Tag: garden bloggers bloom day

Mid June vignettes

kris5 Comments

you see ladders, I see an arborI really really love my start-of-a-garden and have been so distracted by it that sometimes I stop whatever I’m doing and just walk around and gaze at it from different angles, touch leaves, admire the industry of spit bugs and think about which patch of grass to take out “next!”. frontyard garden - what the camera seesBut as much as I adore it all and think it’s beeeautiful – even the clashes – I find it very hard to photograph. Suddenly in pictures the ignorable periphery shows up crystal clear. I wish I could shoot what I really see – the garden without weeds, cars in the driveway or iridescent pinwheels and fourth of July banners over the hedge; the seedling trees and shrubs full grown, shading and screening; a rocking chair front porch and weathered shingles on the house; and my expansive view of the sunset sky rather than the actual pie slices between chain-link houses and construction zones. Someone really should invent a camera that deletes the coiled hose, coverts the ugly chaise into a funky antique with gracious proportions and paints the great white wall a lovely shade of celadon.

Until the Canon ESP is created and marketed at a reasonable price, closeups and vignettes will have to suffice for best illustrating what I love about my garden. Does your garden live up to your longshot camera view or do prefer taking closeups too?

'Quick Silver' Eleagnus and a bilious spirea - one of my favorite combospenstamon and filipendula - a clash of washoutsthornless blackberry. my mystery plantClematis 'Roguchi'

Many thanks to Carol of May Dreams Gardens for hosting yet another Garden Bloggers Bloom Day and for not barring the door to any of us who are always (un)fashionably late to the party.

Rosa mutabilis, Atlantic poppies and chives

Promises

kris4 Comments

Magnolia stellata in budThere are still summer (and spring!) blooms in my garden which is really inappropriate for a mid-November Garden Bloggers Bloom Day (Thank you, Carol for hosting).  But what really excites me are the buds revealed on my newly naked star magnolia (Magnolia stellata).  This was the first thing I planted after my Z and I bought our house two years one year, 8 months ago* and like our kids (Nino and the kittens) it was a rescue.

The magnolia was offered to me by a co-worker whose parents moved into a new home and rather than keep this stellar shrub, they preferred to junk it and plant a Rose of Sharon instead, no lie.  (The horror!)  Z and I drove over to Portsmouth to check it out – it was a good 5′ tall, 4′ wide, beautifully shaped and fully budded; we dug it up; tortured it by driving it unwrapped over the Mt. Hope bridge; planted it in terrible soil with little amendment and I proceeded to half forget about it during a drought year.  The poor thing.  Last year’s buds were pathetic and few and I hated myself for being a terrible gardener/plant slayer.  I really thought it was a goner.  But it survived.  Bloomed even.  And now it’s entirely budded up in a promise of spring splendor and I couldn’t be more relieved.

Here is further evidence that plants are forgiving of a lazy gardener:

opportunistic Tassel flower (Emilia) in a driveway cracksometimes Forsythia blooms again in the fallPurple love grass (Eragrostis spectabilis) - blooming when it should and going bya lonesome scuttle of peppers ('Fish' I believe)Salvia leucantha and protected Profusion zinnias

By sending this GBBD post off to May Dreams Gardens, I am also making a sort of promise to keep writing about my own garden.  And that means I’ll have to keep gardening (as if I could ever not have a garden) and maybe even follow through with all the promises I made to myself about the garden when we bought this place.  Do you find that blogging about your garden helps you keep your promises?

*time flies but not always as fast as it feels…  Hey, maybe I am still 28!