Happy Birthday Brooks!

Happy Birthday today to Brooks--hard to believe my boy is over 30. As I was lying in bed last night thinking about when he was born, I realized that he has been my son for over half my life now! Wow. He is a great guy and I hope he has a very happy day. We will celebrate his birthday over the weekend, as he is going out tonight with friends.

Morning Walk

Gingko leaves

It's another beautiful day and here are a few pictures from my morning walk. It sure is more fun to walk when there are lots of pretty flowers to look at. I have lots to do today,  I want to finally finish planting all the annuals and then work on the perennial garden. It is loaded with larkspur right now, so it's hard to see anything else in there.

Roses

Clematis

Roses

Nigella (Love-in-a-Mist)

Iris

Sprinkler Times Two

Look what I found in Pennsylvania last week! Another sprinkler just like my favorite one that belonged to my dad. The one on the left is my dad's and the one on the right is the new one I picked up for $10 at our favorite little antique/junk shop in Ephrata, PA. I remember that sprinkler when I was a kid, so it has to be over 50 years old. And it still works, how amazing is that.  Now I have one sprinkler for the front and one for the back. I have tried a lot of different kinds of sprinklers, and this one is by far the best one ever. And it's adjustable (see the little red dial?).

You can see that the owner, Kathy, always has lots of cool benches, garden chairs, and outdoor stuff on the front porch. We have bought a lot of benches here, and this year both Eileen and Prudy found new ones for their porches. Lots of other cool stuff, too.

Antique shop in PA

Taking Time

David Austin rose 'Gertrude Jekyll'

I so admired and obsessed over the blooms of my tree peony this spring that I sometimes felt like I knew every bloom on the plant. Maybe I felt that way because I was photographing them practically every day during their short period of bloom and sticking my face in them regularly to breathe in their scent. I read this passage recently by former Washington Post columnist Henry Mitchell in his book "One Man's Garden," and I knew just what he meant. We are so busy in the spring getting everything neat and tidy that we sometimes forget to take the time to really admire the beauty in our gardens.

One year I took off two weeks during the peak of my irises, and for some odd reason the weather was flawless and the irises were having one of those exceptional years and I sat there and strolled there morning to night for two weeks. There were two thousand stalks of flowers, with about seven flowers on a stalk, and not one of them opened that I did not see in full head-on focus.


It is curious to me that so many gardeners occupy their leisure making things neat and tidy. It is one thing to trot past a fine bush of, say, 'Mrs. Anthony Waterer' laden with attar-scented blooms, and another thing to settle down and gaze at it for an hour. What is the point of growing a rose in the first place if you just admire it in passing?


Isn't that the best idea to take time off from work to admire your flowers, especially those with such an ephemeral bloom time?

My roses are in full bloom right now. I don't have a lot, but I have a few old-fashioned ones, a David Austin English rose, and several Knock-Outs as well. And I'm taking the time to smell the roses this year.

Rose 'Frau Karl Druschki'

Making Progress

Nothing makes me happier than a gentle rain the day after all my pots are planted.  I awoke during the night to the sound of rain and it is still raining this morning, so my pots and garden are very happy right now.  Yesterday was a beautiful sunny day and I spent all day out in the garden, finishing up my pots, and planting various things in the garden. I did pretty well in PA, I have a few random plants left over, mostly fillers like Diamond Frost euphorbia and sweet potato vine, some angelonia, and a few million bells. I will stick those in the garden somewhere. And I still have a flat of alyssum that I like to put between the pavers and half a flat each of vinca and impatiens. But everything else is in, including 4 Munstead lavenders that I put on the side by the garage, in front of a long row of peonies. This is an area that I am never happy with and am always looking to improve, so we'll see how the lavenders do. Walt pruned back the lilac tree quite a bit and it looks so much better. We also tied up the autumn clematis for about the 15th time, I swear that thing can grow, hung up a birdhouse Walt had repaired and painted, and a cute new sign I got in PA. 

So it was a perfect Mother's Day for this Mom, doing just what I like all day long, and then a yummy dinner (steak and baked potatoes)-- that I didn't have to cook-- with Walt and Brooks. Julia drove to Atlanta on Saturday and will start her internship on Tuesday, but I talked with her during the day.

Mixed coleus 

Larkspur beginning to bloom

Planting area

Taking pots to the backyard

Waiting to be planted

Happy plants this morning, in the rain

A Perfect Day Today

Today

BY BILLY COLLINS

If ever there were a spring day so perfect,

so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze

that it made you want to throw

open all the windows in the house

and unlatch the door to the canary's cage,

indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,

a day when the cool brick paths

and the garden bursting with peonies

seemed so etched in sunlight

that you felt like taking

a hammer to the glass paperweight

on the living room end table,

releasing the inhabitants

from their snow-covered cottage

so they could walk out,

holding hands and squinting

into this larger dome of blue and white,

well, today is just that kind of day.

Lovely Styrax

My Styrax Japonica (Snowbell) tree is in its glory right now, absolutely laden with these little white bells. It is so beautiful to look at, especially in the morning when a slight breeze is blowing the flowers all over the yard like snow. We planted it in 1991 (bought it at Merrifield for $44.95 according to my garden journal), and it has turned into a lovely backyard tree. It is underplanted with white 'Delaware Valley' azaleas and white daffodils, thus I call it my "White Garden," well actually, white corner.

Snowbells on the ground

Adirondack Chairs

Chairs in Chantilly

One of the things I was looking for up in Lancaster County last weekend was new Adirondack chairs. I have two old Adirondacks, which I think we bought around 1988 at the old Door Store. Remember that store? Anyway, as you can imagine they are pretty worn out, but hey, 24 years isn't too bad for outdoor chairs, so I can't complain.  Everything I have is so old.

My old chairs

I am looking at chairs made from a recycled poly lumber, that is made from milk jugs and water bottles. I have looked several places, including LL Bean (too short) and a store out in Chantilly. I liked these (from Chantilly) the best, they are the most comfortable, but unfortunately I don't like the colors. I really want lime green chairs. When we were driving around Lancaster County on Saturday looking for some road,  we happened upon an Amish workshop that makes their own Adirondacks from recycled lumber. I really liked these and they were less expensive than the ones I've seen in Northern Virginia, and the colors were awesome. We all sat in them and agreed they were fairly comfortable for Adirondacks. Unfortunately, I couldn't fit chairs and plants in my car, so now I have to decide if it is worth driving back up there to get them.  Hmmm.

Amish-made chairs

First Roses

I've been having some problems with aphids on my roses lately, so was happy to see this little fella chomping away.  I don't usually use chemicals on any of my flowers, but with roses I sometimes sprinkle a little rose dust on them if needed. The roses are really starting to bloom now, and here are some yellow roses I just picked yesterday. I have no idea what kind of rose this is, but it's one my friend Yasha gave to me in 2006 when my dad died, so it is a special one.

Spring Plant Shopping in PA

Homestead Gardens

We had three full days of plant shopping in Lancaster County this weekend, and came home yesterday with cars packed full of plants, shrubs, roses, benches, chocolate, bacon, pretzels, mulch, soil,  and more. This is the most fun weekend ever for us, running around to our favorite garden places in beautiful Lancaster County, buying and talking about plants and our gardens all weekend, and just being together. We mostly go to local farms and greenhouses, and a few larger garden centers where we can get more specialty items. Some of the places we  go to are Spooky Nook Greenhouse, Leacock Flowers, Wenger's Greenhouse, Homestead Gardens, South Maple Greenhouse,  Ken's, Espenshades, and a new place this year (for us), Newswangers. We talk a lot about which we like best, and I think we all agree Homestead and South Maple are our favorites.  We love the cookies Rachel makes at South Maple, and this year when she saw that we were so hot and thirsty, she went into her house and brought out glasses and a jug of cold water for us. So nice! Each place is a little different, and we buy plants at all of them.  We have been buying our plants in Lancaster County since 2005 when Evie first started telling us about all the great places we should be going to!

Hanging plants at Homestead

On Saturday we passed by a chicken barbecue on the road, so we stopped and picked up barbecued chicken and grilled potatoes and had a picnic lunch by a nearby stream, looking over the Amish farmland. We made our usual stops in Lititz for Wilbur Chocolates, and at Weavers, where we get bacon and other delicious food items.  Evie and Earl's oldest granddaughter got married on Saturday, so we were able to see them all dressed up, and they came over and told us all about the wedding after they got home on Saturday night.

We loved this plant--some kind of papyrus

Homestead

Wenger's

Wenger's

When our cars get too full, we stop back at the farm and we each put our plants in a section of the barn.
We have a routine for our meals at the farm, we have ham and cheese sandwiches on Friday night, along with pepper cabbage and broccoli salad that we pick up at Weavers, and on Saturday night we had a flank steak with salad and radishes (both from Evie's garden) and leftover grilled potatoes from lunch. Breakfast is usually fresh eggs from the farm with bacon, and on Sunday morning we made blueberry pancakes and sausages. Then it was time to start packing our cars, always a challenge as you can imagine. And now it's time to plant all those plants!

Plants in the barn

Earl and Evie before the wedding

Packing the cars

Prudy's rosebush had to go in the front seat

Ellen, Judy, Eileen,  and Prudy at the farm,  2012