Though the tree peonies (Paeonia suffruticosa) are done for the season - blooming, anyway - they still put on a show for a little while longer, as this seed head shows. Just another example of wabi-sabi...
Roses are like children. You yell at them when you shouldn't. You ignore them when they want your attention. You forget to give them lunch money. But they forgive you and love you anyway. They continue to bring you joy beyond measure and so it is with my roses.
I knew from the beginning that this would be a good year for the roses. They got an early start, just like every other thing in the garden this year, since spring came about three weeks before it usually does. There were flower buds forming before they barely had enough leaves to support themselves.
So I let them do their thing. I went about other gardening business, both inside and out, and I didn't give the roses much notice. Time passed and then they started to bloom. Well, that got my attention now, didn't it?
As I walked over to admire a bloom, I said to myself, "Ooooooh! Ahhhhhh!" and I took a sniff at it. "Mmmmmmm..." And it was then that I saw that all was not right in Eden. The leaves had multiple holes in them. Nearly all the leaves, especially toward the bottom of the plants. If I hadn't known better, I'd have thought the Japanese Beetles had come early, too.
The last time I shared my refrigerator, I fooled everyone into thinking it was organized, clean and neat. But I knew I was going to be taking a picture, so of course I straightened it up. I'd do the same with my house if I knew you were coming. (Be sure to call!)
This time, I want to show you the cutest little things I found in the grocery store when I was at Jenna's house last weekend. I've said before that it doesn't take much to make me smile and these did it.
I'll admit it, I didn't know a lot about compost tea until recently. I wasn't even sure how it was made. I guessed it was a watery form of compost and I already used compost in my garden, so I wasn't all that curious about it.
When I opened the package, the faint aroma took me back to when I was a little girl and I used to play in my grandma and grandpa's barn. They raised a few cattle for beef and the kitties were always hanging out in the barn, so just smelling that tea reminded me of those days.
As I mentioned before, while attending the GWA Region III meeting in Cincinnati last month, we toured a couple of private gardens. I shared that of Bill Lee and Hurst Sloniker and now the gardens of Beth Karp.
Just as we drove up to Beth's home, it began to sprinkle a bit and by the time we left, it had picked up some. There was just enough time to make our way around her beautiful property, admire her landscaping abilities, and snap a few photos.
Some things defy logic. I've always been told that plants have an innate desire to reproduce. The way some do this is by flowering and producing seed. Now most of the time, I couldn't care less whether they produce seed, especially if it's a tropical that I'm growing in the house, but I DO want those flowers!
Tropical plants tend to have unusual and extraordinarily beautiful flowers. That's what first drew me to Amazon Lilies when I saw a package of bulbs for sale in Walmart in Bradenton, Florida on a vacation trip there. White and big and just lovely.
I bought the package of three bulbs and when I got home, I planted them in a pot, watered them, and waited. Soon, dark green leaves began to emerge from the soil and I was amazed at how large they were. They kept putting out those verdant, shiny leaves and I waited for the day when I'd see their beautiful white blooms.
I waited.
And waited.
And waited some more.
Lots of beautiful foliage, but no flowers. In the meantime, I was on one of my many visits to the Foellinger-Freimann Botanical Conservatory in Ft. Wayne, IN, and while strolling through the rainforest, came across some gorgeous white blooms. It took me a little bit to figure out which of the plants they were coming from, then I realized it was the Amazon Lilies.
Wow...these were much more stunning than I'd remembered when I purchased my bulbs five years ago. That's right. FIVE years ago. No flowers in all that time. I couldn't figure out how I could have such a healthy plant, yet it wouldn't bloom. Just seeing those blooms in person frustrated me all the more. I wanted some of my own!
I came home and decided I was tired of looking at my wonderful foliage plant and put it into one of the spare bedrooms. It was winter, and that room wasn't heated as much as the rest of the house. The temperature was probably somewhere around 60 degrees.
When this spring came, I brought the lily out again and pretty much ignored it. Then one day last week, as I was doing my watering, I noticed spears with buds on the ends peeking out of the foliage!
I don't know where I've been all this time, but I just this morning discovered Macro Monday. The brainchild of Lisa, of Lisa's Chaos, participants choose a macro photo and post it to share. Since I'm a lover of macro photography, as regular readers of Our Little Acre well know, I'm excited to start taking part in this sharing of the intricate details of our world!
For my very first Macro Monday post, I've chosen a photo I took last week of my yellow Columbine (Aquilegia ' McKana's Giant'). It's one of the largest Columbines I have, both in height and in size of the blooms. I love the pure, clear, pale color it has.
Those of us that grew up in the '60s and '70s remember the flutey goodness of Jethro Tull that blared from our AM radios. So when I found a quirky little Coreopsis in my garden center a few years ago, I had to smile and of course, had to buy it. No, I didn't buy it for its name (although I sort of liked that, too), but for its hollow petals.
I grew 'Zamfir' before that, and while it's similar - one of 'Jethro Tull's parents and enough alike that I could be happy with either one - it didn't grow well for me, and eventually died. 'Jethro Tull' has done much better and looks like it's having a stellar year for me in 2010.
You know how sometimes you come across a product that is so simply ingenious that you say to yourself, "Now why didn't I think of that?" That's exactly what I did the first time I saw the Ups-A-Daisy® plant pot inserts.
I have several large containers that I plant each spring and by the time I fill them with potting mix, they are too heavy to move by myself and I've used way more potting mix than the plants in them really need.
Ups-A-Daisy® container inserts solve both of these problems.
Let's take a container I planted a couple of weeks ago as an example. This one measures 20" across the top and is 20" high. It can take an entire large bag of potting mix to fill this thing.
"Bejeweled"
