 |
| Bridge over Denver Botanic stream |
 |
| Utah Sky |
 |
||
| Japanese Pond |
 |
||
| Arbor |
 |
| Pond Plants |
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ // ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
© 2012 written for Ilona’s Garden Journal. An excellent blog.
September
New Project At Hand- A Prairie Spot
September Drought
It has been a dry and heartless September, so what is a gardener to do? Start a new garden bed, of course. Actually, it wasn’t that blithe a decision, since I had been reducing gardened areas.
So why would I now carve out a new, quite large bed from the already reduced lawn area of the front yard?
Dissatisfaction With the Garden
I have been dissatisfied with the front yard ever since I moved here… just couldn’t get used to the way the driveway was so very long and so very strong a presence cutting right up the side of the rambling farmhouse I call home.
The plantings I placed within the “teardrop” are now too large and have never lived up to the pictures of my mind… but that is rather another story. This one relates to the spots of plantings resulting from trees planted and their necessarily mulched clearings.
Two of the trees made it, one died and left an unsatisfactory empty bed something the shape of a newly made grave. I didn’t want to sod it back up… because, well, it just goes against my nature; and I had lots of lovely daffodils in there, so in the early summer it would just be a blotch of long grass and dying daffodil foliage- NOT what one wants right smack in the front yard.
Conundrum
Nevertheless, I am nothing if not inventive in such situations.
I started getting a vision of how uniting this graveyard bed with the large shrub and spruce tree group would give my eye a much more pleasing axis to cut that horrible stiff straight driven driveway line. Not quite straight, which actually made it worse, but this new bed now curves away in a way that I really like. It just meant cutting huge amounts of sod.
In my old city front yard it might have been half the front yard! I can almost feel myself laugh maniacally when I think of it. Anyway, it is now fait accompli. Sod removed, ground tilled, the start of my prairie (not really prairie, but the impression of one) begins with starts of my ornamental grass…which had finally gotten settled in and was thriving.
I also chopped up the coneflowers which were really too large for their place, although I always liked the way they complemented the pyracantha. Now, however, they have full sun, and are now much more in scale with their place in the garden. I dug up some struggling Russian sage, and put that in next to the grasses, too. I am presently deciding what else to put into the bed… then comes mulch to keep the roots from heaving over the winter.
I will have to take some more pictures of the process… so you can see the puny starts of plants in their bare stretch of ground, which is always how a new garden looks here.
Here goes with the ugly process pics ending with a couple pretty things just so you know that eventually it will look nice in the end….
It was chilly that week, and the hose was sort of stiff, and since I was going to solicit the help of teen kids, I knew I better be exact with where I wanted those portions of sod removed. My husband kindly cut the little stakes, we staked it out ( next picture) and joined the cause.
We wanted this new bed to be parallel with the crabapple tree bed which is filled with groundcover (and from which I rescued the barely surviving Perovskia. Just goes to show you can kill almost anything with enough shade and competition. I am crossing my fingers that it will love its new place in the sun and grow well next year. The plants you see in the bed are the Shasta daisies I planted last month.
Now in the photo to the right… the sod coming out, reused in other areas that were low and uneven from the work the county did on the ditch a number of years ago ( with some going to enrich the vegetable garden, too. It was so dry that I just piled some to put into the boxes later. I also filled in the square edge of the previous bed
It was hot and sweaty work that day, but I had four very hard working family members. Thanks guys 🙂 No grumbling either… that was nice.
I promised something pretty. From earlier in the season the lovely Echinacea, which now finds itself divided into bits and pieces for a drift inside the new project flower bed.
 |
|||
| Pink Asters |
No doubt the asters which already bloom nearby will find themselves a place inside the area. They grow like weeds around here. Right now they are the only real source of color in my garden as we are in October already.
Now that I think about it, I will maybe not transplant anything more and wait til next spring. Although it might be a good idea to strew in some hardy annual seed to fill in until the perennials take hold.
Next, I will need to tell you about the gourds. I have LOTS of gourds.
© 2010 Ilona’s Garden Journal.All rights reserved.
Summer Sunshine in a Flower
Hello September from Cottage on the Corner:
Bring me then the plant that points to those bright Lucidities swirling up from the earth,
And life itself exhaling that central breath!
Bring me the sunflower crazed with the love of light.”
~ Eugenio Montale
Beautiful photos of summer sunflowers and tomatoes- the end of the season.
I love T. Opdycke’s celebration of the sunflower, the flower that I think of as quintessentially summer. Her photos are joyful and take you on a tour of her world.
a lovely world it is, too.
© 2010 Ilona’s Garden Journal.All rights reserved.
Outdoor Cleanup
That is the autumn clematis picture collage I made for the plant profile page- the vine is still blooming, but pretty much blown, now. The fuzzy little seedheads are appearing and giving the whole arbor a hazy look. I will post the article this week. Right now I am featuring an article on some of my favorite varieties of tulips. I probably have as many again to write about in a later post.
We are beginning our outdoor cleanup. The leaves are still all on the trees, but the grass needed mowing, weeding needed to be stepped up, and it is time to put away some of the less used outdoor furniture, so there won’t be such a rush when the fall rains come. Some rain is predicted throughout the next week.
I haven’t been driving around the area as much, so when I went out on errands last week it seemed like a wand of time had waved over the fields. I felt very much in the spirit of old Rip van Winkle, to awaken to fields turned overnight to fall tints. The corn, last remembered to be vigorously green and lush had turned to its tawny, tawdry, autumnal stature. The green rows of soybeans now took on their burnished golden colors of harvest time. The trees, too, hinted of fall colors in bits and spurts of gold and red among the verdure of summer’s growth. Where does the time go? Is it really so close to Autumn frosts and winter fires?
I stuck the edger in the ground in hopes that one of us would start the fall edging of the grass verges. The old fashioned sort that looks like a half-moon, this was handed down to me by my dad. The one that once was mine had long ago succumbed to over arduous use by teenage boys who dislike such garden tasks and think that jumping on the tool somehow gets the job done faster. Doesn’t do that, but will eventually bend and break the tool. Even the strong ash handled ones. I keep retraining a new teen helper, and now hope that we all will keep my dad’s old tools, and the new replacements I bought, in good order. Here’s to that hope, keeping my fingers crossed.
I have written a number of new articles for my garden website, more to get the information up than to be seasonally pertinent. I have one on Autumn clematis, some on foundation plants, and expanded on the flowering kale post that I had here.
My goal is to get as many of the profiles of my favored or useful plants online, as possible. I always wanted something like that when first gardening: buy a plant and then have a handy guide to its planting preferences.
It was early to do it, but moved my planter containers into the green house. I want to save some of the plant material for next year, and so often I wait and they get blasted by frosts. There must be some garden form of the saying “stitch in time”, but I don’t know what that is.
What To Do Now: September
No it isn’t a “Honey-do” list, but just some reminders before the season gets away from you! As it often does for me….
This is a great month for planting things- the still warm weather means that plants can get settled in, and the autumn rains are coming which should give everything good rooting conditions.
Time to get peonies in the ground, a reminder also included in the September garden tips. Most trees and perennials may be planted now.
See the picture of that lily I snapped this summer? I would like to plant some bulbs of that.
Garden tools are often on sale. I like picking up those that need replacement or hose attachments now. I’m going to have to do that this year- as “how do they manage to do that?” my ‘garden helpers’ somehow broke the last of the sprinkler attachments. Must have banged it against a rock…hard. -perhaps many times- I wonder if that qualifies as a stress reliever? Like in some movie where they were shooting old toilets with a shotgun…anyone remember that movie?
Of course, spring blooming bulbs… that is the big thing now. Don’t expect there to be good supplies or sales late in the season this year.
The bright part of this story is that it is so much more pleasant to plant them in golden autumnal days than in the dreary cold, wet November ones. I can say that from experience 🙂
September Poems
Something of what we see daily here has been caught in a poem.
September
by Helen Hunt Jackson
The golden-rod is yellow;
The corn is turning brown;
The trees in apple orchards
With fruit are bending down.
The gentian’s bluest fringes
Are curling in the sun;
In dusty pods the milkweed
Its hidden silk has spun.
The sedges flaunt their harvest
In every meadow nook;
And asters by the brook-side
Make asters in the brook.
From dewy lanes at morning
The grapes’ sweet odors rise;
At noon the roads all flutter
With yellow butterflies.
By all these lovely tokens
September days are here,
With summers’s best of weather,
And autumn’s best of cheer.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~//~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Asters
by Dora Read Goodale
The Autumn wood the aster knows,
The empty nest, the wind that grieves,
The sunlight breaking thro’ the shade,
The squirrel chattering overhead,
The timid rabbits lighter tread
Among the rustling leaves.
