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!

Seeing rather than looking: a weekend miscellany

A few highly productive but also very busy days around here. The weather, as I mentioned last post, has smartened up significantly, leading me to get up early, write/work like a demon til lunch or early afternoon, then go outside to tackle the garden. Just on Friday, I wrote over 2500 words for assorted projects, including, of course, The Book, which seems to be coming along well.

Likewise, the garden is coming along well. It's actually leaping ahead at an amazing rate, sort of worrying because I wonder if everything is going to be early and thus done early. But on the other hand, I've been enjoying welcoming the arrivals of plants that I had thought might be spleeny. And I do greet the discovery that they've made it through the winter with great joy. "Welcome BACK, Anemone 'Vestal.' Nice to see you again, Echinacea 'Coconut Lime'. Hurray, you've made it through, Eryngium 'Jade Frost' (above photo)." And so on.

I love going outside to take photos with my small digital Canon, which has an interesting macro feature and sees things that I didn't notice. I might be fixating on the myriad shades of colour in the hellebore petals (actually sepals, but we won't quibble) and fail to notice the wee insect making its way toward the flower's centre, perhaps to pollinate.


Along with writing The Book, I'm providing the photos for it, and have been taking extra shots in case images I have from other years aren't enough. The most frustrating flower to photograph has been this Orange Konigin epimedium, because each flower is so small, they open at different times on each stalk of blossoms, and they're just not cooperating. It wasn't until I was looking at these images blown up that I noticed the wee hairs on each flower's stipe. Also the cat hair and/or spider web festooning this plant, courtesy of the two elderly cats who do go outside and who like to help me in the garden.

Love the venation in these pulmonaria blooms. Of course, I've mentioned my love of pulmonarias before, and will again. They're just so wonderful, and pollinators adore them too. Given that I was talking about pollinators to a group of gardeners in Dartmouth on Saturday, it's small wonder that I have them on my mind.

Magnolias are in bloom in other parts of Nova Scotia, and some report frost damage from the cold nights we had a few days back. Only a few of my flowers are beginning to show on the stellata, and most are still nestled inside their protective bud covers (the proper name of which completely escapes me tonight.)

This seems to be the week of rainbows, too. Thursday evening's was nice, but Saturday evening we were given the present of a double rainbow over my neighbour's old house. After taking some photos, I sat out behind our place and just let the intermittent rain spatter on me while I watched the rainbows, which went on for probably twenty minutes.

And I was thinking to myself as I looked at this sedum emerging from its winter sleep, how much I like the look of some perennials as they push through the ground. I almost wish this one (which is one of the taller varieties, possibly 'Matrona') would stay small and tidy and lovely. Almost.

Something about the geometric beauty of this hellebore's flower, surrounded by the rosy sepals, really, really pleased me. So did the condition of the soil in the lower garden where the hellebores are and where I was weeding the past couple of days. It's turned black, rich and friable from all the compost I've added to it over the years since I first took on the challenge to deal with what was red clumpy clay. So it can be done, friends. It really can. The dedicated work we do, whether in the garden or on other projects, really does pay off.

So, what has come back in your garden that you've been really pleased about? What has seemingly gone to sleep, never to awaken again?

Wordless Wednesday: Tulipa 'Orange Surprise'

Skywatch Friday: A bee's-eye view of the sky?

Okay, I confess right now. This isn't what you'd call a conventional post for Skywatch Friday. However, we have come to that time of year when I sometimes forget to admire the sky because I'm too busy looking at things at or near ground level. Soil level. You know what I mean. It's gardening season!

I had to go to Truro on Wednesday and give a little talk to the Friends of the Garden at my first alma mater, the Nova Scotia Agricultural College. (yes, I have several almae matras. You wouldn't really expect me to take the conventional route through academia, would you?) The Friends tend to the incredible Rock Garden at AC, and if you live in this province and haven't been there, you are missing something extraordinary. Even in winter.


After we were done, even though the sky was drippy and grey and cold, I went out to walk around the campus a little. I had my pocket camera with me, a compact and clever little Canon Powershot SX200. I love that little camera. Drop it in my purse along with my iPhone (geek) and I don't need to drag laptop and digital SLR with me if travelling light. It has an impressive lens on it, too, with the ability to focus very closeup to subjects. So I thought about what it might be like to see things from a bee's eye perspective, when it comes to plants. Not so much the actual image they see, but what it's like to see from the ground up, rather than our normal perspective. First stop was the heath and heather bed, which has overwintered magnificently this year.

Then down to the rock garden, where many things are still quiescent, snuggled into their mulchy beds, dreaming of warmth and sunlight and the cue to begin. But these semps were watching me watching them.

And the creeping thyme didn't mind me creeping up on it with my little camera.

Oh, what a surprise. Jodi is still taking photos of snowdrops. Well, yes, I'll keep doing that for weeks yet. They make me happy. And raindrops on snowdrops...well, that's just one of my favourite things. Hmmm. I think someone sang a song along those lines.

It was raining in earnest when I went across the road to the Alumni Gardens (Aggies once, aggies twice...) so I didn't linger. I did, however, want to hang out with this sycamore, because its bark and its funny alien fruit amuse me. The fruit wouldn't co-operate by falling from the tree intact, so I contented myself with admiring the trunk, which looks like a piece of exquisite sculpture.

Enough with the rain. Back to Collins Hort Building I went, and the small greenhouse was open so naturally I went in there to have a look around. I think some of the plants in there may well have been there when I was a student, or are offspring of those original plants. Not the standard poinsettias, though.

I do LOVE succulents, and I keep saying it's time to learn more about them. Well, while I was away, a nice box of books arrived from Thomas Allen & Son, who distribute Timber Books here in Canada. And a nice book by Debra Lee Baldwin was in that box of books. Not her new one--I'm not sure how that happened, unless it's backordered here in Canada, but I didn't have Designing with Succulents, either. So I'll have fun with it while waiting for the new book.


This cactus delighted me, with its furry crown studded with little pink jewels of soon to open flowers. Rant: One of my peeves in life are the plant companies that stick strawflowers to the tops of cacti in an effort to sex them up for clueless customers. The real flowers of cacti are much, much more interesting. So stop doing that, stupid plant companies.

Well I feel better for that, don't you? Let's move on to this tiny, dainty, charming succulent, which I assume is a sedum but I might be all wrong about that. Whatever it is, I love it and want some.

And to wrap up my bee's-eye view, there's a huge, wonderful hoya hanging in the Collins greenhouse. And what do you know but it had a number of clusters of perfectly sculpted, perfectly scented flowers hanging from it. I don't know that this photo will be enough to inspire mine to flower sometime soon, but it's worth a try. The blossoms of hoyas are marvelous. They can fill my sky anytime.