No time for my blog, I am too busy planting!

Hello, friends, fellow gardeners, and other visitors. Did you think I had run off to far away lands? Not exactly...it's been a busy busy month, this July, which of course kicked off with the Open Garden weekend. My voice finally came back completely after about two weeks, which was surely a record for laryngitis. Highly entertaining when one makes a living asking questions of others.

I don't know how YOUR garden is going, but ours has exploded into a rhapsody of lushness. Shrubs are covered in blooms, daylilies are filled with scapes and packed with high bud counts, grasses are growing taller and taller..in fact, pretty much everything is growing taller and taller.

Naturally, I can't resist bringing home new or new-to-me plants, and there have been more of those than ever, this year. They range from tiny saxifrage alpines to fascinating perennials like this yellow stokesia...

To the not-hardy but definitely delectable chocolate cosmos, which really does smell of chocolate. I have to remember to dig and store the tuber of this plant this year!

Long ago, when I was a student at NSAC, the greenhouse lab technician wrote a poem for me. Ken and I were always bantering back and forth, playing little tricks on each other, and as I was going into exam time I spent even more time in the greenhouses, either playing with plants or actually studying. The last couple of lines of the poem, which I still have somewhere, went thusly:

"As she runs to the greenhouse we still hear her chanting,

No time for degree, I am too busy planting!"

Some might think "I'm not finished planting yet!" will be my epitaph. They're probably correct. But you know what? This is the perfect time of year to do planting, at least in our climate. Warm days, cool (ish) nights, adequate rainfall...all these things are highly welcoming to new plants whether they be annual transplants that you just had to save, or container grown trees and shrubs!

There is LOTS of colour in our gardens these days, but as far as I am concerned, there always is. There are the big showy annual poppies with their brilliant colours, countless lilies and roses, astilbes and hostas, cranesbills and filipendula...

But there's also a feast of foliage here. When I look out one office window (the other is obscured by the ever-joyous 'Limelight' hydrangea), I see a feast for the senses--lots of flowers, yes, but also rich foliage from golden tansy to copper beech to purple barberry to blue oat grass. It all makes me happy.

I spend a LOT of time when not actually gardening, staring through my camera's various lens at plants and their visitors. What I love about macro photography is that the camera's lens 'sees' things I can't with my naked, aging eyes, like the hairs on this bumblebee's legs.

If you aren't growing astrantia (masterwort), I'd like to know why! It's a fantastic plant, very floriferous, attractive to a huge number of pollinators, makes a nice clump, and some varieties self-seed, though I haven't had that pleasure yet. There are about half a dozen varieties in our gardens, from white 'Star of Heaven' seen here to deep red flowered varieties, to pink varieties, to 'Sunningdale Variegated', which has gold and green leaves.

Summer is also a time for family, and I've been very happy to have my son home visiting. He is a film and camera buff, creative like his mother but more into making films to tell stories than into writing. He has been teaching me more about my camera, too.

And the happiest of things I can share? I am back riding my horse after more than two years of not riding! This is pretty important to me, especially as I'm going to be getting new knees within the next year, which will make all things easier to do. After losing a number of cherished friends in recent months, I decided that what I'm dealing with is only pain, and no matter what I do I hurt. So I might as well do what I love, and to heck with the pain. Leggo, my faithful Morgan horse, seems to approve too.

I'll try to post more regularly in coming weeks, but if not, you'll know why...I'm still too busy planting!

No makin fun of my ass: Jenny & Leggo

People often ask me why I don't have trouble with deer in the garden. Or, for that matter, with coyotes. We live in a very rural location, with open fields and woodlands all around us, and there are plenty of both deer and coyotes around. But we have our own built-in critter repellent in the form of our attack donkey, JennyManyAnyLumps, and her horse, Leggo-My-Eggo.

Jenny, it has to be said, is neither smart nor beautiful. In fact, she may possibly have donkey-Alzheimers, as she often forgets where the heck she's going, even from barn to paddock--a distance of maybe fifty feet. In her defence, she's somewhere around 30 years old; she was about twenty when we got her a decade ago to keep my then very young horse company. Leggo is a purebred Morgan, and horses being sociable herd animals, he didn't appreciate being an only child when we brought him from the large stable where he'd been boarded by previous owner. So we looked around, and our farrier told us about a donkey who needed a good home, and we brought Jenny home to be Leggo's buddy.

It was love at first sight. They are devoted to each other, and neither of it likes it when I take Leggo away for a ride. Jenny stands in the barn or paddock and makes desperate sounds resembling a bellows crossed with a foghorn. However, when they're together, Leggo tends to bug her, playing 'herd the donkey' on a daily basis.

Despite her age, somewhat-stunnedness, and exasperation temperament (she moves on Donkey Standard Time, which means when she feels like it, quite annoying if you're trying to get her somewhere in a hurry) Jenny is awesome at coyote and deer detection and repelling. I don't know if she thinks deer are just longlegged coyotes, but she snorts and honks and stamps at them, and she would kick the stuffing out of any coyote foolish enough to try her on. She unfortunately doesn't discriminate between coyotes and golden retrievers, Weimerauners, and even cats, so visiting relatives and friends know not to bring their dogs beyond the fence. Leggo doesn't mind, but in Jenny's mind, they're all coyotes. Our two senior cats who do go out give her a wide berth, and in the barn, she's no problem at all with them.
...when that gets boring, he just goes into flight around the pasture. Watching him gallop, buck, and have a blast gives me great delight.

Leggo likes to play with me too; we play a complex game of tag called 'Fierce Wild Horse' in which I chase him around the pasture, he gallops and bucks and snorts like a dragon, and then comes bouncing back to me if I don't get to where he's paused quickly enough to suit him. He LOVES this game, and gives me the eye hopefully whenever I come out to the pasture to visit.

Jenny looks like she was created by Salvadore Dali, with her funny neck. When we got her, she was living with a bunch of cattle, which were fed grain daily. Jenny liked to clean up the feed after them, and donkeys very curiously don't gain weight all over, but in pads and certain spots, including their toplines or crests of their necks. When the crest gets too heavy, it simply falls over. It's solid, and it doesn't hurt her, and even though she's quite svelte compared to how she was when we got her, it will never go back to its original shape. However, most of us can sympathize with her.

It doesn't affect her agility; she rolls daily, several times usually, and she gallumphs around the field when the spirit moves her to. The past few days, there's too much ice in the field under just a bit of snow, so Jenny and Leggo are both in the barn for their own safety.

Like me, however, they tolerate winter because they know that eventually, spring and summer will come, and they'll have plenty of days to bask in the sun and nibble pasture. They have a good life. Leggo is mostly a pasture potato these days with my knees like they are, but he enjoys a regular game of fierce wild horse, and he's well loved, so it's all good.