Gardening: So why do I only photograph the Before?

When we first moved into the house, I took photos of the garden. Lots of photos. As I look through them now, I notice that my photo-taking focus seems to be on the construction and planting phase of the garden areas that we changed. So I have lots and lots of pictures of areas of the garden looking like this:

or this:

But far fewer looking like this:

Or this:

The prettier the garden gets, the fewer photographs I take of it. Why is this?

Photos: Mine.

Rambling: Rambling

I've been Away. From the blog, that is. From this blog, that is. On the other blog, I've been babbling away happily about perfume.

I suspect that the time that would normally belong to poor Rambling Chicken has been devoted to making progress my 100+ books. I'm up to forty-eight out of the hundred, thirteen of them in July. If I can keep that up I may break one hundred.

There's been very little gardening or cooking, the things that I most often Chicken Ramble about.  And I haven't had any strong opinions about blogging, or plastic, or clutter, or books.  I did have a recent internal Onion Tantrum. (Why do they insist on peeling all the papery skin off of the onions at the grocery, so that they mold faster? Why why why why why?) But it didn't seem worthy of a full post.

So did I just post to tell you about what I'm doing and not doing? It appears that I did just that. Now that I've broken the ice, maybe I'll return sooner.

Meanwhile, I present Still Life With Shoes. Because I'm strange that way.

Image: Mine.

Gardening, A Plant Wardrobe, Plant Three: International Orange Oriental Poppies

Our neighbors, three houses down, have a stand of gorgeous blood-red Oriental poppies. And I've been lusting after them for years, without quite having the nerve to ask for a root cutting. I planted a tiny plantlet of Beauty of Livermere last year, with great hopes, and early this month it started blazing blood-red right outside my desk window. I couldn't be more delighted.

I thought that as a result, I could live without the more common orange Oriental poppies. You know the ones. Life vest orange. Traffic cone orange. Goldfish orange. Orange. The orange that wreaks havoc with almost any color scheme. That orange.

I was wrong. I can't live without them. Beauty of Livermere is magnificent, and I'll love it year after year. But I need the gaudy orange.

Photo: Mine.

Gardening: A Plant Wardrobe, Plant One - Honorine Jobert

In the perfume world, my other major area of obsession, it's common to discuss the idea of a fragrance wardrobe. An essential part of this concept is that it's a limited fragrance wardrobe. It would probably consist of more bottles than the average person owns (two? three? none?), but not so many that that average person would eye me worriedly and back slowly away. So, less than a hundred. One common figure is ten. I recently posted about this concept, and listed nine perfumes.

So if we're limiting perfumes, if only theoretically, why not go through the same mental exercise for plants? The obvious "why not" is because people don't think that you're crazy if you have a few hundred different plants. But all the same, all the brave talk about simplicity and limiting choices and appreciating what's left could, in theory, also apply to gardening.

So if I were to limit myself to...

OK, I can't limit myself to nine plants. In the whole plant world, from ground cover to trees, only nine different kinds? No. Very funny.

So if I were to limit myself to nine different perennial flowers, what would they be? Nine cultivars - no fair cheating by including "roses" as just one plant.

The first one is obvious: Japanese Anemone Honorine Jobert. The most beautiful flower on the face of the earth. Period. Look. Just look. Could anything be better?

Yes, yes, I understand that no doubt you have a plant that you think is better. In fact, I'm continually surprised that this flower is my favorite. I would have expected myself to pick some dripping, quartered rose, or an exploding peony. When did I become a minimalist?

But there it is. Nothing is more beautiful than Honorine Jobert. No doubt the exploding petals will be represented further down the list.

What about you? Got a favorite?

Image: Mine

Gardening: Peonies! And celebrating nursery errors.

Two or three years ago, I planted some peonies that were supposed to be red, according to the packaging.

Then I waited two or three years for them to bloom, because we remodeled things and some trampling was unavoidable.

And during those years, I wondered if red was really the right choice. I'm very picky about my reds. I don't like them too magenta, and I really don't like them orange. I slowly came to the conclusion that red was a mistake.

One of them finally bloomed. And as you can see from the photo, the packaging was utterly mistaken. About the redness.

Woohoo!

Photo: Mine.

Scenes From Gardens Past: Pachysandra 2006

Pachysandra is not considered an exciting plant. It's seen as dull. Tough. Utilitarian. Overused. Cliched. George Schenk, in The Complete Shade Gardener, refers to it as "ubiquitous and boring".

But he also calls it "indispensable." And when I look at this photo, I think that overused or not, it's beautiful.

Photo: Mine

Gardening: The most common early mistakes

I was just reading a post over at Children of the Corm, one that was puzzling over why a gardener wasn't succeeding. I commented, but afterward I found that my mind had assembled an opinionated list of what seemed most likely to go wrong. So here I am, opinionating.

Judging from my own experience back when I was a beginning gardener, I'd say that the main non-obvious gardening mistakes are:

Underwatering - just sprinkling the soil until it's damp on top, unstead of staying at it until it's gotten a good soaking. It's non-intuitive to realize that you may have to stand there for fifteen minutes or more, watering just one small bed. Automating your watering to make it easier to water deeply enough - even if it's just plopping a sprinkler in the middle of the bed so that you can turn on the faucet and walk away for an iced tea rather than standing there with the hose - can make a huge difference to the garden.

Overwatering - watering too often, so that the roots never dry out. Under normal circumstances, that nice long soaking should save you from having to water again for a few days. If you have abnormal circumstances, I think that a good thick mulch is better than watering more often.

Underwatering and overwatering - sprinkling the soil too little, too often, giving you plants with soggy shallow roots.

Shade denial - refusing, for example, to accept that roses and onions and tomatoes will not grow in three-quarters shade. I'm still not over this one - I'm always trying to convince a plant to accept at least a little less sun than it wants. I tried to grow onions and summer squash in a part-shaded garden last year.  This year, I hope that I accept my failure and plant bush beans, which succeeded quite nicely in that space the year before.

Skimpy digging - not believing how big a hole you really have to dig, especially if you have concrete soil. And not believing that sometimes you do have to turn the whole planting area and mix a car-full of bags of something good into it.

Root squeamishness - not breaking up compacted roots. I know that it seems cruel, and counterintuitive, and just plain weird, to yank and even cut perfectly good roots. I got over this with rootbound large plants early on, but for some reason I hesitated to mess with the root ball of tiny six-pack plants. They had so few roots in the first place; could they really bear my damaging any of them?

So, for years, I would pluck those dead sixpack plants out of the ground and see the little intact root cubes. I've finally started roughing up their roots properly at planting, and I no longer have this problem.

The wrong plants - specifically, not growing the easy stuff for the area. If the plant isn't growing in casually maintained gardens all over town, I'd suggest skipping it and picking something that is. Next year or the year after that, after having some successes, is time enough for the tricky ones.

That's my list. What's yours?

Image: Mine

Gardening: Random Thoughts

Thought One: My father's aunt lived in an impeccably tidy and formal house. It was lovely, but almost entirely non-organic - sliced tomatoes (in a cut-glass dish) on the dinner table were the closest thing to a plant indoors. Everything was carefully placed, and nothing ever moved - if a figurine was placed on the third shelf of the china cabinet, it remained on the third shelf, decade after decade, never moving, but never showing a trace of dust. And it was likely to be joined by only one or two companions, all carefully placed on an expanse of polished wood. Control. Perfect, neat, clean, control.

But the back yard was a space filled with billowy hydrangeas, exploding with giant white masses of flowers in their blooming season. At the time, I loved the space, and it inspired a lifelong love of hydrangeas. Now, I also love the glimpse that it gave into another aspect of my great-aunt's personality.

Thought Two: When driving through parts of the rural American South and Midwest, I'm always surprised at the lack of gardening activity in the front yards. While the back yards may hold giant vegetable gardens, or may actually be farms, the front yards are almost universally simple flat green swaths of grass. Big swaths, a sizable fraction of an acre. They're sometimes broken by one or two trees and, in the spring, a few dozen daffodils by the road. Rarely, a shrub or two might be permitted to grow right next to the home's foundation.

Why is this? Do rural residents associate gardening purely with work, so that time invested in ornamentals fails to appeal? Or does the "public parkland" aesthetic hold so strongly that homeowners feel that a front yard in which the grass is interrupted by a flowerbed might as well be a junkyard of rusted jalopies?

I don't get it. I've always wondered what might happen if I moved to the area and turned my front yard into a cottage garden. But I'd better not.

Photo: Mine.

Gardening: Scenes from Gardens Past - A Place To Sit, 2006

I read, somewhere, sometime, that an important element of garden design is to figure out what the area under design is for - its purpose. Cutting garden? Vegetable garden? Transition? Pure looks? This seems obvious, but at the time it wasn't.

I've concluded since then that the purpose of most of our garden is to sit down. Or lie down. With a book or a drink or a snack or a notebook or perhaps all of the above. In fact, I have a basket dedicated to carrying my garden toys outside with me, when I'm going to sit.

So, above  is the Bench Under The Maple, apparently photographed while I was lounging on a blanket on the ground. Behind the bench are blooming Siberian squills and daffodil and bearded iris foliage, and those plugs of green between the paving stones are either Irish moss or Corsican mint.

Photo: Mine.

Meta: Garden Posting

So, you may ask, what's with all these Scenes From Gardens Past?

Well, I want to write more about gardening. I'm very fond of gardening. But for some reason I can't quite seem to write about it as comfortably and easily as I can write about perfume. I wrote a whole post about that fact and... I didn't like it. So I didn't post it.

But I concluded from that failed post that that I don't write more about gardening, because I don't write enough about gardening. That is, the only way to get my garden voice and get that ease and fun from garden writing, is to do more of it. And to get comfortable with, frankly, writing nonsense about gardening. And to do all that, I need a subject. And with that whole winter thing out there, I don't have much in the way of subjects. But I have all these photos in iPhoto. So there you are.

There will, of course, also be posts about books and Wrong Food and who knows what else. But I thought that the long stream of garden photos might call for some explanation.

(And that anemone? It's from 2005.)

Photo: Mine

Gardening: Scenes from Gardens Past - Garden Resident 2007

This garden resident was temporary, just sticking around until he, um, well, decayed.

And the same for his friend from the previous year. I take no blame for the fuzziness of this photo; I maintain that he moved.

Photos: Mine.

Gardening: Scenes from Gardens Past - Marching Pots 2006

This was mid-April 2006. I very much enjoyed this line of prim plain terracotta pots of tulips on a mossy edge. This October, I'll remember to do it again. (And by now, the pots may be mossy, too. That could be nice.)

Photo: Mine

Gardening: Scenes from Gardens Past - Construction 2007

We did a lot of home construction in 2007. Our contractor took great, great care to refrain from tromping on the garden, as is demonstrated by this photo, with the flowers ganging up on the ladder instead of the other way around.

Photo: Mine.

Gardening: Scenes from Gardens Past - Tulips 2006

These are my very favorite tulips, photographed in 2006. (2006 was apparently a big year for me and my camera.) They've faded or been lost - I haven't seen a trace of them in at least two years - and I want them back. I wasn't the person that originally planted them, so I don't know their name. Not, I confess, that being the person who planted them would assure that I do know their name.

If anyone has any suggestions as to that name, I'd be very grateful to hear them.

Photo: Mine.

Gardening: Scenes from Gardens Past - The Path 2006

These are April Fool's Day daffodils from 2006, growing by the path below a bedroom window. I find them lovely but dismaying - I have to wait for April to see these again?

See the small-leafed plant behind the daffodils? It's a miniature rose. Below is a shot of its very last blooms, in November of the same year.

Photos: Mine

Gardening: Scenes from Gardens Past - Garden Residents 2006

This is Jill. She lives in the garden. This portrait, and the one below with her car, were taken in 2006.

When we bought the house, the garden was dotted with toys belonging to the child who'd lived there before - and perhaps children from before that. As we found them, we repositioned them in safer places - the back of the potting bench, up high on the fence support, on a windowsill, or, in the case of Jill, in a nice big pot.

Jill moved out of the pot when it cracked in a winter freeze. She currently lives in the vegetable garden with Jack, another member of the Playmobil clan. Jack's apparently a little camera shy - I don't seem to have a picture of him at all.

Photos: Mine.

Gardening: Scenes from Gardens Past - Complicata 2007

Spring isn't here yet. But the photo hoard is there and available. So why not look at some?

This crowd of flowers and foliage was from late May, 2007. Low in the picture we have a Complicata rose, a geranium that's most likely Rozanne cranesbill, unnamed lily and bearded iris foliage, and a sprinkle of pink petals that are probably from the Sally Holmes rose that loomed in that area at the time. Wild violet foliage fills in, and oakleaf hydrangea leaves drip down from above. A mess, but isn't it a lovely one?

Photo: Mine.

Gardening: Boredom and anticipation and aimless rambling

.I keep thinking that I want to write a gardening post. And then I go stare at the screen and type nothing. What to talk about? Seed catalogs? Did that. Egyptian walking onions? Did that. Potato onions? Meh; they failed last year due to lack of sun, so I'm nursing a grudge against them.

Zinnias? Well, zinnias are pretty. In fact here's a picture of one that I grew in 2005. Isn't that pretty? But, well, what else is there to say about zinnias? They're pretty, happy, circus flowers. Grow them. If your taste matches mine, grow the more daisy-like ones, like that one, instead of the ones that are more like a chair cushion.

I'm sure that the problem is the weather. There was a brief burst of excitement when I realized that the daffodil shoots were showing, but that's over now. By the way, here's a daffodil that I grew in 2007. Also pretty, right? Later in the spring, there will be a couple of hundred of these by the street. That'll be nice. And a few hundred of the big yellow trumpet kind inside the fence, around the front yard.

And the magnolia's showing buds, so it's not too long before we'll see those big pink aerial tulips again. So, another photo. See? Pretty!

You see the problem? It's all anticipation. I want spring and I want it now.

Maybe I should take up leeks.

Photos: Mine.