Yesterday I cut some flowers for a small bouquet. Not much is blooming here this year so bouquets I grew myself have been quite rare. This one is a cheerful thing, mostly planted here and there by birds while I toil elsewhere. Gardens are labor and love, life and loss. A fair amount of sweat, too,
and a battleground of bugs and beasties engaging in munch madness.
Many a grim gardener will turn all grins when the bucket of soapy water
is filled with drowning beetles. Slimy blobs of slugs likewise die
in bowls of beer they can neither resist nor survive. For gardeners who have chickens, there is
almost perverse satisfaction in dumping a bucket of bugs for the fowl and
watching the feeding frenzy ensue.
For me, gardens are also a lot about memory that serve as hugs. When I was but a bitty girl, my family moved a lot while Daddy established himself as a doctor. Each new house meant new gardens. I remember watching Mum and Daddy plan, dig, feed and plant many many gardens. They both came from farming families who raised a lot of their own food so gardening is in our blood. One rose garden in particular stays with me. For a few years, they tended and nutured that garden and once it was
fully established and just gorgeous, we moved. It lives on only in memory. At the new house, Mum started new gardens. I don't recall ever helping her - though there may have been some weeding - but I did watch. And Daddy tilled a big spot in the back yard for me to grow my own strawberries. That's the memory. It's more likely they were his berries that he just let me think were mine. As a little girl, I swelled with pride as my berry plants grew and produced fruit. I giggled when my duck stuck her head through the garden fence and swiped my luscious sweet red berries that she swallowed whole, the outline of the berry showing it's progress down the duck's long neck. As I grew, so did the gardens, and it became a March tradition for me to check the lily garden along the foundation of our sunporch, which wasn't a porch at all but an enclosed room so why we called it the sunporch, I do not know. That lily garden was filled with large showy Asiatic lilies perking up otherwise boring yews, but the lilies were not what caught my attention. I watched for the first sign of crocuses peeking up from the frozen ground to see if it was safe to come out. New England winters can be long and cold. First appearance of crocuses raising their sleepy heads is much more reliable pronouncement of pending spring than that grumpy old groundhog they get so silly about in Pennsylvania. I planted my harbingers in the first garden I put in here about 17 years ago and still watch for them every March.
Where hosta, astilbe and impatiens once started nesting, my newest garden now cradles coreopsis and daylilies. Nature's temper tantrum in Oct. 2011 forced that change, leaving me a very large stump, as well as a few broken shingles and smooshed gutters. I decided the money to grind the stump would be better spent on plants to hide the stump. So far, those plants
are not doing much hiding, but they are pretty, and a means of moving forward. The stump garden is much prettier than that photo suggests. Eventually, there will be a couple of perennial grasses in there but those I planted last year decided they didn't like that location. They refused to grow
this year, so will be replaced with more coopertive grasses at some point. Coreopsis loves it there. I have three varieties, Moonbeam, Merury Rising,
and a darker yellow whose name I do not know. It is not my favorite but it fills the spot nicely. Moonbeam drew me in a long time ago. I still adore it, but Mercury Rising's deep claret red accented with golden yellow is quite fetching and adds a really nice pop of color out there. The photos of course do not capture it's claret tone. The daylilies are a bit of a surprise for me, as I've not previously enjoyed them.
They suit the spot and the pocketbook so there they are, three varities: lemon yellow, pale peach, and a claret that matches Mercury Rising pretty much spot on. They are - yes - growing on me. I forgot what color that daylily was when I planted Mercury Rising last month, so this fall there will be some shifting of plants to balance out colors. And as I dig and rearrange and tuck in, my mind will wander back to the times I watched my mother do the same. It is a wonderful connection.