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| A picture of our new fence, installed last fall. |
Greetings! It's been an entire year since I've posted here, but I thought I'd share some photos and updates of what's been going on with me and in my gardens.
I was pretty busy last fall and winter, as my brother and I moved my mom from her home of 60 years three hours away, to an apartment near me. This was a major logistical challenge, and this spring we cleared out her house and listed it for sale.
But I was ready to get back to my gardens by May of this year. Also, I had been hoping for many years to have an open garden, and last summer I determined that early June this year would finally be the time. I'd had a few small groups visit before, but I'd never announced my garden being open to the general public before.
The pressure was definitely on to get my gardens shipshape, although the weather this spring wasn't ideal: April was cold and rainy, so I did hardly any garden work, and then the summer blow-dryer was suddenly switched on at the end of April, with no rain and hot winds for almost six weeks. But we still managed to do some necessary projects and improvements:
Our New Picket Fence
Last fall we finally bit the bullet and replaced our rotting wood fence with a vinyl fence. One of the things I've really loved about this house since we bought it (in 2008, more than 18 years ago) was the white picket fence surrounding it. But it was totally rotten within a few years, so we replaced it in 2011 with a cedar picket fence, which every 2-3 years our family has spent a day or two laboriously painting. But still it too rotted: the pickets were breaking off when I touched them and even the posts were rotting out of the ground. Grr. I considered steel and aluminum fences, but they don't make flat pickets in those materials (at least here in the US), and composite still isn't very good according to reviews. So vinyl it had to be.
The new fence looks a lot better than the rotting previous fence, and the better vinyl fences have improved quite a bit in the past decades, so maybe it will look good for a while. And we'll never have to paint it again!
But the fence installers displaced many of the paving stones inside the fence when removing the old posts, and my gardens were a wreck this spring:
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| The Paradise Garden looked pretty ragged on May 1 of this year. Most of the paving stones and steel edging along the left side were displaced by the new fence and needed to be re-laid. My 20-year-old son very kindly helped me fix things. |
New Paver Paths
Another bigger project was adding pavers between my Herb Garden and my east patio beds. I removed the sod with a shovel and leveled the area, and my son laid the pavers over gravel and sand.
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| My son is getting pretty good at doing this.... |
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| This is the new "Superhighway" to my Herb Garden. My son also dug out two of the boxwoods to make a new, second entrance into the Herb Garden closer to our house. (It used to have just one entrance at the far end at right.) I hope this new sidewalk will keep grass from invading the flower beds around the patio. |
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| Here it is from the opposite angle. We also leveled up and laid pavers between the Herb Garden and this side of the flower beds around the patio. There used to be a strip of lawn and more fence between them, and grass and weeds constantly invaded that bed, growing under the fence. (The fence used to entirely enclose this area, with a gate at the sidewalk at left, and another gate in the distance near the corner of our house. But we liked the open, un-fenced view on this side of our house, and I also wanted to connect the Herb Garden with the patio and pergola--plus keep out the grass.) |
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| A view from the patio under the pergola. This view is why we didn't want to re-install the fence here. Clematis 'Princess Diana' is covered with beautiful hot pink, bell-shaped blooms every June. |
Our son, an engineering student, is moving out this fall to live closer to college, and I will definitely miss both him and his help with projects like these....
A Few Photos
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| Looking across the new picket fence and our small lawn, to the Paradise Garden. I thought this clematis ('Jackmanii' I think) was dead last year, but it has bloomed beautifully for nearly two months. |
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| My roses were attacked by spider mites a couple of weeks before my open garden, which sent me into a panic. Apparently that's caused by hot dry weather stressing the roses. So I sprayed insecticidal soap and sprayed them off with the hose every other day, and they mostly recovered by opening day. |
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| I allow the bachelor buttons to seed everywhere, and they always fill in any spots I need early-summer color. |
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| Now in June, the lilies are blooming in the Paradise Garden, and the tall snapdragons are making a show. The lilies smell lovely. |
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| A patriotic display for our semiquincentennial 250th anniversary of The United States of America. A solar light with red, white & blue stars illuminates at night, which is surprisingly pretty. |
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| We bought a new ornamental rock for the West Island, and placed it in front of a sumac tree (rhus glabra) cultivar we planted a couple of years ago. The edge of the rock echoes the shape of the trunk. |
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| A closeup of the rock shows the interesting silvery places in the orangey-pink rock. I'm not sure what kind of rock this is, possibly feldspar with mica. But the silver glitters in the sunlight and it's really pretty. |
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| The east patio is surrounded by mostly tropical plants, many of them potted houseplants that overwinter in my sunroom or in my basement under lights. The patio is a very nice shaded place in summer. |
The day after our garden tour, it finally started raining again after our mini-drought. We then got probably around eight inches of rain over the next two weeks. It was strangely cool too, for June, and I didn't need to water anything at all for almost three weeks. Plants and lawns look green and lush again. :-)
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| A green and verdant land... |
New Camera
Finally, I've begun learning how to use the better digital camera, a Sony Nex-6 with Sony 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6, that my father gave me a decade ago before he passed away. I was always too intimidated and too busy to learn how to use it before, and I just used my pocket camera, a Canon Powershot, for all my personal, garden, and research photos. (I don't have a smartphone, so I always keep my Powershot in my purse.)
I'm now taking a Udemy online professional photography course, and have been taking photos using both manual settings and the camera's autoshoot programs, using a tripod, and figuring things out. This will be a yearslong process--just like learning how to garden.
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| Potted mint with a small ornament I kept from my mother's garden |
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| A wild turkey wandered into our back yard, and I captured it with my zoom lens communing with my metal crane statues through the window, while seated at my desk. I bought these cranes last fall when I was writing a paper about the use of bronze crane sculptures in prewar gardens of Japan, which will be published by the Journal of the North American Japanese Garden Association at the end of this year. |
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| Getting down on the ground gets harder each year, but it can make better photos.... |
I hope your own gardens are looking lush, green, and flower-filled, and that your photos can capture just how lovely they are. Thanks for reading! -Beth
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