gardening: observing, planning, designing, and editing
There are three natives in this yard that develop good-sized seed collections, which start getting distributed in July: twinleaf, trillium, and false Solomon’s seal. These plants did very well setting fruit this spring, but the nonnative Solomon’s seals, which seem to like similar habitats, did not.
Twinleaf seedpods are very silly—eventually they split open at that manic smile of a seam, ready to dribble seeds nearby.
The overnight low was in the 70s, and it was over 80°F before 10 a.m. this morning. You would need a soup spoon to get through the ozone-fortified, humid atmosphere outside. What a great time to sit under a ceiling fan and revisit the cooler days of May—and purpleness—but non-iris purpleness. Continue reading “Cooling Off: a Look Back at Spring Purpleness”
April is the greening month. The earliest spring plants, which came up with not a trace of green, such as rue anemone and twinleaf, turn green. Other plants, such as crested iris and Pennsylvania sedge do most of their growing in these few weeks.
Continue reading “The Greening of Spring and Foreshadowing of Summer”
“Irrepressible” certainly applies to rabbits—chipmunks too, come to think of it—but late April into May seems to belong to the rabbits. These two did not budge when I came out with safflower seeds for the finches.
More recently, I have seen a small bunny, offspring I am sure, darting between hostas. It would be lovely if these rabbits would develop a taste for lawns. The height they mow the blue fescue to would be OK with me.
We’ve mostly gotten enough rain for the ferns. There are two very different ferns in this yard: the lady fern is small and well behaved, while the ostrich fern is big and…enthusiastic.
Last year’s leaves that are mulching the rain garden are a key to this fern’s size. Each of these small, erupting ferns could just about be covered by the oak leaf in the lower right-hand corner of the photograph below.
Looking at the bluebell photographs that I never got around to posting last year, two things stick out: this year’s bluebells came up over two weeks earlier than last year, and they did not get nibbled by ravenous rabbits. There are limits to what they will eat after all.
Like all spring ephemera, twinleaf lives the expression carpe diem—seize the day. It takes about a month from groundbreaking to seed-setting. They erupt from faintly greenish pods, with flower buds wrapped protectively in reddish purple leaves.
What a dreary, dreary month. It’s…Novemberish. November has Thanksgiving, its saving grace, but it is gloomy, chilly, and daylight disappears noticeably. And here we are, in January, and it’s gloomy, chilly, and daylight has not reappeared because of the heavy cloud cover. And it snowed overnight; heavy, wet snow.
This is being posted in 2024. This post was drafted last year, but languished on my computer following an accident. I am dating this according to when the photographs were taken so that the posts land in the right spot in the timeline.
So much for August. August brought rain, causing some plants to sulk and wait for drier days. September is feeling more like August—a lot of dry, sunny days with pleasant temperatures.The Japanese anemones budded a little late, but bloomed the first week of September, as usual. They had—I kid you not—flower stalks that are pushing 4 feet in height. I did not have to bend over to get photographs of these flowers, which just started to bloom.
It is not your imagination—this is being posted in 2024. This post for July 2023 and the next, for September 2023, were drafted last year, but languished on my computer following an accident. I am mostly recovered, and finally have the bandwidth to take care of the fun, but nonessential, things in my life. I am dating this according to when the photographs were taken so that the posts land in the right spot in the timeline.
It seems like an odd time of year to see mushrooms, but we’ve had roughly 1 ½ inches of rain since July 11. We started the year with a rain deficit, then caught up on rain until May, which was quite dry. June was OK, but July has been unusually wet. Continue reading “Mushrooms in July!”