Spider Sighting!

My resident spider is still alive! I thought that last week's cold weather and snowstorms might have done him in, especially since I didn't see him move from the inside of the window frame for several days.

Last night, however, we saw him finally venture back out to repair his web. Today I got one good picture of him in the middle of the web before he retreated to the safety of the window frame ledge. I love how he sits on that ledge--two of his seven legs slung casually over the frame, both touching the web so he can monitor its movement.

The temps are supposed to be pretty mild in the short term, so we can probably enjoy watching him all week. On the other hand, he puts bad music in my head:
You're stayin' alive, stayin' alive...
Feel the city breakin' and everybody shakin' people, stayin' alive, stayin' alive...

Seriously, if I have to have a BeeGees song in my head, why can't it be Jive Talkin'?!

Signs of New Growth

During the summer of 2005, I worked part-time at a local garden center. One of my first tasks in the spring was to go through last year's shrubs and trees to determine which ones would be sellable and which ones were not. I waded through the pots of shrubs, arranging the salvageable ones in a small circle, pitching the dead ones directly in the dumpster, and setting a handful of questionable plants aside for further review.

As the manager looked through the "maybes," he nixed a small mountain laurel, 'Olympic Fire' kalmia latifolia, that I had almost placed in the save area from the beginning. Sure its leaves were a bit desiccated by the winter winds, but the couple of branches I had lightly scratched with my thumbnail showed living green tissue underneath the thin bark.

I tried to bite my tongue--after all, this was only my first or second day of work--but I couldn't hold back for very long. "Um... you know that mountain laurel you said to pitch? There's a lot of green under the bark. If you don't mind, I would like to try and save it. We could put it back behind the fence there so customers don't see it until it's rehabbed..."

The manager, who I would come to know was a really great guy, looked at me, and then at the mountain laurel, and then back at me. "Well, we could do that," he said slowly, "but I think that it might get more TLC at your house. So if you want it, why don't you just take it home and see what you can do with it?"

And so the mountain laurel came to live at my house last spring. It didn't do much during the summer--didn't look a whole lot better than it did when I planted it, but didn't look any worse, either. I gave it the occasional deep watering to help it establish a good root system, and pruned off a couple of dead branches in the late winter.

This year, it didn't put on any noticeable growth but I did get two clusters of flowers. I pinched one cluster back immediately, but let the other cluster bloom for a couple of days before I punched that off as well. I watered it deeply once, during a midspring drought, but otherwise left it alone.

With all of the bed construction and plant moving that I have been doing this summer and fall, I mostly forgot about the mountain laurel until I was planting bulbs last week. As I took photographs to chronicle where the bulbs were planted, I noticed buds at the end of each and every branch of my mountain laurel and took a picture of them as well .

Will the buds sprout new leaves in the spring? Will they be clusters of flowers? I haven't had the plant long enough to know, but I am heartened by seeing these signs of new growth in the fall. As the temperatures drop, it's very nice to have a promise of interesting things to come.

First Snowfall 2006

I'm not ready for this... not quite yet. I have crocus sativus and deep purple tulips to plant. There are lasagna beds to layer, annuals to clean up, lawn to edge, and leaves to rake.

I need to put up my storm windows--although admittedly I'm waiting for the cold to kill off my favorite seven-legged spider before I tackle that project. (I am gladly spending a couple of extra dollars with the gas man in exchange for the amusement of watching him spin his web in my leaded glass window.)

I'm really not ready for this... and yet I couldn't resist spending some time outside drinking in the cold, clear beauty of this first snowfall. The neighborhood was quiet, still, and crisply white. I could swear that there must be wonderful, mysterious things waiting to be found on the other side of each warmly lit window I passed on my walk... the houses all look "lovely, dark and deep." But these mysteries are not mine to discover, not this evening. Like Frost, I have promises to keep--and miles to go before I sleep.

To Pinch or Not to Pinch?

This year, I decided to do a little expirement with my 'Matrona' sedum. I don't particularly like the bloom on them--I fail to work pink into my garden very well--but I love the foliage.

I wondered if delaying bloom until a time when little else was flowering in the garden would make me like them more. Since I have two of them, I decided to let one grow without intervention and pinch back the other continually through the spring and early summer. The first picture shows the unpinched sedum, which is now beyond its disgustingly cheerful pink stage and into the dark pinky-brown shades that I much prefer.

The second picture was also taken last week and shows the 'Matrona' that I pinched through early August. It's blooming right now, and I am happy to have something else blooming in the yard for the last of the bees to enjoy... so I guess that my experiment was a success in that regard. Instead of turning up my nose at the sedum, I smile as I check it for bees.

The last picture shows why, bees or no, I will not be pinching my sedums quite so far into the summer this year... unless I move them. Their pink looks a little insipid against the fall colors of yellowing iris foliage. I was planning to keep this sedum here, but if I suppress its bloom until later in the season I risk having to look at a pink and yellow clash made all the worse by the rich fall colors around them. Yikes!

Maybe siting it nearer to a dark purple, burgundy or red foliage may suit the sedum's autumn show a little better. Near the oakleaf hydrangea? Closer to the doublefile viburnum? At this point in the season, I have several months to decide where its next "new home" will be... and that's good, because I tend to change my mind several times before giving anything a permanent home.

Perfect Fall Day

After reading about the "Perfect Fall Days" that so many other garden bloggers have enjoyed recently... I finally got one myself! It's around 50 degrees with just a little wind and lots of sunshine here today. The sky is a bright pale blue befitting autumn in Ohio, and the crisp earthiness of fallen leaves scents the air.

I couldn't take advantage of the glorious weather quite as much as I wanted, though. I have lasagna beds to put down and mulch to sling, but I sprained my ankle Monday playing in an upper intermediate volleyball league. (Coming down from a block and discovering your teammate's foot underneath yours is never a good thing.) I'm usually not very good about taking care of my injuries--stubborn, and all that--but I also had spring bulbs to plant in the front beds, so that helped keep me from getting into too much trouble.

I planted about 25 small frittilaries, most of them around 'Bressingham Ruby' bergenias and 'Purple Knockout' salvia lyratas to help them show up in the spring. 36 'White Emporer' tulips, 18 'Princess Irene' and 'Avignon' orange tulips, and 8 double black 'Hero' tulips rounded out my planting.

The black tulips were hard to site, as I wanted them to have light-colored foliage around them as foils. However, I found that the golden sages, golden oreganos, and variegated lemon thymes were almost too close to the edges of the beds to help much. The white tulips were a little easier to place. They are early tulips and I used about half of them around the area that the crambe maritima (sea kale) takes up in the front bed. The crambe is slow to show up in the spring, so by the time it pushes its dark, alien-like sprouts up and out of the ground the White Emporers will be dying back.

My garden assistant merely supervised while I worked, as bulb planting is a little beyond her abilities. She used to dig some when she was a puppy--and I set aside a special area for that at the old house to keep both of us happy--but at the ripe old age of 5-1/2 she seems to think that getting dirt under her fingernails is beneath her.

Coco is very good, however, at a variety of gardening tasks. She chases pests (squirrels and chipmunks) out of the yard regularly. She prunes, but only selectively and with questionable aesthetics... for example, she seems to think that lemongrass looks best at 6-8 inches in height.

Where she really, um, helps me out is in the harvesting. During our first two years together, she picked and ate the first few ripe tomatoes out of the veggie garden--wasn't that nice of her, to let me know they were ready to eat? My ex-husband laughed in the spring of year 3 when I announced that she was banned from the back yard until further notice while my first 'Early Girl' finished ripening. I really don't mind when she eats tomatoes out of the garden, I just prefer that the "head gardener" gets the first one!

It was especially nice to be able to spend the afternoon in the yard, and with the dog, because I'll be away from both for the next four days. I'm going to New Jersey to meet my boyfriend's extended family and see the town where he grew up. No time to see Old Roses' favorite public gardens at Rutgers while I'm in NJ, or even take a trip to the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens that Xris showed off earlier this summer at Flatbush Gardener when their corpse flower bloomed--sadly, it will be too short of a trip.

I am going to bring my digital camera, though, and might have something interesting to blog when I return. Brian wants to show me one of his favorite spots in the nearby Allamuchy State Forest if my ankle feels good enough to allow me to walk there... and you never know what beauty you might find in a state nicknamed The Garden State!