Sunny Saturday (Celebrate the Day!)

Birch 'Crimson Frost' seems like inspiration for Dr. Suess

I think a lot of the country has had sleet, freezing rain, high winds, and even... snow. It has been getting cold here at night, but with sun and temperature getting above freezing for almost December; I'll take it.

It has been so nice, although even at noon the shadows are so long, the sun sits so low to the horizon during the entire day. The quality of light is poor. The skies are so blue they seem unreal.

I can see the camp of the evil squirrels from my deck.

I filled my window baskets with spruce, arborvitae, and cypress.

My 'bumpy' boxer supervised. She might be 13 next spring provided the bumpiness is not a cutaneous lymphoma. She enjoyed the sunny day on the deck with me. She says she has been talking to the feral cat about the nine lives thing and wants to come back as my pocket dog, preferring to be as close to me at all times as possible (read 'underfoot').
(The peeling deck is in my plan. I would like to stain it rather than paint it each and every year only to have it look like this in less than 12 months.)

Decorated for the season. I'm not sure if I am done. Sometimes less is more. Just the various evergreens looked good to me.

Bright light and long shadows along the shrub border at noon today. Notice green grass and no snow.

Poinsettias

Red poinsettia as a focal point of a holiday vignette in my home

Nothing speaks to me more about the holidays than poinsettias. They are best thought of as a growing plant in the same niche as a floral bouquet, bought for color and discarded when they begin to look a bit tired.

Through trial and error I have learned to buy and bring them home on a day where the temperature are minimally at freezing and rush them indoors. Once there I check the soil. If at all moist I forego watering until it dries out completely and then flood it in the sink having removed the foil pot cover and allowing it to drain. Depending on the dryness of the air in your home and temperatures, poinsettia will last through January.

Poinsettia can cause contact dermatitis if you are exposed to the white sap as they are euphorbias. They are also poisonous to pets.



Photo Credit: Megan Bame
There is just something so wrong with spraying poinsettias every color in the rainbow. Some growers even ad glitter.
 

Poinsettias come in shades of green, white, pink, and red, and mottled combinations of these. Most other colors start out as whites and have paint sprayed on to achieve all the colors of the rainbow.

The Gnomes Have Arrived

House across the street is harboring gnomes? Refugees?

I live in a beautiful neighborhood. There are several gardeners on just my short one block street. The rest want to garden and they keep up their yards.

My neighbor cross-corner from me (kitty-corner would be the vernacular in this area), has been challenged by the weather and has lost his foundation planting arborvitaes at least two years, maybe three now in a row. His granddaughter has even inquired as to the variety I had planted on the south side of the high school as possible replacement varieties this last spring because of this particular run of bad luck. ('Smaragd', by the way.)

It comes as no surprise then to see these figures emerge.

The gardener there is an incredibly good vegetable gardener. His perennial garden is one ordered in straight rows perpendicular to the vegetable garden. I think of it as a color box. In mid-June it is if one opened a elementary school child's watercolor set; blocks of intense color in the primary and secondary colors.  There is the true orange of poppies which bloom in the beginning of June, a deep purple of an iris, the bright pink of a peony, a deep red-violet rhododendron and a light mauve one, white Alaska daisies. I think there must a deep red peony of the type seldom seen here anymore and probably a yellow iris, too. They are all line up in pure clumps of color, no intermingling allowed. The effect is spectacular.

He is also a gardener playing tag with 90, Parkinson's, and kidney cancer. He is not about to mess around with the possible survival of his arborvitae. Covering his arborvitae then is just good planning. With the intense wind of the last few days and the winds which will come on the flip side of winter when evergreens are particularly prone to desiccation and wind burn, covering with burlap makes good sense. (I wish thinking of covering my Boulevard cypress would make it happen.)

My Boulevard cypress after the particularly bad wind burn of 2014 (in April).
Fortunately for this lazy gardener, it does grow out of this burn over the course of a couple months.
Cypress is far more forgiving than Alberta spruce and arborvitae.

A warning to proactive gardeners wishing to avoid evergreen burn, burlap treated with copper sulfate to prevent rotting may end up with plants dying from absorption of the chemicals used to prevent the burlap from rotting. Copper sulfate is used in and around landscaping applications in many ways. Often plastic pots are treated with copper sulfate to prevent root from endless circling of the pot. I have seen an entire privacy screen of arborvitaes die from being bound in burlap treated with copper sulfate. They had been covered for the dual purpose of protection of desiccation and deer predation. They died anyway-- today's cautionary tale.

Windy

Peacock Kale

Like a blow hard, the weather seems to be threatening winter. A high pressure system has dumped 8 inches of snow on Denver, which from where I sit feels as relevant as hearing about spring blooms in Australia. Already I count the days to spring without hearing the starting gun for winter.

The trees are bare here. The oaks hold onto their burnished leaves. The grass is still green. When the sun shines it is balmy. When the wind blows more of the bones of the garden are revealed. I still have a couple annuals in the garden that are alive...

A nice-looking cordyline I should bring in

 

November Garden Clean Up

I spent yesterday afternoon working in my garden.

Birch 'Crimson Frost'

Not a monumental revelation, I suppose, except that it was November 4.

I mowed sugar maple leaves and they literally disappeared uncovering the deep lush green lawn beneath. I mowed my perennial bed, cutting in and around shrubs. I mowed the strawberry bed. I mowed the daylilies that have much too much evergreen daylily in their genetic make-up. I mowed the hosta bed under the huge white pine which is nearly done dropping its golden needles, at least for now.

I dug out the treacherously thorny blackberry with a root ball of the dimensions of my forearm. I doubt I "got it all". It is like a cancer invading the kinder, gentler raspberries.

I removed stems and stalks. Leaves continue to fall. I see the structural bones of my garden formed by plants.

What is a Garden For...?

Wild bee in a double cosmo, seed from Jason at A Garden in the City

I think a lot of us garden out of habit.

We may have started as a way to beautify a home, grow some food, maintain our yards, or attract birds and wildlife. Just as we gardeners evolve so do the reasons we garden and what we want our gardens to deliver.

Is the urge there to recreate some vestigial memory of a primordial garden from some distant ancestral past? Is it simply an add-on to another hobby, cooking or photography. Does your garden speak to you at some lower level of need; never knowing hunger while the sun is shining on your face and the warm wind blows?

Being able to fully answer this question will tell you what sort of garden you should create.

I think it is important that every small child has the opportunity to play in the dirt. I don't mean the sanitized boxes of sand with plastic covers that are so removed from really playing in the dirt. Some of my earliest memories are of playing in the dirt with my sisters on the farm with small metal farm implements and toy tractors. We had little disc and explored contour farming methods and terracing. We moved small chamomile plants around pretending they were mighty trees. We assembled small abodes of leaves and sticks and pretended our tiny farmers lived in them. We herded ants as if they were sheep or chickens, with about as much luck. We realized the dirt was not a homogenous mix, but contained different colored bits of silica, organic material, and interesting rocks.

Part of my succulent collection, echevarias, sedums, jades, sempervirvens,  barrel cactus, and more.

We foraged for anything edible. I am surprised we didn't poison ourselves with nightshade, mushrooms, or something else close at hand. I don't remember getting a lot of guidance on what we could eat and what we shouldn't eat. Just like children today we loved the sugar high, but it came from sand cherries, black caps, dew berries, and apples.  We eschewed burdock, dandelion, and fox grapes; all edible, but as palatable as other more tasty forage. We probably spat out things which were not good for us for exactly the same reason. We learned early on the itching caused by nettles, none of us were curious enough to want to taste them.

We all survived.

We learned about the natural world and our places in it.

A group of daylilies I grew from seed a couple years back.

Weather Unsaid

Color in the front yard, these crabapples on my Red Jade will freeze and persist until spring when they will thaw and birds will pick off 90% of them.

Or words unspoken...

 

The weather is behaving absolutely gloriously. I would take a dozen days like today with bright sunshine, though short-timed, and moderate temperatures.  We will be having a string of sunny days before the temperatures dip back to highs below that golden 50 degree mark.

 

When in the garden, I turn about considering how I should make each day count for something in the scheme of my garden chores. I pulled radishes, hilled up some leeks, and collected some ripe fennel seeds. I am probably the last person on the planet cooking with fennel regularly, and wish I could tempt the bulbous stem not to go to seed each and every time I attempt to grow it for more than its seed heads. It appears I may have luck with some offshoot of my plants set out this spring.

 

Fennel seeds

Burning bush and rock cairn

Parsley

Leeks

Fennel offset

Strawberry bed with sugar maple winter leaf cover

Oakleaf hydrangea showing some color

Abiqua Drinking Gourd with some nice color

 I rely on a very small group of plants for winter color when there is no snow cover; a couple heuchera, carex, my evergreen azaleas, bergenia, and a few shrubs with colorful bark.