Blooming where we're planted...however we want!

It's not an earth-shattering secret to declare that I don't like garden gnomes. 

I resisted the temptation, some years ago when I was stuck at an awful bed and breakfast locale in Newfoundland and Labrador, to swipe the two ugly garden gnomes out in the 'garden' as I was leaving, and ensconce them on the top of Gros Morne. I did bump them with my suitcase and knock them over, but didn't hurt them in any way. Whew. I feel better for having 'fessed up to that. 

My dislike of garden gnomes, however, is purely personal and really rather good-humoured. I LOVED the whimsical book "How to Survive a Garden Gnome Attack", which might not be high lit-er-ah-chure, but is darn funny, and hey, I can even enjoy a whimsically placed gnome or three. I'm not a zombie-fan but I've seen zombie gnomes and they reduced me to chortles of glee. 

The reason for this confession comes as a result of a discussion that happened on Twitter and on the blog of my friend and fellow gardening addict, Colleen Vanderlinden of In the Garden Online. Colleen took umbrage, rightfully so in my opinion, at some negative and critical posts and comments about 'crimes against gardening' posted by another writer. She didn't like the idea of being critical of other gardeners just because we don't share similar tastes. 

Nothing Subtle about November in Nova Scotia!

Today was one of those weather-perfect days that are rare gems in my province during the month of NO-vember. Regular readers of my writings know that I regard this month with about as much enthusiasm as I do filing my taxes or cleaning out the cats' litterboxes, because it can be such a dreary month, full of storms and grey drabness.

This November has been a month of bombast. We've had several wicked wind and rain storms, and when it hasn't been raining, it's still been blowing gales of wind. Enough wind happened this weekend that it knocked down my blue pergola (since repaired and uprighted by Longsuffering spouse), flattened some perennials not already flattened, and just generally created garden mayhem. But it's getting to be that time of the season, when things are truly winding down.

"April is the Cruelest Month..."

It shouldn't be at all surprising that TS Eliot is one of this English major's favourite authors, and The Waste Land one of my favourite poems. Yes, it's complex, and most people don't know more than the first few lines, which sum up the current situation in my garden:

April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.

Midweek Farch Miscellany: Ice, cold, and dreams of daffodils

Trying to be optimistic here, as we have had two outbursts of really bad weather in the past 5 days. This has resulted in more snow, but also bouts of rain and freezing rain, resulting in a glacier in most of the yard. The good news is, the snow isn't blowing around. The bad news is...the horse and donkey would need ice skates crossed with snowshoes to be able to cope with being outdoors. So they are barn-grumpy.

Still, there is plenty of beauty to behold, like these seedheads of inula against a wintery sky...

The Very Historic Gardens...A Nova Scotia Must-see

While western and southerly parts of North America are beginning to relax into their anticipation of spring's arrival, SOME of us are still getting bludgeoned with winter weather. As we shoulder yet another winter storm of snow-rain-sleet-snail-whatever out of the sky, I thought we could use an escape from it all. So let's go to one of the most beautiful places in Nova Scotia: Annapolis Royal Historic Gardens.

The Gardens were established 30 years ago on a 17 acre parcel of land overlooking the tidal Annapolis River, adjoining an area first settled in 1605 by the French explorer Sieur de Mons and cartographer Samuel de Champlain. The community originally named Port Royal was variously occupied by the French and the British for over a century until the latter finally took it for the last time and renamed the settlement Annapolis Royal in honour of then-monarch Queen Anne. 

A Little Midwinter Miscellany

Most of the time, I don't mind winter. I really don't. It's an important part of life in much of North America, and it's crucial for both the garden and the gardener. It's a time for plants to rest, and gardeners to look back at what we have done in the past, and look ahead at what we plan for the future. It's a good season for catching up on our reading.

However...the past two weeks have been a bit much, and this week in particular has been so over the top as to be absurd. We are not just blanketed in snow: we are quilted, duveted, down-comfortered and Arctic-sleepingbagged with the stuff. It's not just a few inches deep--it's a few FEET deep. As in this drift, which is well over four feet tall and extends across the back of the garden.

Skywatch Friday: After the Snow

The first serious, get-down-and-boogie snowstorm came along on Wednesday, with nearly a foot of snow blanketing everything and creating wonderful snow-art, ranging from dustings on asclepias pods to drifts in some of the borders. Hey, if we are going to have winter, we might as well have snow, to protect those hellebore buds from the vagaries of temperature shifts so that they will bloom when spring comes!

A heavy snowfall accompanied with impressive winds tends to make everything look new, interesting and fresh. Although the grey skies tend to make for a bit of a monochromatic Skywatch Friday, things are serene and relaxing as I walk around the property.

Winter-themed Plants for a White New Year...

I trust that everyone has had a wonderful Christmas, although many of us have been plagued by weather challenges. Here, the Green Christmas gave way on Boxing Day night to an onslaught of weather, including freezing rain, rain, snow, and much wind, assorted power outages and other adventures. Today, the weather continues, blasting us with a few of those 'flurries where winds blow onshore'. But that's fine with me as I have not been outside for two days, content to read, write, nap and otherwise wind down from the chaos of Christmas.


When we were still snow-less in Scotts Bay, I got to thinking about various plants that have snow-related cultivar or common names, thinking that would make for an amusing post. Some of the plants that I have in my garden include Hemerocallis 'Roses in Snow.'

Wordless Wednesday: Powerless Wednesday, post storm

A wee bit of verbiage to explain today's photos, which are only taken with my iPhone. Monday night, the Annapolis Valley was lambasted by a storm worthy of hurricane status. Many of us, including our house, are still without power, due to huge numbers of uprooted and broken trees and downed power lines. We're safe and just waiting for the power to be restored, 40 hours later...others sustained damage from tractor trailers blown off roads to buildings collapsed.

Nova Scotia Power has some explaining to do. Seriously.

A Remedy for NO-vember: spring bulbs indoors & out

It's no secret that NO-vember is my least favourite month in the calendar. The lack of light gets to me, and today, the first day of going back to Atlantic Standard Time, it's dark at just after 5 pm. We've been deluged with rain the past several days too, so it's dreary and dark and soggy outside. HOWEVER...

...I did get a significant number of spring flowering bulbs planted before the rains started. The anticipation of them is a balm for the soul--remembering springs past, and springs to come. When I plant bulbs, I think of Stan Rogers' song The Field Behind the Plow, and though I'm not planting food crops, I like to think of planting bulbs like Stan felt about planting grain or potatoes or whatever, as putting "Another season's promise in the ground."

Bulbs amaze me. Those insignificant looking little nubbly lumps of plant material disappear deep into the garden's beds and borders, sleep for a few months, then burst forth in a rainbow of colour. From the most exotic to the (some might say) humble crocus, they're all wonderful.

The tenacity and determination of Galanthus (snowdrops) delights me. Some years, they're pushing through melting snow in their haste to get up and blooming. They shrug off frosts, and multiply each year.

Are you acquainted with Leucojum, given the common name of Summer Snowflake? For many, they bloom in late spring rather than summer, but in our cooler spring garden they have held on until well into June. Think of them as something like taller, elegant snowdrops. I think they're underused and wonderful.

Another of my favourite small wonders is Puschkinia, or striped squill. It's an early bloomer too, following along after the snowdrops and usually accompanying the hellebores. This is another colonizer, great for rock gardens and front-of-border plantings.

Alliums are fabulous, deer resistant, come in all sorts of colours and sizes...some have excellent, longlasting seedheads, and some self seed, like the amusing 'Hair', which I'll show in the next post.

Another excellent and later blooming species is Sicilian honeybells, Allium bulgaricum (formerly Nectaroscordum siculum or N. bulgaricum). It's another favourite, so unique with its green, purple and white bell clusters.

The petite Iris species like I. reticulata are enthusiastic bloomers, barely clearing the soil before their colourful blossoms form a petite-pointe against the awakening soil.

For those who crave true-blue flowers, you can't go wrong with scilla, or squill, with its nodding, cobalt blue flowers. Scilla forms gradual colonies and works well under deciduous shrubs and mixed with taller bulbs such as daffodils and early to midseason tulips.
Fritillaria are another great choice for those plagued by deer and squirrels in their gardens. This is the chequered or snakeshead lily, F. meleagris. Frits can be bothered by scarlet lily beetle, although I've never encountered this as a problem.

Chionodoxa is commonly called glory-of-the-snow, and is another of my favourite small wonders for the front of borders or in rock gardens. When happy, they gradually form nice colonies in blue, white...

or pink! They are very popular with early pollinators, as are the crocus.

The first time I planted winter aconite, I put them in too soggy an area of the garden, and they didn't come back for me. This year, I've put them in what I hope is a more convivial situation (although with all this rain, everything is currently soggy!) and I hope they'll delight me with their cheery little flowers.

Don't forget to plant some bulbs for indoor colour; you can often purchase pretreated hyacinths, which you just plant and wait to bloom, or else you can buy the less expensive untreated bulbs, give them 14 weeks of cool temperatures (under 45 degrees F) and then bring them into bloom. They were a real boon to me last winter. Just the thought of them makes the day a little brighter.

Next time: the bigger, showoff bulbs: tulips, daffodils, and more alliums. Do you have all your bulbs planted yet?

Skywatch Friday: The last rose of summer...or not?

Since autumn's official arrival, we've had an amazing amount of wind here on the upper Bay of Fundy. Wind scouring in off the Bay can be hard on plants, tearing foliage off (especially when accompanied by heavy rain) and sometimes doing serious damage to plants and other structures.

This rose, however, photographed in one of the small communities a little further down the shore from Scotts Bay, is oblivious to the weather, still blooming in late October. I have roses still blooming too, but this one right on the shore deserved accolades. So it's my choice for Skywatch Friday.
Meanwhile, it's another windy day here, and the Bay is roiling and threatening accordingly. Hard to believe it's the same tranquil body of water that we go fishing on in warm weather. Those days, probably, are done for this year. And it looks like we're heading into a record breaking season of wind. Keeps the dust down, right?

Skywatch Friday: Stormy Waters, Sunflower Skies

I am almost fashionably late with my Skywatch Friday post, but since I popped up for air from working and started reading other blogs, I realized what day it was!

As you know from other posts, including my previous one, Hurricane Earl was pretty much a non-event in my part of the world. We did get some rain, and some wind, and it did make for a few good waves on both the Atlantic and Fundy coasts of Nova Scotia. This is a scene at Halls Harbour, a few miles down the coast from me.
As a nice juxtaposition from that bombastic weather, some blissfully smiling sunflowers that I saw today while visiting a local home for special care. The people who own that facility have huge gardens all around the grounds, and they are well cared for and interesting--and much appreciated by both the residents and those who visit loved ones there. A sunflower to me is always a cause for smiling, and these basking under blue skies made me that much happier.

Skywatch Friday: The calm before Earl...

Thursday morning I went outside just after sunrise, when the sky was simply heat-haze coloured as opposed to blue, to take a walk around the gardens and record what they look like while we wait to see if Hurricane Earl comes a-calling. It seemed like a good idea to have a look at the mass of bloom still happening in my garden, when things are relatively tidy and floriferous and there wasn't a breath of wind to disturb the scene. So although it's not really sky-oriented, this is my offering for this week's Skywatch Friday.

A variety of hydrangeas provide a backdrop for this wash of perennials, evergreen and deciduous shrubs. I refer to this as my mini-prairie-in-progress, with panic grass, rudbeckias, and other coneflowers consorting with bee-enticing plants such as agastaches and eryngiums. The bees were extremely busy this morning, loving the heat, and perhaps knowing that there is inclement weather coming. They bustle around the garden, diving into flowers and essentially ignoring me. I listen to them and smile a lot.

My coneflowers are still going very strong in their bed. I mentioned on Facebook that Longsuffering Spouse kindly edged around this bed on the weekend, cutting out a good foot of sod and then adding well-composted manure to the bare ground. In a few weeks time, it'll be perfectly suited for tucking in some springflowering bulbs, and next spring I'll spread the perennials out, moving some of the coneflowers forward and letting the taller ones work as a backdrop.

The outburst of gold in the centre foreground is Solidago 'Little Lemon', a cultivated goldenrod sent to me last year by Dugald Cameron of GardenImport. It's thriving beautifully, and is becoming one of my favourite later-season flowers. I plan to divide the plant and move it to another bed where it can spread out and consort with eupatorium and other later-season stars.

Signs of the closing down of summer: some of the miscanthus are beginning to put up their tall, wispily elegant flower heads over their fountaining foliage, while Actaea 'Pink Spike' is in full bloom. Tanacetum 'Isla Gold' is blooming enthusiastically, although I plant it more for its gold foliage, which is starting to fade to a bright lime green now, and Monarda 'Raspberry Wine' is still providing lots of food for the lingering hummingbirds. It'll be interesting to see if they stay beyond tomorrow or if they take off on their migration before the arrival of Earl.

We're not terribly concerned about Earl, whether he arrives as a hurricane or a tropical storm. Living in a rural community on the shores of the Bay of Fundy means that we expect bombastic weather from time to time, and we are generally prepared for it. Those of you who are regular readers know that we get truly rude winter storms, and usually at least one tropical storm or diminishing hurricane as summer winds down. So things may be messy on Saturday, and there may be some flattened flowers and defoliated shrubs come Sunday, but I'd sooner that we took the brunt of it than the apple and pear producers down in the Valley below us. It could be a difficult weekend for them.

Anodyne for April-is-the-cruelest-month-itis

Well, it had to happen sooner or later. The weather finally remembered that this is April in Nova Scotia, and threw a hissy fit worthy of a prima dona ex-federal tory cabinet minister stuck in a Charlottetown airport. There was no bad language out of the weather, tis true, but there was plenty out of me while I watched wind, rain, snow, more wind, chilly temperatures, and of course, yet more wind over the past few days.


However, I laugh in the face of such adversity. Ha. Ha.


Guess that wasn't overly convincing, was it? Okay, yes, I'm still cranky about the weather. But I've been using the inside days to get other work done so I can take a day off and go outside when April resumes behaving like a genteel lady once again. In the meantime, let's talk about some spring performers that make us happy. Like Lantana, which of course is an indoor performer at present but will be festooning many of my containers when the weather warms up again (top photo of Landmark sunrise).

Or primulas. I am very fond of them and have a few, though I plan to have a few more sooner rather than later. The watercolour one in the second photo is a lovely plant at the NSAC rock garden, and I'm hoping it has babies to share. This brilliant red and gold character came from Lloyd Mapplebeck's nursery last spring, and looks to be multiplying at a good rate. None of these primulas are in flower yet, I hasten to add. We're early, but we're not that early.

This brave soul, on the other hand, is close to flowering. This is Primula frondosa, the cutest little alpine-like primula you ever saw. We're talking tiny; each rosette is about the size of my camera lens cap, and the flowers are pea-sized. I love it.
Sneezing, looking around resentfully, but putting in an appearance is my old friend the hepatica. This simple little bloom makes my heart happy every spring when it and its friends put in an appearance. A native of Nova Scotia but all but extirpated, I got this from a nursery that grew its own plants from seed years ago. It's very slowgrowing, however, so I don't expect to have the woods awash in it any time soon.

The pieris that my friend Dick Steele gave me is quivering with anticipation. Just a few more days, and it will erupt into displays like this, it promises me. I've cut the holly back this year so the pieris has more room to shine.

Ah, the beautiful blues of scilla. This is one of those true blue flowers that just makes my heart happy to see it. It multiplies nicely, not insanely fast but with good persistance, and its cobalt blue flowers are very satisfying.

This rock cress is a determined plant. As soon as the weather warms up even slightly and sunlight hits it on its rocky hillside, it's in bloom. I haven't had as good success with the more lavender and magenta forms, but the white one does splendidly for me year after year.

A little foliage now, to excite us about things to come. Polemonium 'Stairway to Heaven' is reminding me that I love it for its foliage as well as for its softly blue flowers later in the spring.

And lastly, a perfect, exquisite, fragrant magnolia from down in the Valley. Mine aren't in bloom yet, and are still enough wrapped in their furry perules (those furry seed coverings) that the chilly weather won't harm the buds. I've convinced myself that I really should add one of the hardier yellow-flowered magnolias to the garden this year. Don't you think that's a good idea too?