People don't often plant white gardens (or moonlight gardens as some would call them). White flowers are rare and their impact is subtle. Maybe it's what the first owners of White Flower Farm (a nursery that has been supplying me with flowers for nearly thirty-five years) were going for when they chose that name for their flower growing business -- finding the unusual among the common. In any case, I'm no different than the vast majority of gardeners: I have a few white flowers, but not very many.
Given my preference for the pink-blue-lemon yellow spring range...
(like this false blue indigo...)
(... or the pink flowers emerging on this weigela bush)
it is always a bit of a surprise to face one of the flower beds right around now (the one closest to where we park the cars, so it rarely gets photographed in its entirety, because cars are are not an attractive background). It is effectively all green and white: clematis at one end, a large patch of white bearded iris at the other, and the dainty (and ever spreading!) white anemone at the front.
And it is the biggest bloomer right now. All white! Well, not entirely. Hiding behind a lilium stem is this pinky girl:
But you can't really see her because the lilium popped up right in front of her this year. So -- all white!
It's cloudy today. We hoped for a good morning of tree planting and indeed, right after breakfast...
... we took out all the equipment and got to work, aiming to fill the far flung corners with some hickories and the last of the hazelnuts and walnuts, but the rain came and even though initially we shrugged it off, it got to be too unpleasant and so after putting in just two trees, we retreated indoors.
As of this day, we have planted 39 trees. We're happy to see that some of them are budding, so they must be fairly content in their new home. (The real test, of course, comes this first winter...) Because Ed left a handful of old trees standing in the new forest, there is less space for the new ones than we had originally thought. No matter! We have ideas on where to plant the newbies elsewhere on the property. But we have to hurry: the longer they stay in the fridge, the lass chance they have of a successful adaptation to their new environment. So guess what we're going to be doing in the next few days? Yep -- we're going to keep on planting.
In the afternoon, the rains stop (for a bit), but I am now with Snowdrop so the tree project is put on hold.
The girl does spend a wee bit of time outside...
... but it is the end of the week and she needs her more restful moments on the couch.
But toward evening, as we walk to the car for the return trip home, she bolts on me. We haven't checked in on the chicks. She has to check in on the chicks. It's raining. She sprints to the barn.
No chicks.
Let's go back and look together.
There they are!
She herds them back in.
And she manages to successfully flock all three back to the coop. Happy follows. But the older girls resist. Ah well. at least everyone is in the barn and out of the rain.
But the continuing shower means that Ed and I never make it back to the tree project. And maybe that's a good thing. Evening plantings mean late dinners, and late dinners mean late nights and tired mornings. Instead, I cook up some fish, steam some spinach and sautee a few potatoes. After dinner, we watch Dance chase a mouse. And I go to sleep before midnight (this is aspirational: I'm not there yet). And tomorrow, we'll plant an impressive number of trees! Maybe.
