flowers

garden : weeding, transplanting, and a baby dove

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After days of pulling up chickweed and dandelion, I finally called it done and mowed the backyard this morning; I’m leaving the front until next week to enjoy the violets a bit longer. I am quite sure I didn’t get all of the weeds, as I couldn’t be bothered to get the dandelion digger and just took the flowers. Plus, the short chickweed that I missed among the tall grass will survive my ample 3″ mower position and be back again next spring. I did learn this week that chickweed is edible, like dandelions; since we’re up to our eyeballs in the greens we actually pay for, I’m going to give eating weeds a miss this year. If the recession deepens, who knows.

In the category of ‘garden labor that is neither killing invasives nor walking around looking at flower buds’ I also moved some plants around this week. The moving around went something like: iceplant (which is really a type of sedum, although apparently now booted from the sedum family as well; I suppose taxonomists have to do something to pay the rent) from back to front; yellow daylilies from front to back, bluebells from back to side, Summersweet from a cup in the kitchen into the front bed, and some of my neighbor’s lovely little spring starflowers into the front bed. As a result of all this moving and planting, the bed along the sidewalk is starting to look quite respectable. The native phlox is blooming, and pollinators—that’s what we’re calling bees and bee-like insects these days, right?—are flocking to the lavender flowers. The aster and coneflower will be moving out of that bed to new spots by the foundation, just as soon as we get that bed prepared.

At the moment, with the violets in the lawn, the daffodils by the porch steps, and last year’s free irises sending up purple and white flowers it looks quite nice. It’s a bit frightfully respectable, as Christopher Lloyd would say, with the purple and white and yellow (which will only be enhanced when the white carpet phlox and basket-of-gold go into the front bed); although the crocuses didn’t bloom after last year’s transplanting, they are also in the same palette. Soon, however, the flaming pink azalea will be in bloom around the corner of the house — along with more white in the form of the other azaleas along the front of the house. The backyard has the huge salmon ball that is the quince bush and the flaming yellow tower that is the forsythia. What can I say, I’m not a fan of the pink, although the bright oranges, yellows and reds will be well-represented in the new sunny foundation bed. Along with (of course) more blues and whites.

As the icing on the cake of actually having flowers coming up in the garden, I was visited by a young dove while I sat on the porch. I’ve never seen one that small before, but it could fly and was following its parent on a tour of our yard. I think the nest is in the neighbor’s hedge, which is an excellent spot now that the neighbors have gotten better about keeping their cats indoors. I’m always pleased to see any birds in the yard; as I’m no longer stocking the feeders, they’re a decent gauge of how well our plantings provide food and habitat all on their own. So far the verdict seems to be: not too shabby.


With digital zoom in order not to get too close to the (4-5″ long) dove.

garden : weeding, transplanting, and a baby dove

garden : planning, weeding, and more planning

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Now that spring has truly arrived, I’m assessing what needs to be done in the garden and making plans. Plans for this spring, that is. There are multi-year plans in the works — replace fences, redo walks, eradicate invasive weeds, move roses — but those aren’t what I’m focusing on. In the short-term, there are beds that I’ve already created that need some work, and that’s where this spring’s energy is going.

First up is the foundation bed on southeast front wall of the house. For reasons that are no longer clear to me, I believed that bed was shady and planted azaleas and a native phlox there. It is, however, one of the sunniest beds around the base of the house. Which means that the azaleas and phlox are, shall we say, cooking in their current spots; I’ll be moving them around the corner to the south side of the house which is quite shady due to the shadows cast there by trees and the neighbor’s house. Once they’re out of the way, the entire bed will be (1) properly edged and weeded, (2) soil-treated, and then (3) planted to within an inch of its life with sun-loving and part-shade flowering perennials. This last bit is made possible by Springhill Nurseries in Ohio, whose sales — double your plants for 1 penny! half off your entire order before April 22nd! — were just too good to resist. I spent a few hours poring over the catalogue, moving little post-it notes (with such information as color, sun requirements, and flowering time) around on a map of the foundation bed, and cutting out little pictures of the flowers themselves. In the end I had a visual guide to the future garden and an order placed for 70 plants (at an average cost of $2 each). Not too shabby.

Not all of those 70 plants will be for the front foundation bed: one of the hydrangea bushes will be a thank-you gift for friends who helped us haul our belongings up to the attic (nothing like a ha’penny outlay to show you appreciate someone) and some are destined for other parts of the yard. Namely, the bed at the front of the house along the walk that desperately needs some help to keep all the mulch and topsoil from perpetually running down the bank onto the sidewalk. To that end, I’ll be planting a row of white carpet phlox under the daylilies as an anchor, as well as a row of basket-of-gold up the short edge of the bed along the front steps. But wait, you are now thinking, isn’t that where the aster and coneflowers are? Yes, indeed: those will be migrating into the foundation bed and forming part of the autumn-flowering contingent there. To create a bit more winter structure, I’m going to finally plant the Summersweet that I received at the Migratory Bird Festival last year (and hope that it’s actually still alive) in the corner of the bed opposite the light post and add the iceplant from the rear fence (dividing it into two clumps). I imagine it will still look rather — what’s the technical term? — scraggly this summer, but I’m hopeful that by next spring everything will have established itself. The lavender-colored phlox I planted there last year is happy as a clam, so that bodes well for the carpet phlox, which is really my main concern. The last bit of this grand plan is to add some summer flowers to the spot to the right of the porch steps that currently only contains daffodils. The parallel spot on the other side of the steps is where I’ve planted the lavender, which continues to grow and bush out and I expect (hope) will shoot out plenty of lovely flowers this year. The flowers will be globe thistle, shasta daisy, and some low-growing daisies in the black-eyed susan family.

All of this planting and replanting will be taking place in May, which is when the plants are able to be dug up from the field and shipped, and I look forward to a long leisurely summer of sitting back and watching my garden grow once I’ve gotten everything in place. There may be a push for the killing of more liriope or ivy, or the digging up of sapling stumps, and there’s also the issue of the bluebells I plan to move to the side of the house. But after that, after that it’s all sitting around and enjoying the view. Once I get the all the chickweed pulled from the backyard, that is.

garden : planning, weeding, and more planning

food : all things quince

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Quinces from our backyard.

One of the best surprises we’ve had as we’ve gotten to know our house and yard was the discovery of quince trees in the rear corner of our neighbor’s yard, along the border between our two properties. Because we are the neighbor to the south, and there are other trees to the north in our neighbor’s yard, the trees grow toward the sun, overhanging our rear sidewalk and garage. During the first year we were here, we saw one or two yellow things on the ground by the back fence, and commented to each other that an animal must have dragged an apple or something into the yard and left it there. That was the sum total of the interest we paid in the situation and the energy we expended in addressing it: very little. We were busy with other parts of the yard, and a bit overwhelmed by the sheer amount of work it would take to clean up the property; the last thing we wanted to do was investigate mysterious happenings out by the garage.

The second year we were here, we spent more time in the yard during the autumn clearing the ivy, pruning the trees, and covering the weed-laden garden beds with a thick leaf mulch. During all that time in close proximity to the rear yard, we noticed that the yellow fruits were actually growing on the trees, and were littering our rear sidewalk by early November. This piqued our curiosity, and we consulted one of my partner’s colleagues who grows quite a lot of his own fruits and vegetables on a lovely piece of land that used to be part of a dairy farm. He told us we had quinces, a fruit of which I had only heard vague and mysterious references to before that point. Nonetheless, I gathered them up and set them on the back steps to cure while I figured out what to do with them.


Quince jelly.


Quince paste.

There are, it appears, two things to do with quinces. You can make jelly or you can make membrillo, a thick paste that is a favorite dessert in Spain that’s served with manchego cheese. You can also bake and poach them, mixing them in with apple desserts for additional flavor, which we tried as well. With two dozen enormous yellow fruits having literally dropped from the sky into our yard and folks all over the internet raving about the glory of the flavor of the quince, I decided there was nothing for it but to make jelly…and membrillo, since it would be a shame to have all the pulp just go to waste. This was my first foray into canning, and I had to improvise somewhat. I used a stockpot for the boiling water bath (which, by the way, I don’t recommend) and set to work chopping and boiling and draining and boiling and skimming and stirring and pouring, ending up with about a dozen half-pints of jelly and about 20 pieces of membrillo. Happily, everybody I know seems to love membrillo, a delicacy I had never heard of before embarking on this new culinary path. We were able to give away the membrillo, in addition to serving it to guests at every opportunity, and enjoyed the jelly for much of the year. I also learned that canning is actually not that hard — although quince jelly is arguably the easiest product to start with, containing just the right amount of natural pectin to gel on its own and turning a lovely deep rose color to let you know when it’s done.

Following this roaring success, we made a concerted effort to help the trees this year. We cut back the ivy that surrounds them and pruned all the not-inconsiderable deadwood. Once we knew what to look for, the trees became incredibly easy to identify, and we were pleased to discover two small saplings at the sides of the main grove, no doubt sprung up from fruits left to lie under the thick ivy ground cover. Later in the spring we were rewarded first by flowers and then by little green fruits. Little green fruits which soon littered the ground when the gale-force winds of the early summer storms blew through. This autumn, there was not a single yellow fruit on any of the trees, much to our disappointment. We are hopeful that quinces are like some varieties of pears, with large and small production years, and that next year will be a banner year. In the meantime, I have been combing the internet for a mail-order source of quince fruits, to no avail, having learned the hard way that their floral flavor is truly as addictive as quince fans claimed!


Tarte tatin, with a layer of quince slices — magnifique!

food : all things quince

garden log : a whole lot of planning

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The lavender bursting out in new growth.

My garden notes these days are trending more toward the ‘to be undertaken when I have more time, money and energy’ and away from ‘done done done!’ Happily, growth continues without me: the lavender has taken to its new home and is sending out all kinds of shoots, the first yellow daylily of the summer appeared this morning, and the roses continue to bloom. I haven’t made any more progress on the peony identification front—I emailed Kelway’s asking for help, but haven’t received a response—but I have a new bloom to work with: the transplanted peonies produced a single blossom that opened up today, so I’ll take some photos and see what I can learn.

In terms of the future, I’ve been researching roses and sketching out a plan for preparing a new bed and moving a large old climber to a sunnier roomier spot against the south wall of the addition. The prep appears to entail major soil modification, in the form of compost and topsoil addition, and the purchase of an arbor. We’ll then let the bed sit and get nice and juicy over the summer while I research how to actually move the plant in the fall. This approach has the added bonus of giving me plenty of time to shop for a suitably un-kitschy arbor; I’m fussy with regard to avoiding the country cottage look as much as possible while still filling the house with color and the garden with flowers.

The other plant-shifting project that I have in mind for June involves the creation of a raised border bed in the middle of our front yard. Well, truthfully, at the edge of our front yard—thus the border aspect—but in the middle of the expanse of grass made up by our lawn and our neighbor’s. This bed will serve several purposes: improving the drainage of the front yard, visually defining the edge of the yard, rerouting of the letter carrier, and providing a home for several sun-loving plants that are currently hanging about in less than ideal circumstances. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve acquired three little sprouts that need to go into the ground soon. The rosemary and ‘Italian oregano’ (thyme) will go into the new bed, with plenty of room to grow into nice sizable little shrubs; both should overwinter here without a problem. The summersweet is destined for the existing bed, but its future location is currently occupied by a clump of yellow daylilies and some garlic chives. So, those two plants will be moved to the new bed as well. It’s my hope to put the small fragrant rose bush—the Crimson Glory—into that front bed as well, but I need to do a little more research on soil conditions and wind protection and that sort of thing before I make a final decision about that.

In the meantime, I water them in their little pots and hope for the best!

garden log : a whole lot of planning

garden log : peony identification project

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Bloom from the peony that came with the house.


The peony bush in question.

My goal for this week has been to conclusively identify the peony that came with our house. It hasn’t been as easy as I’d hoped. Part of the problem is that I lack knowledge of the correct flower-describing terminology, which makes using the search function on HelpMeFind’s peony page more challenging and less productive than it should be. Is my bloom pink? Yellow? Double? An anemone? This was easier with the roses, as I had a borrowed rose book in front of me to provide the basics with regard to double blooms and such.

Nonetheless, by blundering around the web for a while and poring over pages of results from a Google images search on ‘peony,’ I’ve come up with two possible matches for my plant. Our house was built in 1936, and the peony was likely planted by the first owner; at the least, I’m quite sure it wasn’t planted by the most recent owners, post-1983. I first decided I had a Lady Alexandra Duff peony, based on the bloom description and the year of introduction in the United States (1932). Upon further looking, though, I’m not as certain. Our plant definitely has drooping blooms, and quite a bit more yellow in the blooms than other photos of Lady Alexandra Duff plants.

My new theory is that I have a Bridal Veil peony, introduced at an unknown point prior to 1958 and still for sale by Kelway’s. Of course, I’ve been unable to find any more information than that, and am wondering if this is an alternate name for the variety. I would love to learn the year of introduction and more of a history of the plant, so if any peony experts are reading this, let me know what you think!

garden log : peony identification project