Cats!

So, here are some pictures of Isabel:


Contemplative Iz.  (My desk chair is her favorite place to hang out.)

Chill Iz.  (hey.  'sup.)

Murder!Iz.  (Hard to see in this shot, but she's polydactyl and has these enormous floofy mitten-feet, which undercuts her Murder! image.)


And then Eloise:

Hanging out on my computer

Snoozy.



Glamour shot.

Nothing much

Trying to keep my mind off various workplace awfulnesses by focusing on the garden...

• I finally cleared out and weed-whacked the area along the west fence between the patio and the big shrubs.  Need to make up my mind about what I want to do in this stretch--I'd been thinking about planting a tree, but realize it would eventually shade the west garden bed.  Now contemplating some shrubs--a ceanothus, maybe a viburnum, some more hollies.
•  Got the weed-jungle in the Massive Pile of Dirt (which is waiting to be added to the north bed) mostly ripped out.  I need to try to find the business card of that dude I hired last summer to finish building/filling the expansion to the north bed.
• Everything in the general region of the shed remains to be done and is currently ghastly.

But the main west bed is looking very nice right now, from certain angles.

And so we're in June.

Just a quick update, mostly photos:

First of all, the Saddest Oriental Poppy EVER.  She should be like two-three feet high, with many splendid luminous huge tissue-paper flowers, but since she was only planted a few weeks ago, this is what we get for this year.  We can only look forward to 2018...

 

In the category of roses, first of all, this weirdly foreshortened picture of the first blossom on Sharifa Osma, who is in a big pot on the porch. What I wish I could somehow post/share is the fragrance of this bloom, which is intoxicating.

 

And in other rose news, here are the first early blooms of The Generous Gardener.

 

Also! The mountain laurel / Kalmia Latifolia blooms have begun opening!  They are actually very small (not well shown in this photo), and very exquisite.

Is it .... Memorial Day??

So, I have utterly failed at the goal of making this a regularly-maintained garden journal w/pictures, but I can at least post a few photos as of today, May 28, for Kevin to enjoy.

This is a shrub clematis, for which I paid a fortune but is really really lovely.

Young delphinium in back, with I-can't-recall-quite-what in the foreground.

These are some begonias that I bought at the grocery story the other day because I loved the complexity of the colors, not that this photo does a very good job of showing them.   They will get planted up in a container for the patio.

This is a small kalmia latifolia (mountain laurel) that I bought on impulse at Lael's Moon Garden nursery last fall, and it is doing better than I anticipated in its container on the patio.  At some point, to be sure, it will go into the actual garden.  At some point in the next few days, these buds will open, and I'll re-photograph them then.

Hanging planters...

I have GOT to start using my actual camera, not the one in the phone, because this is a fairly awful photo of the early blooming rose (Crocus Rose).  Will try again tomorrow with my Lumix.

I think of this as like one of those "Three Stages of Life" tryptiches...

Foxglove, with salvia and cranesbill Biokovo in the background.

The intensely, eye-poppingly crimson geums were not intended to be quite so *vivid*, but they do make a nice color explosion in what is otherwise a rather cool-toned garden.

Dianthus.  I love dianthus.

This is the northwest corner of the garden, which was just planted this spring, and still needs to grow into itself.

This eryngium, which is several years old now in the north bed, will be *spectacular* in a few weeks.

Overall view of the west bed.

April round-up

Retail frenzy at West Seattle Nursery and Bark & Garden!  This is what ~$240 worth of perennials looks like:

Among other things, I am restocking the moonbeam coreopsis (with an eye to keeping it from running amok this time), oenothera (ditto) and cistus (DOUBLE ditto), doubling down on the foxgloves, dianthus, and penstemon, planting delphiniums for the first time, taking another run at gaura, putting in a white oriental poppy, and--a bunch of other stuff.  (Full list in Google doc.)

Also, being 0 for 2 on clematis, of course I had to take another swing--this time Fair Rosamund, and I need to figure out where to put her.  The logical place would be against the west fence adjacent to Wollerton Old Hall, but I have read accounts that W.O.H. blooms can fade a kind of unpleasant yellowish-off-white, which would look like hell with F.R.  Likely further towards the NW corner, with something blue in between.

None of this includes the $111 I spent at Heirloom Roses:  Molineaux, Queen of Sweden, and Jacqueline du Pre.  I am dubious about the latter, given others's reports that she's straggled in their gardens, but she is too beautiful to resist:



I have started a large map of the entire west bed, in wan hopes of developing some better plan for deciding where to put things than just tromping around and setting pots down more or less at random and then hurriedly digging them in before my back gives out.

Stuff to move from north bed before it gets renovated:

• daylilies (can probably split each into 2-3)
• dianthus (ditto)
• eryngium
• echinops
• linum 
• siberian irises? maybe? (they want a wetter site than I can guarantee them)
• peony, of course
• Prince asters

...and I will need to figure out where they all go in the west bed too, of course.

Also:  what do I put in the NW corner?  If I could locate one of those dwarf Sango Kaku Japanese maples, that would be good.  Or if someone would breed a ceanothus that doesn't get HUGE.

Counting the survivors--west beds

The real winners in this whole part of the garden were the damned weeds; I keep sort of forgetting that here in the temperate rainforest, the weeds grow ALL WINTER LONG.

Crocus Rose and The Generous Gardener appear to revving up for a vigorous year.  I was going to do a comprehensive pruning and trellising in February, per the video, but there really was not a day it wasn't raining, and also I realized I needed a much better (larger, stronger) trellis than any I had on hand or could readily acquire.  I bought a bundle of cedar 1x2s and will be building a trellis any day now (hah) but I think it's probably too late to do the comprehensive pruning this year. 

The hollies get a special round of applause for being the most durable and patient shrubs imaginable.  They do need some pruning, and I think if I stay on top of things (hah) I can keep them comfortably fitting in their space.

For the perennials, here's the win/loss columns:

Yea	??	Nay
All the herbs	Acanthus Mollis	Artemesia Silver Mound
Prof. Kippenburg	Gaura Gaudi Red	Penstemon Pocahantes and Blackbird and Thorn
Jacobs Ladder		Moroccan Daisy
Monarda		All the salvias (no surprise)
Foxgloves (yay!)		Osteospermum Lavender Mist
Sun roses (both ends)
Coreopsis Daybreak
Geranium Biokovo
Potentilla William Rollison and Pikes Peak and Monarchs Velvet
Echinacea Pow Wow
Anemone Sept. Charm and Fantasy Cinderella and Honorine Jobert

Obvious takeaway is that the potentillas and anemones proved hardier than the penstemons.   Also, there is a LOT of empty real estate in this bed on the north side <gleefully rubbing hands>.

I will leave the catastrophe that is the north bed to another day and another post.

Also, the magnolia is dying of anthracnose blight.  Which will give me a chance to put a nice little crabapple in there. 

Counting the survivors--stuff on the patio

Actually, most things came through the winter remarkably well, considering it got down into the low teens several days in a row in January.

• The daphne, bless it, keeps soldiering along, will be covered with bloom very soon, and really needs and deserves to be potted up this summer.
• The hebe that I got somewhere last fall had a rough time of it and is mostly, but not entirely, dead.  I'll prune it and see how it does.
• Sharifa Asma is starting to put out growth, yay!  I read an article somewhere this winter that gloomily discussed its incredible propensity for disease, and might I just say I WISH somewhere was some kind of even semi-authoritative reference on the disease-proneness of the various David Austin roses in various climates?  Thank you and good night. 
• The bay appears to have scale (of course) and has not grown a millimeter, which I guess is not a surprise.
• Kalmia latifolia is thriving and looks like it should bloom soon.
• There's an evergreen something-or-other mycrophylla whose tag I have lost, but who seems to be doing fine. (I think a cotoneaster?)
• The rosemary barberry (berberis x stynophylla Irwinii) that I bought on impulse at Lael's is swell, but still very mossy on its branches, and I should clean it off with a tweezers at some point.
• And the Japanese maple is fine, but I need to make up my mind whether it stays or goes, and also see if its barrel is rotting out on the bottom.
• I will need to decide what to put in the planter right soon -- that might be a good place for various annuals.

Soon we'll have to have the pergola-raising party!

HOLD THE PHONE!!

...and Jesus take the wheel!!!

The peony ...

...is...

ALIVE! 

As you know, Bob, that peony was one of the very first plants I bought and put in the ground (along with Just Joey [sob] and that wacky Frieda clematis).  Sometime in the next year or two I idiotically put the rock rose right in front of it, and it got totally smothered year after year, and I was absolutely certain it had given up.

But last year I *finally* hacked down the rock rose, and I was just out weeding and surveying the mess, and my hand to god, there is the peony pushing sturdily up out of the ground and basking in the sun.

(Surrounded by weeds, to be sure, just like everything else in this friggin' garden) (and also the rock rose stump is staging a vigorous comeback attempt and will need to be grubbed out by someone whose back is stronger than mine).  

And also BY GOD, my generally worthless memory has offered up the fact that this peony is Athena:

  

I will be very happy, needless to say, if it blooms anything like this.

Anyway, I thought this deserved its own entry.  <beaming all over my face>  

First, the fall/winter...

So.  A difficult winter for several reasons:

• It was one of the longest, WETTEST, coldest winters in at least recent PNW history.
• Things at work got, let us say, challenging.
• The Prozac crapped out on me, but I didn't realize it for quite a while, attributing my slowly-deepening depression to--
• THE FUCKING ELECTION FUCK FUCK FUCK.

 But returning focus to matters of the garden and household, some items of note:

• Sharifa Asma actually had several blooms (small but lovely) before winter set in!
  

And, um.  Actually, I think that might be it?  The depression really clobbered me when it came to even *thinking* about the garden.

On the upside, though, after a gruesome experiment with Cymbalta, I'm on Lexapro and it seems to be working well!  (Hence my posting here.)

Onward to spring!