in progress

I missed May. How did I do that? The confounding thing is that I didn't even know I had done that. Skipping a month or two — or, er, seven — isn't an unusual thing around here, certainly, but usually I manage to keep track of exactly how bad a blogger I actually am. But to be worse than I thought? That's just demoralizing.

Anyway, this gardening-and-working-and-baby-and-blogging thing is turning out to be a bit more difficult than I anticipated. Time, of course, is at a bit of a premium (always). At least I used to be able to garden when the baby was asleep. The problem now is juggling the other things: I've taken photographs, but then neglected to upload them to somewhere accessible, and there's no time to blog. And then I find the time, but then the photographs are out of date ... and it's June now, a warm June (following a warm May), which means that the garden is changing fast; anything older than a week or so is out of date. So then I wait until I can take photographs, and the cycle begins anew.

So I've just thrown up my hands and given up. These photographs are from May 24 and 25. The garden doesn't look like this any more — the irises have stopped blooming, for example, and the weigela is just about done — but it did look like this, not too long ago, and for now I'm going to say that that's good enough.


The weigela bloomed, as it does, and it made me happy — as it does. I didn't get a chance to prune it this year, though it desperately needs it, so it's a bit more scraggly looking. Still lovely, though.


And ...strawberries! Although these are, metaphorically speaking, the eggs, not the chicks, and we shall not count them. We've had bad luck with our strawberries; last year we managed to harvest one, and this year looks to be about the same, despite the apparently early abundance. The thing is that we check them, and they are not quite ripe so we leave them alone, and then we check them the next day and they are just ... gone. Eaten by slugs, raccoons, destroyed by rain ... kidnapped by aliens? We don't know. But they're not there. It's disappointing, to be sure, but then again, they are cultivated strawberries and rather bland — the farmer's market ones are better at this time of year — so it's not a great loss. I think next year I will work on finding alpine strawberries, and plant those, and perhaps it will be better.

The promise of bare briars in mud

The roses came last week! I ordered bare root stock from Pickering Nurseries - Sheridan didn't have a great selection of non-hybrid teas, and this way I got to choose almost exactly what I wanted. (Almost. I started looking in earnest around the beginning of the month, and they were already sold out of the more popular varieties.)

The initial plan called for a mixture of peonies and ground cover shrub roses, but after realizing that perhaps I would really prefer blooms for more than two weeks a year - gorgeous as they are - I decided to excise the peonies in favor of more roses.

Also, I may or may not have fallen in love with some wildly inappropriate cultivars (but isn't that always the way?) and needed the room. There will still be a border of 'The Fairy' roses - dwarf polyanthas - that are easygoing ( as roses go), and bloom continuously. In the corner near the door, a David Austin variety, 'Graham Thomas,' a yellow English rose. It grows to five feet, which is a bit excessive, but I couldn't resist. (I had already had to give up my dream of one or two 'New Dawn' climbers, there being nothing for them to climb in the front garden.)

(One thing that I did not realize, and which seems a bit obvious in the picture above, is that 'The Fairy' is super thorny. Since I may or may not be slightly allergic to rose thorns ... this will be Interesting.)

The third and final variety is a tiny shrub rose called 'Amber Sun,' a reasonable recent variety with a slightly silly name, but lovely flowers. Supposedly they are pale pink with an orange overlay, and the flowers fade back to pink. (This garden has a definite theme of pink and purple right now ... I am just going to go with it.)

So we planted these last weekend - not nearly soon enough, as they were obviously coming out of dormancy already. It's looking good so far - we've kept them mounded, as recommended, and I noticed today that shoots are already starting to appear.

Speaking of shoots: the peonies are not entirely gone from the plan. Remember the two peony plants last year that didn't take? I had assumed they had died - one definitely did; it had some kind of root rot - and the other sent up leaves, but was stunted and never came to anything.

Well, it's back, weirdly and unexpectedly (and smack in the middle of the rose garden, of course.) it is still super small - I see peonies in other gardens and they are so much taller before they lose their waxy red color and leaf out. But perhaps that is merely an age thing. I have made some space for it (and it now has the advantage of being near the roses, where I have heavily amended the soil with Good Things), and we shall see what happens.

This weekend: hopefully back garden clean up - it's far past time to prune the rugosas - and possibly restarting the herb pot. I've been waiting for it to be definitively frost free; they do better when I leave them outside for the season. (And yes, this means that I had definitively given up on the herb pot, Mark I. It became something of a very sad, very lost, cause.)

 

 

photoblog: cherry blossoms (and a magnolia)

Last weekend, we went to High Park to look at the cherry blossoms. We'd never actually been before. We think that it's one of those things that Torontonians never get around to unless goaded by a visitor — sort of like the CN Tower.




Anyway, the blossoms were open, but it was cold, and there were many, many people — much more than I expected. Apparently cherry blossoms are a "thing." (I think I much prefer the Japanese tradition of laying out a picnic underneath the cherry trees. Here, everyone sort of milled around with their eyes glued to the viewfinder — much less picturesque, and it seemed to miss the point a little, somehow.)




At any rate, it confirmed what I already knew before: cherry blossoms are very pretty, but magnolias are orders of magnitude better. Intrinsically.


(Pd still won't let me pull out the Saskatoon berry to plant a magnolia tree. Sad.)

the before

This is the "official" before photograph — you know, that from which everything will spring. You see, I really did raze the front garden. It took about a week (and the purchase of a really nice shovel). I tried to find a picture of the front garden from last year to compare, but I couldn't find one — I must not have taken one. Probably out of shame. This one is from July 2010, which is a bit unfortunate, because it's very verdant and green, and so the contrast is even starker. At any rate, as you can see, there were many bushes and they had height. Last year was kind of like that, only more so.


And now all of that is gone, except for some of the chives (I don't think I could kill the chives in this place; they will still be here when the Sun burns up), and about half the lavender (ditto). All of the other small specks of green are just remnants — some patches of violets, which will be dug under, and some clumps of iris. That narrow patch of grass between the path and the retaining wall is going to have wildflowers, maybe some calendula, and poppies, so it's going to be let alone (though we did trim back the grass).

Oh, and tulips. I left the tulips. I just couldn't kill them — although I think the neighbourhood cats have been doing it for me. Not only have the taller ones been nibbled, but I'm pretty sure some of them have also been sat on.

the garden is there to be enjoyed

The front garden is a mess right now. (The back garden is, too, but for different reasons: benign neglect, versus active warfare.) Really, it's mostly just dirt. I took advantage of that amazing run of summer-like weather we had, two or three weeks ago, to garden — which, in this case, meant ripping almost everything out: weeds, spirea, unidentified shrubs. And sedum. Lots of sedum.

But some things survived, on a smaller scale, and even thrived with the warm temperatures; with Pd home for his portion of parental leave and the baby napping, I got to play around with the DSLR and lenses. It's been a little while since I've really been able to photograph (instead of "snap pictures"), and I hadn't realised how much I had missed it.

Also, this utterly proves my point that you don't have to know much to take reasonable photographs; as long as you can focus and know a little (not much) about depth of field, you can totally fake the rest.

Giuseppe Verdi tulips; the earliest to bloom. Poor things; they were so enthusiastic when it was 20 Celsius out, and when overnight frosts returned, they just closed right up in agony. They're pretty much spent, now, and will need to be deadheaded this weekend — luckily, the mid-season tulips are coming right up behind; I noticed buds on them a few days ago.

Periwinkle (vinca). I don't care if they're aggressive; I love them dearly. How can you argue with something so pretty, that blooms so reliably and early?

Besides which, the front garden is essentially one big, deep raised bed (as we are on a hill), so the roots aren't going anywhere. I wouldn't let it into the back garden. But at the front — something needs to keep that lavender in check.

Siberian squill — an opportunistic interloper from a neighbour's garden. It's impossible to tell from whom; there are stands, large and small, everywhere in this neighbourhood. I like them as photographic subjects but not as actual plants in the garden; they're slowly getting dug under as I proceed to tear down the yard (quite literally). I'll post photographs of that in a few days.