weekly bloom: interregnum

It's an odd time in the garden right now. Everything is very much growing — no massive die-offs yet! — but we're in that in-between time where the tulips are spent and nothing else is quite ready to take over. There are a few days like this every so often — gardening being far from an exact science.

The garden, this week:

 The theme this week is "anticipation." I have no actual full-throated blooms to show you. The roses don't bloom until June-time, and the coneflowers until the height of summer. The poppies aren't here yet. But there are some indications that a flower show is coming. The columbines are the furthest along:


I remember there were masses of them last year, in the back yard, and I was planning to some of them to the front yard come spring. Well, they forestalled me. I'm actually not entirely sure how. The front and back yards are not physically connected by any strip of soil.


I really think I am going to get a peony this year. Just one. But that's more than I've gotten any other year, so far.

You'll have to look closely, but there are several flower buds in this Oriental poppy:


 And finally, the irises are getting ready for their debut:


The other thing that I did last week, which I forgot to write about (or take pictures of), is put invasives into the front part of the garden. Yes, I planted lilies-of-the-valley. I do love them (despite their tenacity), and the front garden is fairly isolated — they couldn't go far even if they tried (and I have no doubt that they will try). They can duke it out with the periwinkle. I figure, by the time all of the groundcover get established, I will never have to weed again.

when a finished knitted object means an unmoveable force

A close member of my family got married last week, and even though it was a very simple ceremony at the civic centre, the Spanish Inquisition still needed an outfit (read: not her beloved overalls, definitely not her cargo pants — is there anything cuter than a 2-year-old tomboy?). Since it was going to be a cool-ish spring day, I decided that she needed a cardigan to go with her dress.



The pattern is Kitty (Rav link), the yarn is a sock-yarn something, from Lettuce Knit, and the colourway is (I think) "Kitten Whiskers." It's not what I would have chosen. It's a bit too twee, the cream and the pink and the name, and in any case the Spanish Inquisition is the kind of child who insists on feeding herself soup, so generally speaking I know better than to put her in white. But this was a last-minute thing — they announced their intention 8 days before the deed — and the cardigan absolutely had to be white so that it could match a variety of dresses, in case the one I'd ordered didn't arrive in time. So, "Kitten Whiskers" it was, and a green satin ribbon from Mokuba to rescue it from cutesy-ness.

In the end, though — not so much with the wearing. You can see it bunched up in my lap, instead. (Notice how the ribbon matches the dress exactly, though? I'm very proud.)



She just flat-out refused. She's been having a bit of a difficult week; we think her molars are coming in, and so she's been more opinionated, more irritable. And when I asked her to put the cardigan on, she said NO.

Multiple times.

And then grabbed it out of my hands and tried to throw it to the ground.


So, no pictures of the Spanish Inquisition in the cute cardigan. I had, in a fit of cover-my-arsedness, also picked up some pink ribbon that exactly matched the pink splotches in the yarn, so while I vastly prefer the green, I'm going to replace the ribbon and see if she'll change her mind.

Otherwise ... well, I have a couple of neighbours who either have or are expecting girls. And they don't knit.

weekly bloom: tulips ahoy

No gardening this weekend. We were away on Saturday, and Sunday was just indescribably wretched: sporadic rain and hail. Luckily, the garden is relatively maintenance-free right now; I should probably weed a little bit but the situation isn't dire.

The whole thing is in full spring growth mode now, which is a little worrying because there's a frost warning tonight, but what am I supposed to do about it now? Not only have the roses been pruned, but they're also sending out crazy growth; I can't stop it now. In fact, it looks like the garden got through the normal Canadian winter just fine; as far as I can tell, the sum total of the winter casualty list is a small hosta. (I think. I am certain that I had three hostas, and now I have two, but I need to wait until they leaf out before I can determine which two. Also, one of them is awfully skinny, and so its survival may be more tenuous than not.)

I forgot to take an overall picture of the garden this time, but here's a ground-level one of the stone path:

The tulips are "Carnival de Rio," late-spring bloomers, once they're gone tulip season in my garden will be over. On the right are the coneflowers I mentioned above; I think they were white and label-less when I planted them; I'll need to check my notes to make sure.* And behind those, with the fern-like leaves, are Oriental poppies, two of them, also hopefully white — I bought them in the midst of high summer last year, well after their blooming season (and thus got a great deal for them, too). I wasn't sure they would come back, actually, so this is particularly gratifying.

I had declared that, if we did not get any peonies this year, I would tear out one or both plants and replace them with roses — I had even gone so far as to decide which ones — likely Morden Blush or Morden Sunrise. So, of course, one of the peony plants — the older one — is finally budding. About darn time, I say. The thing has been sulking in the ground for three years, sending up a single shoot that leafs out far too short and too early, and breaking my peony-less heart in June.

*Haha. I like to pretend that my notes are precise and thorough, as opposed to being either a) the dates of old digital photos, or — better yet — blog entries, or b) the giant pile of discarded plant tags on the window sill by the kitchen sink.

weekly bloom: the start

The  hellebores came back! They are a little bit more scraggly, a little less well-formed than when I bought them last year; I have left them entirely alone to get established. It seems to have worked. I believe the cultivar is "Ivory Prince," which is one of the commercial hybrids that has upturned, rather than the usual downturned, flowers. (I know: the traditional hellebores are lovely, and getting "Ivory Prince" is sort of akin to getting those black violas, or things-that-look-like-other-things — of course you can do it, but why? But hellebores are so beautiful that I do want to see them, and I am not really a foliage kind of girl.)

The mid-spring tulips have also sprung. These are 'Banja Luka.' This photograph doesn't quite capture their lurid garishness in full sun (they look quite reasonabl here, in fact), but trust me: they are the plastic flowers of the tulip world. The Spanish Inquisition loves to look at them.



I finally laid the path down in the garden weekend before last. The previous owner had had the pavers down, but after I moved almost all of her plants (she had had a thing for shrubbery and 'Roxann' geraniums; I don't, particularly the geraniums), it didn't make any sense. We did want a bit of a path, though, to give the garden a bit of contrast, so I made a winding sort of path that also gave me some natural boundaries to work with.

I made the plan last year, and tried to execute it — but the first round of flanking plants perished the the Great July Die-Off of 2012, and the wooden stakes I had used to mark the tulips' locations disintegrated, so some plants are little closer to the path than I would like. It's a bit raw right now, but after some rain and some growth I'm sure it will be just fine.

The garden two weekends ago:


And the garden yesterday:


You can see that the heat wave we've been having has done wonders for the growth. The mid-spring tulips are blooming now (see above), the chives have gone haywire, as they are wont to do, and the roses and peonies have started leafing out. I may put mulch down soon, around the roses and perhaps the path. I was going to leave everything else — there's periwinkle groundcover by the lavender and patches of violets — and let it all grow in, naturally, but last year taught me that that is just an open invitation to weeds. I'm still mulling it over.

I also pruned the roses in the back garden this weekend, but no photographs of that: that place looks like a wind storm swept through. I only had an hour or so, so I didn't do much, just the pruning, by which I mean I took down seven- and eight-foot long canes. (In some cases, I even yanked them out of the grass, where they had tried to root.)

I'm starting to think that those scabrosas might be climbers.

weekly bloom, redux

I never meant to leave for so long. Actually, I had a whole post written in mid-April, but for some reason I didn't publish it, and then it fell out of my brain and now it's too old. It's the first of May, though, and it's 20 degrees outside, so it seems like a good time to bring back the weekly bloom, doesn't it?


The Giuseppe Verdi tulips have been blooming for almost two weeks now — since the last week of April. This is almost precisely when they bloomed in 2011, as well. (They bloomed a full month earlier in 2012, but we all know that 2012 Does Not Count.) They're almost done, but the mid- and late-spring tulips are springing up right behind them.

I know that often tulips don't act like perennials, but I have to say: this is the third year they've sprung up, and I've only ever planted them once. The lazy gardener (oh, what an apt name) in me is very pleased. I don't know that they've multiplied, exactly, but they've been very dependable for the last three years and I am grateful.

More later. I actually spent almost two hours in the garden over the weekend, cleaning up, and now it looks much tidier and less ... neglected. The roses all seem to have survived, the Oriental poppies are staging a comeback, and there's even a chance I could get peonies this year.