Surely this is a "careful what you wish for" type of spring. I'll be bringing in the tomatoes the next two nights. Too chilly for them out on the porch. If left alone, they may develop a stunted growth. But after that? Summer, full blast. Hot days, coming up. Hot nights too. I'll be turning on the dreaded AC, that's how hot it will be. So maybe I should revel in the cool morning! And the quiet outside! No dirt moving today! A lovely breakfast on the porch.
And Millie learns a lesson: eat the dirt in the tomato pot and you will throw up! Perhaps she'll stop now, right, pup?
I give some thought to the garden I will be planting in about ten days. I like, but do not choose to replicate the typical herbaceous border. I prefer the English cottage look. So, no orderly plants in clusters, spaced, artistically presented to recognize each species. And not even the French Giverny style of grouping flowers by their color. I love, instead, a blend of flowers. This, unfortunately, is hard to do well and I've made all the mistakes possible in my previous borders. (I've worked on this in three different properties over the decades, each one bigger than the previous, each one more complex. This will be my fourth.)
To my credit, I never had a strip of land, with good soil, plenty of sunshine and an unchanging size to work with. (I will have that now.) And over time, I really pushed day lilies, as any reader of Ocean would well remember. (I still love them, but I no longer want them to dominate.)
What's the biggest challenge? Combining plants very well. I purchased (and additionally will move from the farmette) some 60 plants of varying heights and blooming times. They need to fit in beautifully together. I suppose the skilled gardener would first draw a flower map and then buy according to its dictates. I did it in the opposite way: I purchased the flowers first (for reasons explained earlier) and now I have to think about how to place them. For this, I looked up each of the 60 plants, wrote down their height, color and period of flowering. This basically took up the whole morning.
I'm not sure yet how to place them. It's hard to imagine 60 flowers all at once. Some rules are obvious: tall in the back, short toward the front. But most are in the middle range and they all have to be in harmony with their neighbors!
As Miss Scarlett famously said -- I can't think about that right now. If I do, I'll go crazy. I'll think about that tomorrow.
When I'm done scribbling notes, it's time to take Millie to doggie day care for her three hour romp with other pups. This is when I go to a nearby coffee shop to read and rest before kid pickup.
I think about gardens. I think about Millie. I think about the numerous texts I got from a grandchild this morning worried about something very trivial. What do they have in common? They all need a thoughtful response. Maybe these days I can pause and do things with greater care.
This is the beautiful thing about being older: there is more time to think through all your options. They are more limited now of course, but perhaps that's not a bad thing. I can look more closely at what's before me. At breakfast this morning, I saw that the house finch came back to the nest in my lilac tree. The partner finch was perched on the roof top. The squeals come from up there. Is the bird is looking out for enemies? Birds, kids, dogs. Flowers, nature. I'm reading a book now ("Raising Hare") that I put off until I was done with my Irish run of Maeve Binchy. The hare book is about a woman who, during the Covid years, rescues a day-old abandoned leveret. I'll admit this: until this week, I did not understand that a hare and a rabbit are two entirely different species of animal. I had made up a song for the grandkids when they were little about a bunny rabbit hopping. I still sing it to Millie. I may have changed the lyrics around a bit had I thought about the animal that figured so prominently in my silly composition.
I lived the first years of my life in the deeply rural part of Poland. With my grandmother who took care of the inside, and my grandfather who took care of the outside world. When I began to seriously plant flowers 30 years later it was because I had a pull toward working in nature born of those early years. But I didn't think about it much. And now that I understand its importance, I want to be deliberate about it. Birds, kids, dogs, flowers. I have a chance to study, to work with all of them.
Kid pickup: I bring Sparrow home. I bring Snowdrop.
Millie and I are home now. I recognize the signs of growth in my pup. She's bigger, not a mere fluff ball, more graceful. And I am starting to understand her eyes now. What she is signaling through them. What she needs from me now.
A milestone has passed: Millie is six months old today.
with so much love...
