It’s lucky the weather has been beautiful, because the news has been so disheartening. I have great need of the garden, to recharge my ability to deal with my fellow humans. Pure summer has arrived, blue skied, clear, and breezy, so I stepped away from websites and media feeds, took my kneeling pad, my weeder, and my tubtrug and went out to the garden. Hello tomatoes. Let me help you out by getting these iniquitous weeds out from under your feet.
It was satisfying. I liberated the tomatoes and went on to the cosmos and zinnias. You can never have too many flowers, so when the available raised beds were full I found a place for more: a circle of zinnia seeds around my garden globe. In my garden I can grow what I want, where I want, in as many raised beds as I like, or in low dirt where I think that’s a better idea, No one argues with me about it. Other people grow other things, but gardeners don’t go around forcing their beans and watermelon seeds on those with other plans.
I added a row of pots down the deck steps – more flowers, and then some chocolate mint. Mint grows fast and will take over the world if not confined to pots. Someone once argued with me that mint couldn’t possibly taste like chocolate, because they didn’t believe chocolate came from a plant. They became very invested in this position, causing a force field to rise around their ears, blocking facts. I like to think this happens more outside of gardens than in them, but our first recorded instance of it was in a garden, long ago.
Once I had the pots on the deck I continued around the house to the front yard, where I checked the water in the birdbath. There was water. There was also a bird. Robins are my totem bird, of course, so when they hang out around my house it feels like a kind word from the cosmos, and makes me happy.
I fill the birdbath from a hose at the end of the house. I’ve been wanting a nice clear path to it, so I cut up some cardboard boxes, laid them out across the grass, layered mulch over them, and lined up stepping stones on top. When I turn on the water, my thumb on the end of the hose sends a strong enough spray to the birdbath to clean out any fallen leaves, dirt, stray feathers, whatever muck the has been left behind. A slight change of pressure makes the spray gentler, filling the birdbath up again, clean, sparkling, ready for the future. It takes the right effort in the right place, repeated often, to keep the situation from getting out of hand.
They say it’s really going to be hot today in Michigan. This weather forecast made me excited. Hot! Languid, delightful, relaxing heat, soother of achy muscles, consoler of tiny infants. Yay! That’s me talking. Unfortunately, it makes Doug cranky. He will want to turn on the air conditioner, and I will want to sit by an open window. I won’t do yardwork in the sun, but I will happily wander outside with my iced tea in hand, checking on the plants. They are well watered from the huge downpour we had two days ago, but pots do dry out. A thumb in the dirt of these told me they’re doing fine, but at some point Doug will bring a bucket of water up from the dehumidifier, and I’ll give them another drink.
The plants in the ground won’t need extra help. Here are the chives in my herb garden, along with some of the sage, looking happy. Their friends the thyme and oregano are happy too, but the chives get the photo op while they’re in bloom.
The outdoor tomatoes are blooming now, too, and a few fruits have set. Tomatoes like it fairly hot, but if it goes over 90 degrees for a couple of days, they won’t set fruit. Meanwhile the indoor tomatoes, which have been producing since Memorial Day, are rolling right along. They have a sunny window, but they’re also downstairs in a two story house, so they’ll stay cool enough.
Sitting by that window, writing this, I was thinking of the birdbath and scrolling through my phone for a recent photo, when I glanced out the window and saw this. They hopped out, of course, as soon as I picked up my phone. I also saw that the level of water has decreased since this morning. It’s 1:30 clock time now, which is our Solar Noon (one hour for the clocks being on Daylight Savings Time, and half an hour for our location within our time zone). I will monitor the water level, and fill it back up when needed.
Zerlina is often very interested in birdbath activity, but not today. We’re officially at 92 degrees, so she’s with the garden tomatoes on the question of temperature limits. I think Doug is taking a nap. I promised him I wouldn’t go out in the noonday sun, but in a couple of hours I will make the rounds, slowly, with iced tea and bare feet, amazed again at the warmth welling up from the same place where, just weeks ago, I walked in the snow.
I love peonies for their wanton blowsiness. They swoop, they dangle, they lean out crazily into their neighbors like uninvited gossips. They burst out in bright colors but change into pastels when your back is turned. They are named for Paean, physician to the Greek gods, and for a song of praise.
This season marks the 100th anniversary of the Peony Garden at the UM Arboretum in Ann Arbor. It marks the 10thanniversary of my personal peony gardening. These are some of mine. I don’t have close to 10 percent of what they do so I guess I’ve fallen behind, but it’s not the fault of the peonies. When Doug and I moved into this house there were three peony bushes struggling in a spot that had clearly grown more shady over the years. Come fall, I carefully dug them out and moved them to a sunnier location. I thought I’d moved them all, so next spring I was surprised to find I had peony bushes in both places. The peonies are definitely going for divide and conquer. The hitch is, they depend on me to clear out more lawn for them. This summer I plan to smother another swath of grass with cardboard, newsprint, and cedar mulch, and come fall divided peonies will take it over.
In keeping with the theme of Greek gods, though totally by accident, my peonies keep company with iris, a flower named for the rainbow and the gods’ messenger. Iris does come in many colors, often two or three on a single flower, but a bearded iris looks more like a supplicant than a messenger – those uplifted hands. Yes, there are three of them, but still.
Siberian iris grow in clumps, so you get a big, dramatic display right away. A perennial, like peonies, they can be divided every few years to yield more and more gorgeous blue waves. But last time I did it, I noticed it was not easy to dig up the clump. Strange, that didn’t used to be true. Something tells me it’s on its way to be truer and truer every year. Peonies and bearded iris are shallow rooted and easy to dig, but I believe next time the Siberian iris need dividing, I will be calling on the Rent-a-Rowers.
Meanwhile, I do have one place where the perennials cooperate without my intervention. Creeping plumbago (ceratostigma plumbaginoides) gets started late in the spring, which annoys people looking for green where the brown was, but makes a perfect groundcover for faded daffodils: the plumbago only leafs out when the daffs are gone and their leaves start to flop and look bad. Creeping plumbago then clambers in and climbs over them, tidying up the garden all on its own. Later in the summer it has lovely blue flowers, and in the fall its leaves turn bright red. Then it dies down and gets politely out of the way, so the daffodils can burst into full glory come spring, and the cycle repeats. A very cooperative plant.
The creeping plumbago was so busy taking care of the front yard, I was able to do some weeding in the back. Then I set out my chairs among the aggressive ferns and volunteer Dame’s Rocket, for both of which I am grateful, and sat, contemplating the view: flowers; weeds; birdsong; the world.
Because the deer and rabbits don’t eat daffodils, I consider daffs part of my landscaping and rarely bring them into the house for bouquets. Tulips are a different story. They need to be protected from critters, so I plant them inside the fenced garden, which clearly means they are a crop. I gather them, and with early and late varieties I have tulip bouquets for many weeks. An interesting thing about tulips is, when the flowers are spent, they – well, they explode, into a colorful chaos. I love that. We went away for a few days, and when we got back yesterday there was just such an explosion awaiting us. The rest of that bouquet blew itself up this morning.
A trip to the garden revealed a new tulip crew ready to go, but this may be the last of them. It’s perfect timing, because the raised beds they’ve been frolicking in are soon to host the tomato plants currently beating against the glass in the upstairs window.
My Green Lady, now next to the new garden bench, has acquired a skirt, and though it’s hard to tell here she’s developing sleeves of lamium, which I hope will ultimately reach her hands. But my attempt to give her a crown of hellebore didn’t take. It was coming along nicely, but must have been just far enough under the eave of the house that it was out of the rain. The pot dried out. The Jacob’s ladder alongside her needs no help from me to flourish, but neither do the hellebore in the front yard. They’re in-ground. So I have a choice to make here: give her a hat of something very drought resistant; remember to water her in spring even when it rains; or, what I usually do, plant her hat with summer annuals, because I’m used to watering summer annuals.
Last year in May the crabapple trees were flowering in glory and the lilacs pouted. This year it’s the reverse – nothing worth a photo from the crabapples, but the lilacs look wonderful and smell even better. Why? Weather? Law of averages? I’m told there are crabapple varieties that only flower every other year, but mine seem to skip years randomly. It’s happened before, but not regularly. I tend to record these events even more randomly than they happen. Sometimes, in a moment of enthusiasm, I tell myself to keep a detailed garden journal with dates and comments for everything in the yard, to compare year to year and nail these things down. Moments of enthusiasm pass.
The dogwood, though, bloom reliably: mid-May. There’s a poem by Edna St.Vincent Millay where she describes dogwoods as having “ivory bowls that bear no fruit.” I loved that poem as a kid growing up, but knew from observation that dogwoods do indeed bear fruit – red berries, in the fall. We don’t eat them but they are berries nonetheless, and many critters appreciate them. So she was wrong about the fruit, but “ivory bowls” is perfect, and I always think of it when the dogwood blooms. Ivory bowls will make you see dogwood, while red berries never would. The point of her poem wasn’t botany. The point was that the magically beautiful persists, returns, and is there to be found with or without a detailed journal.
Things have brightened up considerably in the last two weeks. The forsythia have thickened up, and though temperatures are still skidding around like Olympic slalom wipeouts, it doesn’t seem to matter as much. The sun is up and working before I am in the morning, and didn’t set last night till about 8:30. Brightness rules.
The early daffodils finally shook themselves out, and the less-early pink ones have joined them. Once again the flower buds of the grape hyacinths were nearly all nipped off before they could get an inch off the ground. This is apparently a rabbit delicacy. Since it’s only the flower bud, the plants come back every year. Alas, so do the rabbits. Although yesterday morning the neighbor’s outdoor cat, Mac, went sauntering across my backyard with a very young bunny in his mouth. Whenever Mac ventures into Zerlina’s sightlines, she throws a hissy fit. Cats, you know, invented hissy fits. But she was sleeping by the front window this time, so he escaped being chastised for poaching.
Mac mostly sticks to the back yard. Meanwhile in the front yard, the birdbath sits near Zerlina’s window. She and I both like to watch it. Either I have lots of robins that like to bathe, or I have one robin that really, really likes to bathe. Here he is all puffed up from just having hopped out and taken a good shake. The cardinal, the mourning dove, the goldfinches, house finches, and chickadees also drink and bathe, but I’d say there’s a proportion of at least four or five robin-baths to each non-robin bath.
Following the daffodils, the weeping cherry’s blooming now, too. This is the tree with the giant scar down the whole trunk, from a lightning strike before our time here. Every winter it loses another chunk of branch and we think, that’s it; every spring it comes back. It’s a favorite of bees, and the natural pruning process has given it many twisty angles that are popular sites for bird nests.
You can see it again in the tomato photo. The seedlings are doing much better than they did last year, for no reason I can come up with. It’s still going to be two or three weeks before our last frost means they can go outside, so Doug cut some dowels for me and I staked them. They also have a better than average survival rate, so I will be giving some away. Not too many, though. I can never have enough tomatoes.
It’s been wet, cold, and windy, and my bulbs and flowering trees are a good two weeks behind schedule. The chionodoxa are coming out but the daffodils, even the early varieties, are holding back.
I did scrounge up bigger pots for the seedling tomatoes upstairs, giving them all room to stretch their toes indoors while it warms up outside. Downstairs, the Cobra greenhouse tomatoes are just starting to get that little sheen that comes before ripening.
While I was rearranging seedlings in the upstairs window, I looked down on what appeared to be off-season practice for Santa’s sled-pullers. It’s hard to tell from the photo, but they’re on the edge of a swale along the roadside. What they found there was either extra delicious or the only thing growing yet, because they stayed at it until an approaching car made them scatter. At which point they all ran in different directions, including straight at the car, which fortunately did not veer into the swale. Once they were gone I went out to see what the Deer Yummy was, so I could avoid planting any of it. Moss.
It was drier and more pleasant outside today. We set up my sundial on the new plinth Doug made for it. You can’t use a watch to set up your sundial, especially not in Ann Arbor, which sits well to the west in its time zone. Clock time jumps an entire hour every 1000 miles or so, but the sun doesn’t hop like that. It’s on a nice, smooth roll (or rather, the turning earth is). Then there’s Daylight Savings time, which means nothing to a sundial. You need to line up the gnomon on a sundial with true north, which is not the same as magnetic north. You can get true north by pointing at the North Star, but not in the afternoon. You can put a plant stake in the ground, watch for its shadow to show the sun directly overhead, and line up your sundial for noon. Neither of these methods work on a day full of dancing clouds. So I hover with my watch, and in a fleeting flash of sunlight subtract about 40 minutes for the time zone and another hour to get back to Standard Time, and twist the sundial into agreement. Will have to consult with stars and shadows when the weather clears up.
Meanwhile, I realized that my forsythia was blooming while mostly obscured by the plumes of last summer’s zebra grass. Since native solitary bees hibernate in the tall stalks of the grass, I don’t cut them down until a few things are flowering for the bees. Doug came out with the electric hedge trimmer and gave the zebra grass a buzzcut. I spread the fallen stalks around, unchopped, in case any bees were sleeping late. The forsythia was gorgeous against the moody sky.
Michigan Spring continues making fun of itself. We had a run of 60 degree days interrupted by 30 degree days, but the plants in the yard took all this in stride. The hellebores are very happy.
Doug and I took advantage of a warm day to inspect the fenced garden. The tulips, safe from deer, are getting ready to provide bouquets for me. We found several broken places in the chickenwire that need replacing, and the clematis trellis was tilted at an alarming angle. I cut the autumn clematis to the ground, leaving three or four strong-looking stems at about 15 inches high, and we righted the trellis. Don’t try this with a spring bloomer, or you’ll be removing flowerbuds. Autumn clematis blooms on the new growth it produces in the summer.
Doug had patched up my garden bench as needed over the years, but for my birthday he built me a new one. It spent the winter in the basement, waiting for its moment to emerge into the sunlight like a big wooden butterfly. We brought it upstairs in three pieces, and he assembled it on the spot. It is shiny and glorious, and now sports a few appropriate objects. Also the spare propane tank for the grill, which has to live somewhere.
Then another round of snow appeared, wet and fragile but snow nonetheless. It looked very like flowers on the hedges outside my window.
On the inside of the same window, the Cobra greenhouse tomato seedlings are four feet tall and blooming. Since there’s no wind and no bugs – or, no suitable bugs – inside the house, I help the flowers set fruit by tickling them. They like that. One infant tomato has already appeared.
The outdoor tomatoes are doing well in their new experimental trays. They look droopy here, but it’s because I’d just turned the trays. The plants had developed a severe lean toward the glass in an unexpectedly short time — I have to remember to rotate them more frequently. I’m used to growing them in those big cardboard milk cartons, letting them get pretty big before they go outside. I can see that in these smaller circumstances they’re likely to run out of rootspace before outside time comes. I’ll need to scrounge up some bigger containers, and maybe start them later next year.
The snow that’s left now lies mostly in disconnected curves and crescents, where our plow service banked its savings at the ends of the driveway and cleared a space to the mailbox. This plowing is done by a woman who is a landscaper in the summer half of the year, and it shows in the careful edges of her beautiful plowing. Then the county street plow comes along and throws the sandy, icy detritus from the road all over her beautiful work. Then the mailman, who in this case is a mailwoman, leaves a note in the mailbox pointing out that she can’t drive right up to it and that this won’t do. So then Doug goes out with a snow shovel and moves the road snow somewhere inoffensive.
I can see from the upstairs window that he won’t have to do that again this season. I’m tending my seedlings in their new, experimental pots, because during the pandemic we switched to getting milk delivered in glass bottles, so I no longer have all those paper cartons for seed starting. Last year I had a motley bunch of trays, but this year I bought some very fancy, reusable silicone potting sets. I’m going to see how they compare to the empty egg cartons and random leftover bedding pots I had lying around.
The indoor Cobra tomatoes I started in big pots in the window downstairs are two feet tall now, and developing their first flowers. I calculate this means tomatoes by Memorial Day. Maybe next year I’ll start them earlier and have tomatoes for, oh, Mardi Gras or something. I’ll put on my green and purple glass beads and have a BLT with my paczki.
Speaking of Lent, Hellebores are also called Lenten Roses, since they bloom at the appropriate time. Mine are a little late starting this year, but there’s still plenty of Lent left for them to catch up. I went out this afternoon to cut away some of the old leaves, and this as my reward. Hello, little flowers. Little signs of hope. Welcome to the needy world.
I have many lovely photos of my flowering amaryllis and tulips, blooming on the windowsill in this unaccountably mild early March. I planned to write about them, their colors, how the pink of one brings out the coral tones of another, but I’m having trouble concentrating on their peace and beauty while the news of war, burning through the snow in Ukraine, simmers underneath the Word window on my laptop.
There was a picture in the news this morning of the entrance to a Ukrainian embassy, piled high with flowers, the universal offer of comfort and condolence. These were mostly blue and yellow, the colors of Ukraine’s flag. I have many yellow daffodils and blue forget-me-nots still deep in their winter sleep in my front yard. They’re hardy, and will rise and bloom no matter what is thrown at them. Snow. Sleet. Freeze-thaw-freeze. No matter what, they work their way toward the surface and bump the leafmold out of the way.
Today in Ann Arbor the snow is in full retreat under a sunny sky and 48 degrees. This is a temperature that would feel cold to me if it rolled through in July, but today I walked outside in my flannel shirt, no jacket. Cold measured by a thermometer is absolute, but cold against the skin exists in relation to other things. We live in a layered world, where beautiful things and terrible things bump up against each other. Sometimes the best you can do against the terrible ones is to try to keep the beautiful ones on top.
It is February. It is cold. Things are frozen.
Robin Richstone 