice. Not my colors, but it is clean and airy looking.

8 June 2011 - Painting the Roses Red

Only nine days into June and it has been eventful!  Four days with temperatures reaching the mid-90s. Yesterday we hit 96, and the forecast is the same for today. Four of those 90 plus degree days set record highs for June. Today will also be a record high if indeed we make 96 again. 

Jack thinks I obsess about the weather and doesn’t understand why.  Well, yes, I do! I’m that person who loves to check out weather records. How hot/cold is it going to get? How does that differ from last year? Five years ago? How much precipitation did we get last month versus last year? Why should scientists keep records except to excite people like me? I just like to know things. 

Meanwhile, this hot spell is drying out our raised beds in a hurry, but it is also making our veggies and other plants spring out of the ground. Peas are a foot high already.  Lettuce is ready to eat, tomatoes are forming on the plants, peppers have buds forming. Beans are turning into little bushes. Water them first thing in the morning, by the time I get home from work it seems they’ve all grown two inches. The raised beds all have a bumper crop of lamb’s quarter. I pull them up with a smile, thinking how Robin buys my weed at her local farmer’s market and eats them with delight. 

June is a funny time for me. So many plants bloom. Clematis, roses, daisies, peonies, columbine, plus the shrubs such as Black Lace Elderberry, honeysuckle, weiglia, and summer sweet are just a few in my yard ready to burst or already at peak bloom thanks to the elevated temperatures. Why is it a funny time? Intellectually, I know these all bloom in June, but in May, they are just leafing out, starting to grow. Then wham! Out of nowhere they are covered with blooms. It happens so fast, even though I walk the yard daily, weed around them, water them, watch the progress, I still get startled at the profusion of color.  

May 31^st is our last frost free day. It’s the weekend everyone is out planting tender annuals. So somehow June isn’t that far away from the mental images of frost, cold, winter.

Helen's Aloha rose

This year the roses are stars—such a profusion of flowers! All you have to do is walk by and you get bathed in their fragrance. It's pretty heady!  

Two years ago Amy had given me a couple starts of an Aloha rose that came from her mother’s garden, from the house in Dearborn where she was raised. It is a beautiful pink with a delicate fragrance. These poor roses have been moved at least three times. This year they are thriving and are covered with blooms and many buds. I looked it up and found it is classed as a Modern Large Flowered Climber.  Modern? Hybridized in 1949. That is 63 years old!  

This year, all the yuccas that I rescued from Betty’s foundation plantings are sending up bloom stalks. They had never bloomed for her—too much shade. It will be fun see the stalks in full flower.  David has a fabulous patch of yucca that are show stoppers when they bloom.  Mine will get there.  

Critter report. On Sunday, Jack and I decided it was time to finally clean all the grass out of the front chain link fence. It was a shady spot in our yard on a very hot day. We worked  across the fence from each other loosening the roots and pulling up the grass. At one point I pulled a really huge clump of roots out and disturbed a stag beetle. He was not happy about it. He stood up on his rear, balancing like a tripod with his butt and two back legs. He gnashed his mandibles and waved his other legs in a threatening manner. I ran…for my camera. He could have been a model for some SF alien. I am very proud of this photo. Check out the interesting antennae and the sensory organs at the tips. He shouldn’t have any problem locating female pheromones with those. 

Years ago I read Nor Crystal Tears by Alan Dean Foster. It is a first contact novel told from the perspective of the insectoid race, the Thranx, and deals with their encounter with the monstrous, fleshy, alien mammals known as humans. One of the things I remember best about this is that the Thranx could not show emotions due to their rigid exoskeleton and their society had come up with an intricate way of showing expressions through body part positions. Antennae, mandibles, palps and appendages were arranged just so to suggest emotions such as fifth degree of apology or third degree of subservience. I think my stag beetle is in the first degree of aggression. 

More weird critters. We have had hundreds of ants traversing our deck. Over the last weekend it became clear that we had a new variety of carpenter ant: big-headed ants.

Really odd looking ants, as you can see from the pictures. For several days I watched them run up and down the boards and considered the whys and wherefores of their over-sized heads. What would be the advantages of a bigger head? How do they carry things around as well as hauling that great big head. And what on earth would be have caused this kind of evolution?

I finally got down on hands and knees for a closer look. Ho! A surprise! They weren't big-headed at all. Each big-headed ant was merely carrying the carcass of a smaller black ant. I tried following the ants to see where the bodies were coming from but I didn't have much luck, or maybe it was a lack of patience. I can only surmise that they were raiding a nest of a smaller species of ants and bringing the bodies back to their own nest. I tried to get pictures. Do you have any idea how hard it is to focus on an ant? They are fast and travel in erratic paths.

Babies. We have robin, grackle and blue jay nests in the yard.  Two weeks ago I found a dead, gawky baby jay under the silver maple. This morning I found a live baby robin. Pin feathers were just starting to come out. It is an awful feeling to know that it will be cat food before the day is out.  

Our hollow catalpa tree is home to two kittens belonging to the tabico. Seems fitting as the tabico was born in the hollow boxelder stump. Her kittens are white, with orange ears, tails and top of head markings. Cute, but dang it, more cats? The girls have seven kittens in their yard, and Hughie is still lumbering around in a state of huge pregnancy. We thought she’d give birth a week or more ago due to her rotund state. Any day now. 

Her babies from last July: Little Fluff and Big Fluff are still living in the backyard. Big Fluff has become quite the company cat. He likes to be petted, scratched and played with. He loves to chase the end of a rope around the yard. When Jack and I are working in the yard or hanging about on the deck, he is usually not far. When he isn’t up for a pet he likes to lie a fingertip out of reach. Close enough. Big Fluff is oddly colored--head and shoulders are black and the rest of him is more brown. 

Many years ago I bought five giant allium bulbs. They have been gradually increasing. I have a beautiful purple display in May when they bloom. When the color fades, the heads remain upright for some time. As the heads fade to a straw color I have discovered I can spray paint them in bright colors to add a little zing to the May garden. This year I used a florescent pink. Zowie!

It's eye-catching. I am reminded of Alice every time I do this. 

"Would you tell me, please," said Alice, a little timidly, "why you are painting those roses?"

Five and Seven said nothing, but looked at Two. Two began, in a low voice, "Why the fact is, you see, Miss, this here ought to have been a red rose tree, and we put in a white one by mistake..."

Did we have another record high today? You betcha. Topped out at 96 degrees again. Now, at 8:45 pm it is still 91 out and 82 in.

3 June 2011 - Pop's birthday

Well, Pop, it’s your birthday today. I have been struggling with this, fluctuating between weepy and mentally giving you a piece of my mind. Still haven’t forgiven you for leaving us so unexpectedly. Robin tells me that I should find a quiet spot and talk to you. (Note to not with. Damnit.) But then I always seem to be talking to you these days, or flogging myself for not learning more from you while you were available. 

But it’s June, the rhubarb is fresh in the farmer’s market and perhaps it is time to make your birthday rhubarb-strawberry pie. I’ll bet D2 has one already made. Last I spoke with him, his rhubarb had bolted and he needed to chop those stalks down. 

This year is flying by. Jack, who has been at the Parkview house for nine months is finally home. We have been busy painting. In the abstract, it doesn’t seem all that difficult to throw some paint on the walls. In reality it is a different story.

·         Patch holes. Sand holes. Prime patching.

·         Paint the ceiling. Let it dry. Tape the ceiling.

·         Paint the molding. Let it dry. Paint second coat. Let dry. Remove ceiling tape. Tape the molding.

·         Paint the walls. Let them dry. Paint second coat. Let dry. Remove molding tape. Tape the walls and floors to paint the baseboards.

·         Paint the baseboards. 

It seems endless. Discovered that our hallway—a very short hallway has 11 doors that open into it. That’s an awful lot of woodwork to paint. However, moaning aside, we are making progress. I have big hopes of getting at least one room finished this weekend, but the forecast is talking about temps in the mid 90s. I may not be able to handle a hot house plus the humidity factor of wet paint. We shall see.

It is hard painting a house to sell. These colors are so not me. but I have to admit it looks clean, light and airy. It is a yellow based beige with white trim, so it complements the gold tones in the kitchen floor and in my oak furniture. 

The living room and dining room have all the  furniture gathered up in the center of the rooms and are covered with plastic. We are at a place where we can put the rooms back together, except that we need to have new carpet put down. Not sure whether to move stuff again, or just wait until the carpet is in. This whole process has been horse and buggy intensive. 

1 June 2011 - Be careful what you wish for

Before I launch into June, just a few notes on the end of May. May was cold and rainy. So rainy that we ended the month with 6.49 inches of rain, making it the 5th wettest May on record. All that rain filled the roadside ditches. In the 32 years we have lived here, we have never before had water standing in our front ditches. This May we had a foot and a half of water. Wow. Our side ditch still has standing water, and is breeding mosquitoes like crazy. I should go buy some of those larva killers, but I need to find out what else they might hurt, first.  The last two days of May were crazy hot. We went from low 70s up to the low 90s. It was a shock to the body, but it surely made the seeds pop right out of the ground.

For years I have lamented that April and May are over too soon. In the last 7 years we have reached the mid 80s in April accompanied by a hot wind. Fortunately this doesn't last long, but what it does is blow all the flowering trees and bulbs into bloom. With temperatures this high, flowers don't last. I have lusted after a long cool spring, where the flowers would reach their full potential--mostly because my garden is spectacular in May, and just once I would like to see it in a slow climb to the peak then a slow descent.

This year I had a long cold  spring. Cold and rainy. Often the flowers that actually showed up were promptly frozen or had their petals pummeled to the ground by the rain.

In spite of that I did get some color to enjoy. The forget-me-nots made a lovely blue carpet under the flowering crabs. The tulips floated over the sea of blue like exclamation points. Jack answered the doorbell one day, to find a woman wanting to take pictures of the garden. She came back a day or two later with a page of flower photos for us.

As a gardener, one of the many things I love is the juxtaposition of color, size, and shape.

For example, this hosta with its large leaves surrounded by tiny forget-me-nots. By the time the forget-me-nots are spent and the plants removed, the leaves on this hosta will have tripled in size filling the space.

 Here large tulips in pink echo the same color of the tiny blooms in the ground cover. It's a bit hard to see in the picture, but up close in person it's lovely.

Wondering what all this is? The clusters of blue bells are mertensia, the small pink in the back is an early blooming pulminaria, the yellow is golden poppy.

I seem to have a problem with aggressive plants. So many plants that I have spread or reseed rapidly. I let them bloom then ruthlessly pull the extras out. By then they have spread enough seeds to make a huge show the following year. That bank of forget-me-nots? That is the result of three small plants.

Each golden poppy flower results in hundreds of seeds. Fortunately they are easy to pull out.

The cool weather plus last fall's pruning resulted in the best lilac display we have had since we've been here. Not only were the bushes loaded to the point of drooping, but oh! The fragrance was amazing, overwhelming at times, yet so sweet. And the flowers and scent lasted for over two weeks.

It was amazing, beautiful and a sensory delight. Plenty for bouquets in the house and for my desk at work without even touching the display outside.

The fauna in my yard has been interesting. Three different toads in three days. Turns out that all three are Bufo americanus, the common american toad, but they were all so different in size and coloring. Turns out toads can change colors with temperature and lighting. We have had toads in the yard for years: brownish or blackish toads.

I was sitting on the deck with a cup of coffee when movement caught my eye. Big fat toad on the deck. He was gold with bright gold eyes. I ran for my camera. The ferals, Hughie and Big Fluff were interested in what I was doing, but were totally indifferent to the toad. They practically stepped on it while watching me.

At one point, Big Fluff became interested in the toad and gave it a gentle little push with his paw.

The toad reared up into what I can only imagine was a defensive position. His back was hunched up into the air and he was practically standing on his head and balanced on his tip toes. Odd.   He stayed this way for about 10 minutes.

Big Fluff is mighty cute. You can see his huge extra toe in this picture. His mother, Hughie, is also polydactyl on her front feet as well.

I think he was quite smitten with the toad, after he finally saw it. He didn't hurt it at all, just watched.



 

The very next morning I was looking out the window to see what the ferals were up to and I see Little Fluff bouncing around with something. I finally realize she has a mouse or a vole, so I trek outside to see if it can be saved. Surprise! She is bouncing a small toad. I chase her off and the toad dashes to the base of the maple tree where he disappears. Protective coloration is an amazing thing!

Adding to the continuing toad story, the next morning I am weeding and bagging like mad so I can get the sacks out before the yard waste truck comes by. In my maniacal state, I'm grabbing huge handfuls of the nasty ground ivy and yanking it out of the ground. I pull a toad right out of his cozy little tunnel. Oops. This toad, no picture, was a very brown toad. I herded him gently into another area of the garden.  I love having toads.