Love Song to Annuals

A couple of weeks ago I did several posts looking at plants we love to not so much love, and included a few annuals on my list of plants I don't particularly want in my garden. They're fine and wonderful and just not my thing. Now it's time to look at some that I am very fond of. 
We'll start with lantana. It's a strange plant; I know it's perennial in warmer parts of the world, and even invasive and a nuisance in some areas. Here, it's a tender annual, flinching at the first sign of cold weather, pouting and dying when frost whispers around the containers. But I adore it. It's an important plant for pollinators, and the flowers are just SO cool with their varying shades in each flowerhead of florets. This one is called 'Sunrise Rose'. It's well named, wouldn't you say?

Invariably I lose labels and names of annuals despite the best of intentions. These, for the record, are all annuals that come in individual pots, higher priced than the flats of grown from seed plants. I use them exclusively in containers around our gardens and yard, and tend towards bright, strong colours. 

This will grow from seed, although this particular strain is a hybrid, either 'Wildcat Blue' or 'Skylover.' The plant is Anagallis, or blue pimpernel, or Poor Man's Weatherglass; I love it for its cobalt blue flowers, and its funky habit of closing up its flowers when the weather gets cloudy. 

Osteospermums are definitely one of my favourites. This is one of the softer coloured ones, and I tend usually towards the richer ones, but I like its unique clean form. And osteos are interesting because they are fussy in the spring, but once they get established, they're so tough and flower until a hard frost or snow takes them out. 

Ahem. This is a fabulous verbena. It didn't need cossetting and deadheading to keep it flowering until the cold weather sent me out to dump the last of the containers. I should have taken a cutting, because not only do I not know its name...I have NO idea where I got it. Sigh. Note to self. Go back to Gardening Gone Wild and study the GBDWorkshop on labels and records....

Pansies make me smile. I don't care if they're common, or slug bait, or whatever else some dismiss them with. They are simply beautifully happy flowers, and this antique shades collection are among my favourites. 

I never used to grow ageratum at all. Then the plant breeders got interesting with colour changing and came up with some deep rose and even wine coloured varieties. Add that to the fact that pollinators love them, and they've taken a place in my container plantings. 

Lobelias can be problematic because they tend to melt down in hot weather. However, there have been several heat-resistant varieties recently, including the Laguna and Technoheat series, and they perform very well for me all season long. 

Torenias will take some shade, I've found in recent years, providing they don't get too wet. This little darling is called 'Lovely Yellow'. And isn't she wellnamed? 

Nemesia is easy to grow from seed, but there are some beautiful new cultivar series that I really, really like. This is called Opal Innocence, and even though it's more pastel than most of my choices, it's so striking I had to have it. As an added bonus, it has a wonderful scent, sort of like baby-powder but not cloying. I hope to see it around this spring. 

And this is a bit of an acquiescence to Anna and her love of petunias. It's a Callie, or actually it's a super-callie, a beefed up cross between callies and petunias. This one is called 'Terra Cotta' and it's a definite favourite because the hummingbirds love it. That's always good enough for me!

Guess who's coming to Supper/Dinner/Lunch/Not-Lunch

To help us get through the interminable nonsense that is FARCH (the seemingly endless ordeal of February March), our friend VP of Veg-Plotting fame has suggested we have a garden themed dinner-party. We may invite 3 to 5 garden or nature oriented persons, past, present or fictional, and explain the wherefores and whys of our invites.

Before I go into my raisons d'etre, we need a little dissertation on the naming of meals in the Maritimes. Here, we have breakfast at the normal hours of the day. The noontime meal tends to be called dinner by rural people, who traditionally ate their main meal at noon to help get them through the rest of their day's labours. My grandparents always called it dinner, and we still do too. Then the meal that we have at evening is called supper (although some call that dinner), and traditionally was lighter fare, although most of us eat our main meal at suppertime (except on Sundays when many of us have Sunday Dinner at noonish, of course). And if you go to a party or a dance or other function in the evening, about halfway through there will be a meal or snack which is called a lunch, and might be held as late as midnight. (Confused yet? Let me tell you about yards, dooryards and driveways sometime.) I'm quite sure Miss Manners would take complete umbrage at any of this.

Naturally, because I live in the Annapolis Valley, heart of apple-growing country, I will have to borrow my mother's set of Royal Albert Blossom Time China for the event. She actually worked for the man who had this china designed; here's the story of its origins:

"On a spring morning in 1933, G. R. Palmeter left a meeting of the Apple Blossom Committee at the Cornwallis Inn to purchase china from a representative of the Royal Albert China of England. While there, he asked the salesman about creating a pattern called "Blossom Time", to tie in with the Apple Blossom Festival. A design was submitted and the factory got to work on it.
The design is an actual picture of the Ralph Eaton farm, in the Annapolis Valley - the apple trees were at the height of bloom, and this worked out ideally, from the factory standpoint.
The result was "BLOSSOM TIME CHINA", which is still in great demand all over the world, even as far as Japan – this over a period of sixty years.
The original shape of the plate was square and the factory later tried a round one but it was not well received. The mugs have changed shape and the bowl and milk pitcher have been discontinued. Other pieces i.e. a trivet have recently been added."

So who would I invite to Sunflower Hill for this event? I'd love to throw it open to all those bloggers I faithfully read across the miles and the countries and continents, but I'm not good at large group meals, since our family is quite small and our holiday meals are my sister and her husband, our mother, my longsuffering spouse and I, and my son. So that's the max I could handle without a complete meltdown. Rest assured you'd all be welcome to visit at any time, but for now, my invitees are:

Kylee of Our Little Acre. Kylee was one of the very first garden bloggers I started to read regularly, and I consider her a dear friend across the miles. Her posts are invariably uplifting and fun, plus of course she loves cats and gardens. We WILL get to meet one of these days, probably when we both least expect.

Timothy Findley. This Canadian author was the subject of my Masters Thesis, and it gives some indication of how wonderful a writer he was that I STILL love his work. He lived for many years with his partner William Whitehead at a farm called Stone Orchard in Cannington, Ontario, and had many cats as companions. Both Tiff and Bill loved to garden as well as loved animals, and they were delightful individuals. Tiff died in 2002 and I planted a rose in the memory garden for him; then, fearing he would be lonely, I planted one for Bill right beside his (Bill is still very much alive).

Christopher Lloyd. I know he's on other gardeners' invite lists, but since the dear man passed away three years ago last month, I suspect he can get from one abode to the next with minimal problem. I harbour a longsimmering desire to visit Great Dixter, as do many others. One day I hopefully will get there, hopefully before I'm as old as Christo was when he passed on. He was crotchety, did not suffer fools or sycophants, loved to push boundaries and adored plants of all sorts. He was my second hort hero. My first was...

Dr. Albert E. (Doc) Roland. Doc taught botany at my first alma mater, the Nova Scotia Agricultural College for many years, and also wrote the definitive book on our provincial plants, The Flora of Nova Scotia. He was definitely my first hort-hero; I could bring him in a shred of a pistil of a plant I'd scrounged somewhere in the woods or meadows around the county, and he could identify it down to subspecies and variety. Even the asters, which drove most of us crazy. He was a fount of knowledge, a generous soul, a true plantsman and gardener and a damn fine chess player to boot.

Margaret Atwood. (I have two degrees in English, specializing in Can Lit, and minoring in biology. Does it show?) Ms. Atwood is the Queen of CanLit, of course, but she's also a pretty mean gardener and a highly enthusiastic green-advocate. I interviewed her a few years ago, and she had just been to Hay-on-Wye and seen Al Gore's presentation of An Inconvenient Truth--the very first, I believe--and spoke enthusiastically of it. She's been involved with Bullfrog Power in Ontario, and also with the Fatal Light Awareness Program to reduce bird deaths from night-lit skyscrapers in cities. I like my writers with a conscience for other living creatures.

I don't particularly enjoy cooking but under duress I can produce some pretty good offerings. One of the things we will dine on will be my fiddlehead and shrimp salad, which I served to my foodie-friend and fellow gardener Charmian Christie when she came to visit last spring. That day we toured several of the local wineries, and of course this dinner will include wines from Domaine de Grand Pre and our own Blomidon Estate Winery in Habitant. The Seyval Blanc is exceptionally fine, although I'll probably have to bring in some Bakeapple Wine from Newfoundland as well.

Of course the cats will be dancing attendance and I suspect there may be no small amount of hilarity as the evening unwinds. Instead of the Dormouse ending up in the teapot, it will likely be Mungus. But a good time shall be had by all.

Do not adjust your sets....this is a test

Oh hi, don't mind me....I'm just testing to see if my migration of feeds as per Google's latest decree is a success or not. This post will disappear after I've proved to myself that I exist. Errrr, that Bloomingwriter still exists. I'm fairly sure I exist, with or without Feedburner. Although with the cold I'm having, I'm not entirely sure about anything except that Vicks helps with a stuffedup head.

If you're using a feed to read my posts, feel free to leave a comment so I know things are working. I changed my feed at Blotanical but I'm 13 hours behind Stuart who hosts the site, so it might take a while for him to manually check and make the change.

A Little Gratuitous Garden Porn

Okay, we're six days into February, which means we're more than halfway through winter. Let's have a look on what I see out my back (deck) doors, shall we? 

No, your eyes do not deceive you. Yes, there is snow drifted up PAST the doorknob now. I stress that this is drifted, not complete snowfall. Overall, we're guessing that there's somewhere around 3 feet in snowfall accumulation in the past several weeks. In some places it's much deeper than that, such as around the back door. So I decided that it was time for a little winter-denial, or winter escape, at least temporarily. 

I love tulips. Absolutely love them provided they're planted in drifts or clusters, rather than straight lines. Like my colours more or less together, rather than speckled here and there. 

One of my favourite types of tulips are the viridifloras, those with green among the colours in the petals. This is 'Greenland'. 

The fringed tulips make me very happy, but I'm not entirely sure which one this is. Sometimes they come back for a couple of years, and sometimes they simple suffer from Lost Label syndrome. 

Not only do the big showy tulips float my boat, I love the species tulips, which are smaller, less showy, hardier, and inclined to multiply over years. I planted these Tulipa tarda bulbs years ago, and they come up every spring, regular as clockwork. 

If my notes are correct, this fringed tulip is 'Carousel', but I have been trying to confirm that with minimal success. I love the delicate fringing on the edges, the flames of red along the creamy-yellow petals. 

The double or peony-flowered tulip 'Uncle Tom' is one of the darkest purple-red (even with sun shining on it). 

Most of the reason I'm so fond of tulips has to do with the way their petals react with light, but I also love their orderly colourful selves. I tend to go for the jewel-hued tulips rather than too many pastel types, and to shun the red-and-yellow mixes that you see sold cheaply at discount stores and from catalogues aiming to make a quick buck. 

These behaved very strangely last year. This is 'Jackpot', an ordinary tulip (I thought), chosen for its deep purple petals edged in white. Instead of getting a dozen flowers from a dozen bulbs, we ended up with somewhere around two dozen or more flowers, in all sizes from crocus to regular tulip blossom size. I have no idea what happened. Since most tulips tend to be annual here (with the exception of some Triumphs, Darwins, and the species tulips), I don't know whether we'll see any of these this spring or not. It was definitely a strange occurrence. 

See what I mean? Have you ever had something like this happen?

Even when they are done, tulips have their own beauty in their exhausted petals. This is the remains of 'Apricot Parrot', I believe, one of my very favourite tulips of all time. Its flowers go through most of the spectrum of the rainbow, with green, gold, apricot pink and even hints of red in the petals as the flower matures. In our garden, tulips begin in early May, but the coolness of our springs means that we routinely have them still blooming into early summer: as in the middle of June. That seems like a long way from now, but the good thing is, I'll get to enjoy most of YOUR tulips via your blogs between now and then. We'll make it through!

Snowdrifts and buntings and robins, oh my!

Does anyone have a good recipe for groundhog stew? I don't think there was any need of getting quite THAT much snow. Actually, we're not even entirely sure how much came down, but it was probably about a foot. On top of what's already there, and with the wind sculpting it into more entertaining drifts, we have enough for the whole country, plus all our friends down South.

The farrier was due this morning and our neighbour came over with his truck to plow our dooryard out. Unfortunately he couldn't find any place to put some of the snow, so he pushed it up to the double doors. Hubby will probably bring the tractor up from the woodlot to rearrange some of this later. The birds you can barely see around the barn are some of the snow buntings. More are arriving every day.
They weren't awfully pleased that I was outside puttering around , and it's too cold and I don't feel great enough to stand or sit waiting them out to come and land in the yard. Just listening to their happy little song did me a world of good, though. The buntings are doing aerial displays as I write this--they're extremely skittish and take off even if they see a shadow at the window, although they seemed pleased to find me come outside first thing. I think they know I'm the Bringer-of-Seeds. But I still might be a predator. 

I was a bit alarmed to find this American robin out front, eating rosehips from one of the multiflora roses I let go wild around here. He's still out there, and still picking at the seeds, and I'm wondering if I ought to put out something protein-filled for him. Sadly, we don't have any earthworms in the cupboard. 

By the way, if you're a Facebook user, I have a few more photos in my Facebook (but I have to friend you because my profile is set to private) I've just learned about connecting to other blogs via this network, so maybe if you haven't, you might consider using Facebook as another way to promote your blog. I know some of you are doing that already, and it's fairly new and has some bugs that need working out, but it's another way to share our love of gardening and nature. 

Gardening with Cats

Our friends at Gardening Gone Wild have put up a new topic for this month's Garden Bloggers' Design Workshop: Pets in the Garden. Now THAT is a topic near and dear to my heart, although most of my feline gardening companions are gone from the garden now.


These are funny looking cats, I know. They're sort of gardening companions, as their pasture and paddocks are all around the edges of the garden, and they tend to come down to the fence and socialize with us as we go about the day to day routine outdoors. Mysteriously, my horse can read my mind--if I'm thinking about riding him, he goes down to the back of the pasture and becomes deaf to whistles, calls, apples in buckets...


Leggo and JennyManyLumps (our donkey-from-Mars) are the reasons I don't grow yew around our property; yew is toxic to horses and donkeys, as are many other plants. I don't worry really about them eating something they shouldn't; they have good pasture and are wellfed in winter, but I do have an aversion to yew.


Of our seven cats, only two of them go outside whenever they want to; they're the senior cats of the house and are quite savvy. They leave the birds alone but do go after assorted rodents: shrews, moles, voles, etc. Some of the others in the house go out with us, either on a harness (Mungus) or just hanging around the back garden. Two of them don't go out at all.


This is Niblets, who used to go outside and zip around the yard, go up trees, 'talk' to us, climb around in the barn...and then one day he tried to cross the road when a vehicle was coming. He survived but lost his back leg, so he lives life as a tripod kitty--very, very well. He roars around the house, zips up and down stairs, onto the table, onto the cat gym...but he doesn't have any lives or legs left to spare, so he stays inside.


And this is Spunky Boomerang. Spunky was one of two kittens we rescued from the roadside a few miles away, and he has never, EVER expressed any desire to go outside again, in the five years since we rescued him. Nope. Not a chance. He's my personal babycat, follows me all around the house, sleeps against me in chairs, at the desk, in bed, lays on towels in the bathroom while I shower...but go outside? No thank you, Mumsie. One day the patio door was open, some of the badnesses escaped, and Spunky went out onto the deck. He was scared and I had to rescue him from under the picnic table. I swear all the doors in the house could be open now and he wouldn't try to go outside. He figures he has it good, now.


Thistle goes outside regularly, and loves to follow me around when I'm digging in the garden. The cats who go outdoors probably dig in the beds to do their business sometimes, but it's not been a concern or an issue with us. Likewise if any feral cats are around; we live on seven acres, and are surrounded by fields and woodlands, and cat droppings bother me far, far less than dog droppings. 

Those who don't get to go outdoors without us tend to have a bit of outdoor envy; while those who go outside do perhaps tease the others just a little bit. What I'd like to do is create an area where we could let them out to romp around without harnesses or worry; that would require some creative designing, with some page-wire and posts, a shrub to lay under and lots of catnip to chew on. It hasn't been a huge priority though, and we have some work to do around the property that takes precedence. 

As for designing the garden with the cats in mind, I haven't worried about toxic plants. Cats don't seem to be as inclined towards eating plants that are toxic to them as dogs do. I've never had a cat poisoned by a plant outside or indoors, although inside to be on the safe side there are a few that I won't have around, like dieffenbachia and Jerusalem cherry. I tend to have planned more of the garden with birds in mind; creating safe places for them to feed and nest. When we had more cats who went outdoors, I made sure the feeders were far from trees or shrubs or other spots where fierce primal felines might try to stalk birds, but now, with Thistle 12 and Rowdy going on 11, I don't worry. They are too well fed and laid back to worry about chasing birds. Or maybe when we had chickens, they learned not to challenge winged creatures. 
Of course if they can't go outside, they can always watch bird television. Sometimes, there's an added pay-per-view Squirrel Channel, but that doesn't happen very often. 

And then there's Mungus, truly the smartest and baddest cat in the family. He's adorable. And mischievous. And somewhat spoiled by his 'daddy', my longsuffering spouse. (well, okay, maybe a little bit by me, too). They're totally bonded. In the years we've lived here, we've had as many as 12 cats at a time, and while we've lost a few over the years to old age or illness, we've lost three to the road. Including two of my hubby's favourites. We don't want to take any chances with Mungus, so we taught him to go on a harness in a matter of about fifteen minutes. He's quite content to go out on the harness and 'help' me in the garden. Occasionally, his nosiness gets the better of him, as in the day he went to say hello to our Donkey-from-Mars. She thought he was a coyote. He thought it was a good idea to retreat. 

My best gardening companion for years was Tigger, our sweet ginger marmalade bobtail. He LOVED to help me in the garden, which normally meant just following me around, sitting beside me, bumping and purring. So it was kind of fitting that he died out in the garden last spring, probably of a heart attack. He'd had a long good life, but it was still very sad. Like the others we've lost over the years, we buried him in the garden and planted a shrub in his memory. As my grandmother said, "I was always good to cats, and they were always good to me." I want that to be my epitaph. 

The Prognostications of Shubenacadie Sam

In Nova Scotia, February 2 or Groundhog Day is celebrated by some who gather at the wildlife park in Shubenacadie. At the alloted hour, handlers gently awaken Shubenacadie Sam from his warm burrow and entice him out to give his prophesy. He's the first groundhog in North America to make his prediction, being the most easterly-residing prophet.
This, however, isn't Shubie Sam. I nicknamed him Marconi because his burrow was near the remains of a Marconi station at Point Amour Lighthouse in southern Labrador. 
My travelling companion and I met Marconi by the lighthouse the day of much great wind, on our return from Battle Harbour in the Battle Islands. He was quite complacent about us following him around for a while...

When he decided he'd had enough, he scurried off across the field and we took that as our cue to go to the lighthouse. 

As to whether Sam will see his shadow today or not? He might see it, but either way, it'll probably take at least 6 weeks for the snow we have now to melt. It just gets deeper every day. But I console myself that things are well insulated in the gardens, and my work allows me to stay home if there IS a weather tantrum happening. The days are getting longer, there's heat in the sun on those days when it IS out, so we'll make it through. We always do, don't we?

As a special Groundhog Day/Imbolc gift to us, my Longsuffering Spouse looked out the window as the sun was coming up to find our favourite backyard visitors are finally here. The snow buntings have arrived and were happily snacking under the big feeder.

These charming and busy little birds are one of those things that make me instantly happy. The pictures are from last year, as my other GroundHog Day gift is the wicked cold my hubby has had the past few days, so I won't be venturing outside today to try to take pictures. Please pass the orange juice and the Buckleys! HOW many more weeks of winter was that again?

Plants we love to not-so-much love, part 2

There are actually very few things in this world that I dislike strongly enough to say I 'hate'. Canned green peas. Goutweed. Bad bubblegum music and the bimbettes that produce it. Sensationalist 'journalism'. Malware. Most of the time, if there's something that displeases, irks or upsets me, I just dislike it and adopt a 'laissez-faire' attitude towards it. I don't like greedy bankers, but I don't have to deal with any directly. I don't like fashionistas, but they just make me chuckle. And so on.

So it is with most plants that I don't like. As noted in the earlier post, I probably like them just fine in other people's gardens. Most of the time I dislike a plant because it's been overused and overused in unimaginative ways. Anyone who has seen Anna's petunia arrangements knows she could make anyone love any plant because she creates delightful arrangements that are interesting and fresh.

There are a few shrubs and trees that I don't particularly like because they have been overused by lazy, unimaginative "landscapers" who are the equivalent of fast-food yard-designers. Slap in two Norway maples, five foundation evergreens, three clumps of 'Stella D'oro' daylilies, a spirea and a potentilla or two, and voila--instant landscaping. Uh huh. You want fries with that?


It's generally against my nature to cut down a tree or shrub if it's healthy, even if I'm not crazy about it. Hence the line of four Norway maples (Acer platanoides) out by the roadside in front of our house. I didn't plant them; they've been there, I'm guessing, for about 20 years. Every year they invariably get tarspot fungus in them, they have boring fall colour, and they're not native--but they're ubiquitous. Go to Halifax and have a drive around if you don't believe me. Oh, sure, some of them may be the red or bicolour variety, but they're everywhere. My way of counteracting the Norways is to plant native red and sugar maples around our property.

When we first moved here, there were a lot of boring foundation evergreens around here, ranging from a line of globe cedars along one side of the yard to a selection of yews and junipers along one face of the house to assorted other uninspired evergreens slapped in here and there. I got rid of the globe cedars fairly promptly, succeeded in talking my longsuffering spouse into removing the yews and junipers after a few years. A goodsized yew near what is now my office came down fairly promptly too. Yews are perfectly fine plants in their own right. But when I was a teenager, I read an article about a horse being poisoned and dying from eating yew twigs and berries, and it's stuck with me forever. Yews are highly toxic to equines, and while my horse is unlikely to ever get out of the pasture and come around the house to eat the yew (he'd be more apt to go across to my neighbours with our idiotdonkey and fraternize with HIS donkey), I refuse to take chances. Even the gorgeous green-and-gold yew which I think very handsome? Not in my yard. Not worth the risk.

If ever there was a yard and garden cliche, this has to be it. Globe cedars, or more properly arborvitae. Blech. Now, because I'm nothing if not contrarian, I will tell you that there is a goodsized Emerald cedar outside one door of the house and I have left it there for years because we used to decorate it at Christmas with lights. But its days are numbered this spring.

Out in the evergreen garden in the back of our property, I have three other arborvitaes: 'Sunkist', which is a beautiful gold in summer, and 'Sherwood Frost', which was given to me and which I sort of like for its white-tipped branches, and 'Rheingold', (covered in snow, above) which provides me with a rainbow of colour all year long. So far, all of them have come through our winter with no problems, but if they start getting winterburn...they can prepare to face their compost-Maker.

I like most flowering shrubs, especially if they have a pleasing shape and interesting leaves even if they're not in flower. Outside my office there's a fairly large, sprawling, buttercup yellow potentilla, and its days are numbered this spring. Shrubby potentillas do NOT do it for me at all, yet I love the perennial types. Potentillas tend to be hugely overused, but they do flower for a long time. And I did buy a pink-flowered one a couple of years ago and plant it in the memory garden dedicated to my late former mother-in-law, because pink of course is the Breast Cancer colour, and the plants do attract butterflies, which Marilyn loved.

Last on my list of not-beloved woodies are certain spireas, generally the type with white flowers, non-descript growth habits and little to distinguish them once their week-or-two flower period is over. There are a couple of bridal-veil type spireas out front (under the Norway maples, surprise surprise) that are just so uninspiring. Part of the reason I leave them AND the maples where they are is because that's also where the goutweed was planted however many years ago, and I THINK that they, and the Rosa multiflora, and the other aggressive-type perennials I threw in there are finally getting the upper hand on the goutweed. I don't dare remove any of the plants for fear the goutweed will take over the universe. Spireas also grow wild here and they and their domestic relatives are good pollinator plants, so for that they also get a big star.

Despite not liking these bland spireas, I have a whole host of OTHER spireas that I really, really love, for either their foliage colour, fall colour, or cool leaf shapes. These include:
'Tor': Awesome fall colour to the foliage.
'Lemon Princess': brilliant lemony-yellow foliage.
'Crispa': Interesting textured, highly serrated leaves and hot-pink flowers.
'Flaming Mound' and 'Gold Mound'; both have brilliant coloured foliage, in new growth and fall colour. All of them are interplanted with other shrubs and perennials but would drive me crazy if they were lined up like little soliders.

Given the huge variety of plants available to gardeners, whatever their growing conditions and hardiness zones, I figure this is a very small list of things I don't like. It would be awesome if some nurseries and landscapers would stop overusing them in unimaginative ways, but in most cases, these plants tend to be inexpensive at nurseries (and ashphalt 'garden centres' run by bigboxes) and for some so-called landscapers, it's all about cheap, same as with contractors who build houses out of chipboard, 2 x 4s and plastic siding. That's a rant for another day, isn't it?