It has become Cooper's garden  April 28, 2008

Cooper is a 2 month old Boykin spaniel.  You need to know that it is worth clicking on these thumbnails because he is sort of awesomely
cute. And my son is kinda cute too. But since the canine has come to live with us, gardening is done
a. little  b. in a hurry  c. without reflection
However, he is currently napping, so let me just muse about...

                          Dicentra spectabilis, which is an awesome thing to behold this time of year,
                          is it not? It shoots up a couple of inches a day for me in April. The day you
                          first notice it could very well be 37 degrees and threatening snow. Then it
                          begins to really flower on a t-shirt and shorts day, only a few short weeks
                          later. My original plant is coffee table sized now, and is in deep enough
                          shade that it sticks around looking okay until early July. I've read a lot that
                          it should naturalize, but that hasn't happened for me. That's ok; it's easy
                          enough to dig out a hunk anytime.
                                     My "Alba", on the other hand, produces a dozen seedling every year. This year they won't be wasted, as Missy
Marchese, Green Fingers stalwart, has encouraged me to start a plant exchange! This should be fun--a horticultural FreeBay, if you will.
But back to the White bleeding heart. Is it just one of those color wheels/contrast type things, or is its foliage just that shade lighter and
brighter that its pink brother? It looks pretty awesome next to a hot pink azalea that blooms at the same time, and when it fades, the
Anemone hupehensis "Japanese Anemone" kicks in to cover the hole.












  
    From left to right we have a very sexy single "locket". I mean, c'mon, if you didn't know better, would you believe a flower could be
shaped like that? The Anemone windflower is next, then, d. Alba, which I've read is called "white pantaloons"-- does sort of look like laundry
hanging out, no? Last d. "King of Hearts", which is a mix of a eximia, a formosa, and a peregrina. I guess I could wax poetic about those
types another day.
   Cooper really hasn't taken over the garden. In truth, he quickly learned that mom becomes a screaming lunatic if he so much as sticks
his nose in the herb and vegetable plot right out the back door. He has lots of grass, and a lovely patch of ivy and pachysandra which
serves as his loo. In time he will learn, as all of our other dogs did, to help me and watch me from his lawn, and we will work together like
that for many years. At least that is the plan.
                   
                         
Spring appears and disappears   March 24, 2008
Husband and I took a 10 day March driving trip starting in Connecticut, going as far south as Charleston, SC, as far west as Charlottesville,
VA, and then home. New Jersey and Maryland featured slightly swollen tree buds, Virginia had daffodils, North Carolina had really red tree
buds and noticeable forsythia, and South Carolina had adorable, tiny bright green leaves on trees, and real grass . Some spots had been
mown! The sad part was driving north again, back into late winter.
I grew up in Virginia, and the month that I miss it the very most is April. April in Virginia means shorts and color in the garden. April in
Connecticut can very often mean mittens.
As husband and I were stalking photo opportunities in the Pavilion gardens at the University, we happened upon a chatty and knowledgeable
gardener who was probably curious as to why I was eye-balling the nascent bud of an oakleaf hydrangea (Hydrangea Quercifolia) from two
inches out (and you might be too: I found it satisfying to look closely at something resembling dead sticks and be able to discern spring
growth ‘round the corner, that’s all)...more on the Pavilion Gardens, and The Garden Club of Virginia
Books Can Teach...    March 8, 2008
Right, duh! But I often forget to take advantage of my own shelf. An impulse-buy from the tempting collection at
The New York Botanical Garden has made me very happy this winter. It is "The House Plant Expert" by Dr. D. G
Hessayon, and it's part of a series. Ya know, "The Rose Expert", "The Lawn Expert", etc. Sort of like "The Idiot's
Guide to FillinTheBlank", but then again, light-years different. It caught my eye because on its cover is a
Pachystachys, and several years ago my teen-aged daughter gave me one for Mother's Day. That glorious day,
(parenthetically, all of my Mother's Days are glorious, because all I ask is to be left alone in the garden until
                                     summoned inside to consume a meal that others have prepared and will clean up after) the Pachystachys was as          
                                      stunning as you see on this cover.
                                               It may surprise you (it certainly surprised me) that my plant has actually looked that way on various
                                     emphemeral occasions since then! But because I have read this informative book, I now know why. In the interest of      
                                       total disclosure I must reveal that... more on this book, and clivia...and a little about my mother-in-law.
Musings of a Woman with Filthy Nails
These pages have nothing to do with Green Fingers Garden Club, except that I am a proud, somewhat atypical
member. You have stumbled upon a bit of a diary-- a "blog", I suppose, of someone who likes to dig and write.
The entries are in chronological order, with the most recent first. If a topic grabs you, click on the link and scroll
down to find it.  If you want to get back to the Green Fingers web site, I don't blame you one bit. Click here to
hurry back to the Hort page.
Compost  March 5, 2008
Now that the snow has melted from the path I need to walk to get to my compost turner, husband is obligingly not chucking his daily banana
peel. I have 3 pots which I keep under the sink, and if one is toted back to the end of the yard and emptied before the next is filled with kitchen
garbage, the chances of the spontaneous generation of fruit flies are, happily, greatly reduced. Coffee grounds from the morning, tea leaves
from the afternoon (I won't take Advil unless I can't move, but I am enthusiastically addicted to caffeine), peels, cores, egg shells-- all are
saved!
I have a large compost pile for anything from the yard. Well, not anything. Over my 17 years of composting I have learned that ...
click here if you wanna know more
this:
 becomes this:
 and later this:
 And finally, a lovely mulch:
Books can jinx  April 7, 2008
Let us herald the triumph of ignorance! Be wary of the burden of information, because with it comes expectations and responsibility.  I am
convinced that the very source of knowledge that I crowed about last month is directly responsible for the demise of my anthurium. It used to
look like this:                                            And now? I am not going to trouble myself to photograph the heart-rending mass of wilted foliage.
                                                  You see, before I read in Dr. D.G. Hessayon's "The House Plant Expert " that anthuriums are                             
                                                     expensive and difficult to maintain, I had enjoyed my $20 Home Depot beauty for 20 months, thinking,              
                                                     well, thinking nothing at all, except that luck had made me choose a big, good-looking, no-brainer
                                                   house plant that decorated my way-in-the-back, rarely-watered patio area for two summers with                        
                                                    unlimited blooms.
                                                   Damn. As soon as I found out what I had (and it had gotten pretty hefty), its light was snuffed. Sniff.

And while I am at it, let me whinge for just a moment about Liatris. No book in which I have ever referenced
this perennial had mentioned anything about difficulty, but I am on my third try. First I did the corms in the
garden. Nothing came up. Then I bought a plant. Mort. Now I am trying the corms again, but I know where they
are this time: in my plant room (solarium is a word to pretentious to use when it's just a place with a lot of
                               windows that used to be the kids' TV room) in pots, where I cannot lose them!
                               Barbara Damrosch, in her "The Garden Primer" (first edition, but I hear the second
                                one is out and fabulous) is typical in her glibness about this plant: "grow anywhere...
                               suited to a variety of habitats...all are vigorous growers...can be naturalized..."
                               Ugh! Is she mocking me?  
                                         I'll let you know.
First Day OUT!! 2008
March 2 and I got outside. The 3 square feet of unfrozen land I encountered this morning at 0930 hours expanded to a couple of small plots
near the house. I read somewhere I should cut back liriope, so I dutifully did. I have a variegated type which makes a nice neat border
around one bed. I puttered. I walked into the house with a handful of "sticks", as husband called them. Then, with no more prompting from me
than a mild glare, he thought, and he said, "Oh, you are going to force some forsythia." OMG is
all I have to say to that. You can't know how far he has come.
Back outside and I was loving the smell and feel of the somewhat frozen earth. I found one of those plastic plant id
tags. Those aren't my favorite garden ornaments, but I try to leave them until I have written down what the heck I
purchased. This was a Hosta "Frosted Dimples", which I am hopeful will come back, despite the fact that the LARGE,
ubiquitous catalog company from which I purchased it sells depressingly tiny samples for great fistfuls of $, and despite
its disagreeable name.
    Other finds: 3 golf balls, one sad terracotta frog whose fashionable faux-mossy patina had crumbled to
expose a loud and embarrassing orange color (oops, should have stowed that one in the shed) and some tips of some, some, dare I say            
                             it--GROWING THINGS! Snow drops with the swell of blooms, yellow tips of muscari leaves which will gladly greet tomorrow's
              pro          promised 50 degrees and then maybe turn a bit green, and the tiny tips of daffs.
                          

                               And so we begin: Gardening 2008.
Vegetables IN   May 7, 2008
      There is a plant sale in my town held the first Saturday in May by the Garden Education Center that I consider to be in the "compulsory
attendance" category. However, life sometimes gets in the way: children, parents, the puppy and various sibs were all on the agenda for me
that fine day instead. That means this year's tomatoes, zucchini and peppers are all from Home Depot. I grow things I really want to eat, and
that means the ability to make salsa, pesto, and any big fat gourd-type thingie that can be chopped, marinated with salad dressing, and thrown
on the grill. I am not fussy. I opine that styrofoam, served in this manner, would taste at least tolerable.
      So I cannot relate to the folks who wax poetic about this tomato or that. For me, heirloom tomatoes and the like are like fine wine:
appreciated in theory but far from mandatory in practice. And when shopping at a cyclopean hardware store, when employees may or may not
have reached retirement before completing all the necessary watering chores, your choices dwindle down to plants that appear to be still
extant. For me, those, this year, will be Better Boy, Husky Cherry Red, Grape Cupid, and WHOPPER. How can I go wrong with the latter?
      The carefully chosen zucchini were carefully labeled as "zucchini". Please tell me who needs 12 of those, which was the smallest amount I
could purchase? I stuck in 6, far more than I need, then Cooper the puppy and I took the longest walk of his short life to deliver the other two to
my buddy Annie. Two bell pepper plants (of the famous "bell pepper" species), and one jalopena, for the salsa. August will be delicious.