Structure(s) Needed (subtitle: A Bout of GADS)

***edited to add Carol's 100% correct diagnosis of my little "problem" to the title of this post. See comments for details. :)

Knowing your shortcomings is important, and I admit that one of mine became apparent while I worked in the yard this week: Having lots of projects "in the works," all of which are only halfway finished. I don't know why I have such a problem with this at home, because I love the feeling of accomplishment that comes along with finishing a project at work. So it goes, I guess.

The most pressing problems involve my failure to provide the necessary structure for certain plants that require it. Remember the Dortmund rose I've been raving about for a year now? My thoughts when I planted it this spring went something like this: "Well, I'm working 70 hrs/week right now at the garden center, so I'll just get this guy in the ground and put up a trellis for him later."

"Later" is a pretty unspecific time, but I'm pretty sure that it has come and gone in any case. Dortmund sprawls through the bronze carex on the corner of my porch, lax and limp instead of upright and thriving. One thing that I failed to consider when placing it was that the rest of the porch post above the brick you see in the picture is a wide, smooth, house-colored expanse where my house numbers reside. I can't cover those, and I really have no other logical and visible place to move them.

The other thick porch post is on the far side of my house, nowhere near the driveway or front door. Not good for porch numbers--and being the northwest side of the porch not great for a climbing rose, either. The two brick pillars that flank the front steps are topped with simple metal posts that don't show up much visually but keep the porch roof from sagging in the middle. Again not good for porch numbers, but possibly workable for a climbing rose support since I don't mind them being completely covered. They would get a bit less sun there, however.

My other option is to leave it where it is and direct most of its canes toward the side of the porch (with a few strays artfully arranged to show the house number) once they reach number-height... I'll probably need to sketch this out to get a visual before I make a decision on which way to go here. (Any thoughts or advice from those who have grown climbing roses? This is a first for me.)

My other pressing project is to finish the grape arbor, so I can stop cutting back the poor grapevine and start harvesting more grapes! I did get one post up and level (with the help of a sledgehammer-wielding boyfriend) but then a thought occurred:

The lot line on the left of this picture will soon be designated by a new fence, and I know that the length of backyard I am fencing is not evenly divisible by the 8ft fence panel size. Maybe it makes more sense to make the arbor fit the leftover odd size (assuming it's close to what I want anyway) than to make the arbor first and fit the fencing around it? It would certainly make for a cleaner look. So I put the rest of that project on hold until the fence goes up.

So the fence needs to go up soon, but I can wait to move the rose until the spring if need be. After seeing these unfinished projects on a post, though, I really want to get going on them already! Ah well... maybe I'll just go out and clean up the trimmed blackberry brambles and weeds that you can see in the Japanese rock garden above. I just noticed that I stopped my trimming to get the first red arbor post in the ground, and never picked up my mess when I was done. (Might I have some form of project or garden ADD?!)

On the Road--er, Sidewalk

Tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of the publishing of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. I was probably too young when I first read the book to grasp every nuance, but it was still an eye-opening experience. I have long meant to go back and read it again... but frankly there are other writers of the Beat Generation whose voices and writings I enjoy more than Kerouac's. (Maybe "enjoy" isn't always the right word--sometimes gut-wrenching would be more appropriate a term--but you know what I mean.)

In honor of this influential novel, and spurred by a recent flurry of "A Long Walk" posts from chuck b., I thought you might like to take in some of the sights that I see while giving my Garden Assistant her morning and evening constitutionals. This morning we just did the short block, as it was already hot outside and Coco has no way to take off her heavy fur coat:

Gnarled tree roots from a badly positioned treelawn specimen. In some places, they are more than 8 inches higher than the sidewalk, and you can often see where the bluestone squares were lifted and the tree roots cut in order to relevel the sidewalk.

The guy who put this front bed in is a renter, and his landlord paid him back for whatever he purchased to put in this front bed. I know this because he bought most of it at the small garden center where I worked in 2005. The lilies are amazingly fragrant in the late summer during our evening walks.

The older couple next door to him has a thing for old-fashioned annuals, which they start from seed and use to fill the bed in front of their foundation hedge. The nicotiana on the right opens up at night, but its scent--if it has one--doesn't travel far enough to reach us on the sidewalk.

This used to be my favorite landscaping. Where the new weeping cherry is on the left, a stately, dark grey, completely dead 20ft. tall tree resided for the last two years. It was surrounded by various grasses and it looked so interesting that I didn't realize that the center tree was dead until late July one year. I was encouraged that they left it up all last summer as well, but unfortunately they "fixed" the "eyesore" this spring.

This lion could easily kick my lions' butts. (And I bet he's cranky enough to do it, too--I would be if I had to balance my hulking frame on such a relatively small pedestal.) I love how he's licking he's paw, and I'm glad they planted him a riot of petunias to admire. I think he needs some savannah grasses, too, though.

Beware of Dick helping Jane cross the street with their attache cases in hand?

This is my new favorite landscaping on the block. What perfect landscaping to have in front of a bungalow... and they are obviously foliage fanatics with all of the coleus, purple heart, and window boxes of fancy caladiums. In the winter, the most adorable clumps of snowdrops pop up in random spots within the stone border.

Very neat, very clean, very all-American. I like the simplicity of this, but last year they used salmon pink geraniums and that looked nicer with the tan brick and light green upper story siding IMHO.

The shrubs that started my August impulse buying... tree peonies on the Western side of an old house on the walk route! There are 4 of these monsters here (the fourth is on the back corner, out of camera range) and they have to be amazingly old. I have admired their gnarled, knobby branches during the winter months and their handsome foliage since I moved here, but I never quite knew what they were until I saw smaller specimens at the Cleveland Botanical Garden. The owners cut them back each spring, unfortunately, so I never have seen them bloom.

This is the front bed of the same house... I think of it as the Prairie House because of this planting and the dark-wheat color of the siding. The three tall plants in this bed all bloom at different times: Yarrow first, then Monarda, and now some sort of perennial sunflower.

"Why do you always stop and smile over this self-sown alyssum? Simple fence, simple flowers... no tomatoes or beans to steal or lemongrass to chew. Move it along, woman--it's hot! Time to get back to the house and share a frozen fruit bar!"

Blackswampgirl's house, as seen from the corner of the nearest cross street. Bob would not approve of that messy edge, but then my humble foursquare is nowhere near to estate status so I suppose I'm okay. (And if I get up the gumption, the rest of that grass could be gone by the fall anyway... but more on that later.)

Hope you all enjoyed the mini tour. It's nowhere near as entertaining as chuck b.'s, I'm afraid, but this is the first ever walking tour post so you'll have to cut me some slack. I have a few other neighborhoods to show you, too, so I'll see if I can't step it up for those!

Pre-Labor Observations

I have big plans for this Labor Day--big garden plans, that is. The remaining mulch pile needs to be spread around the plants that never got it when they should have in the late spring, for one thing. And the little girls next door, who are adorable but who impede my "me time" in the garden like you wouldn't believe, just got into the truck with their Mom and drove away with many bags of food and picnic items tucked around them... so I hope that means they plan a long day of fun away from the house.

Taking a preliminary walk around the garden this morning, I found a few things to be content about. Not only are my 'Ozark' strawberries continuing to provide sweet red berries, but they are covered with flowers that promise an extended harvest. Even better, the gifted 'Party Dress' Japanese anemone has decided to open its first bloom! The flowers are amazingly beautiful, and now that I know they are prone to flopping, I will be better prepared to give them a little lift next year.

It seems that I finally found the right place for my small ornamental onion, allium senescens glaucum. Its previous companions either dwarfed it entirely or simply did nothing to show off its fun, twisty foliage.

I moved it to what I think of as the "dry garden," where (except for an amended area where an espalier apple grows) the soil is sandy and barren. It's really nice combined there with 'Caradonna' salvia, 'Arthur Branch' sedum, 'Newe Ya'ar' culinary sage, 'Vodoo' sedum, and various flat, rusty-colored fieldstones. They form a little textural tapestry that you have to look over when you reach the end of the garden path, in order to view the Japanese rock garden.

(And I can't say enough about that 'Caradonna' salvia, by the way. I gave away my last 'May Night' in order to make room for more 'Caradonnas' because their flower stems are a dark purple color that deepen the blue flowers. It gives them so much more presence IMHO.)

The 'Diablo' purple ninebark seems to be adjusting to its new home without a peep of complaint. I picked up three 'Frosted Curls' carex grasses in the annuals clearance section of our local garden center, and placed the pots underneath the ninebark branches to see if I would like this combo as much as I thought I would. (I do!)

This carex was listed as hardy to zone 7 on the tag, but I successfully overwintered three of them last year after buying them from another source where they were listed as hardy to zone 6. We did have good groundcover in the form of lots of snow this winter, though, so I'm going to hedge my bets and mulch over them in December.

My other big job for the day will be to plant the variegated iris and lamium that I "stole" yesterday from my grandma's and mom's house, respectively. I say "stole" in quotation marks because they both have allowed me to take divisions of these plants before and I knew neither one would care if I did so again. But technically, I didn't ask before picking up the shovel... and I have a good reason for that, I promise.

The lamium seems to transplant with no problem, but grandma's variegated iris are the only ones that I can't get to take here. (Siberians, various tall bearded types... they all grow like crazy.) Since one garden superstition says that stolen plants tend to thrive--ostensibly to increase the guilt of the thief--I'm banking on that to happen for me in this case! Maybe that in combination with the "Third time's the charm" rule will mean that I get to enjoy a nice patch of variegated iris next year? I hope.

That August Itch

I have been reading about it in several different garden blogs, and that August Itch has finally bit me, too. Hard. I don't know if there is a "real" name for it, but you know what I mean. It's that time of the year when those areas of the garden we called "lush" earlier in the summer now just look like a jungle--in a bad way. It's the downtime between the bountiful blooms of summer and the start of autumnal tones and elegant decay.

It is now that I look out over my eclectic garden and wish that I instead tended a regimented, formal parterre. Or a soothingly austere prairie-style planting. Maybe a zen garden.


I finally succumbed yesterday and started to scratch my itch. Much of the self-seeded red amaranth was ripped out and composted. 'Othello' ligularia was moved (yeah, while it was blooming) to a spot where its rounded, large leaves are needed to break up the finer foliage of goatsbeard and grasses. Hakonechloa 'All Gold,' picked up on clearance, was placed in a corner where it can glow--and cascade over nearby retaining wall blocks.

Japanese bloodgrass--happier here in the rich, trucked-in soil of the back garden bed than it ever has been in the barren dirt of the front bed where herbs and other tough guys like yarrow thrive--was divided into more clumps. The blue hosta in the foreground moved between two of them and the hakone grass.

Several different relocation options for the Russian sage are under consideration. Clusters of 'Chocolate Chip' ajuga were broken up and spaced apart in the hopes that they will grow back together to carpet the garden floor. The gaping hole in the bed, where the 'Diablo' ninebark used to be, is now the home of the dwarf tart cherry tree that I should have planted there in the first place.

Finally, this area of the garden is starting to look like something. But even as I remind myself of my vow to try to Leave Well Enough Alone in the coming year, and give things time to settle in and grow... still, I feel that itch.

Messy Thoughts

On my way to work one morning last week, I heard a news story about flooding on the Blanchard River in Northwestern Ohio. The house I grew up in is less than half a mile from a bend in the Blanchard, and we'd never had a problem before... but the news crews made it sound like this was a flood of epic proportions so I felt compelled to call home. "We're okay here," Mom said, just as I had expected. "Ottawa is just a mess, though," she continued, and proceeded to tell me how water was collecting in places that I never remember seeing floodwaters before--not even during the horrible flood of 1981. The waters had apparently risen very quickly in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, catching most people completely unaware.

The people we knew who seemed to be the worst hit were my brother Jeff's brother-in-law Troy and his family. They lost eight 4-week-old puppies to the floodwaters, and water was so high in their house that it will probably be months until they finish reconstruction and can move back in. My brother picked up a john boat from a friend's house early Tuesday morning and helped them evacuate their kids and Lynette's mother out of the house. They moved into Troy's parents' place, which is in town but on higher ground... and when word got around that Jeff had a boat he ended up helping evacuate a few other kids out of a house nearby, too, through chest-deep water.

For the rest of the week, watching news clips and talking to people back home seemed like a bad dream. One streaming video showed the same view of Main Street that I normally enjoy as I drive into town from Cleveland. But you couldn't actually see the street or the green lawns that line the road... just a sea of muddy brown water edged with houses, broken only by a line of trees that showed where the pavement should be.

The most surreal moment of all came when I got a call from Mom early Thursday evening. "Make sure you watch ABC World News Tonight," she told me. "Jeff, Troy and Jenny's parents might be on--a crew taped them going back into Jenny's house to retrieve her wedding dress." (My other brother, Craig, was scheduled to get married on Saturday to his longtime girlfriend Jenny. In spite of the flooding and the fact that his future in-laws had to evacuate from their house we were all pretty sure that the wedding would still happen in some fashion.) The part of the conversation that really threw me, though, was my mom's response when I asked her what she and Dad were doing. "Well," she responded matter-of-factly, "They still don't have power in town so your grandma and a few of us cooked up supper for your uncles and whoever else nearby wants to eat a hot meal. We're just waiting for the kids to arrive with the canoes so we can hop in and deliver it." Supper delivered by boat through the streets of Ottawa... I couldn't even imagine!

The water finally crested late in the week, but I had no idea what we would find when we arrived back home on Friday night for the wedding rehearsal. The amount of water was mind-boggling, and it took me an extra hour or so to navigate my way around all of the flooded roads.

The wedding itself went off just fine, with a few little flood-induced glitches here and there like missing thank-you gifts that would have to be passed out later once the bride's parents were able to get back into their house. All of that paled in comparison to the what had been accomplished, though. Our neighbors stepped in and let us use the party room in their huge garage/workshop for the rehearsal dinner because the intended location was still underwater. Workers went into flooded stores to retrieve tuxes and salvage linens. One very generous local family put up the bride, her parents, her sister, and several members of the wedding party who were supposed to be staying at the bride's flooded house. Many people drove the long detours to come out and show their support for the happy couple as well.

It was the first--and hopefully last--wedding that I have attended where an ABC news crew was present. If any of you saw the interview of the bride's parents on Thursday, or the follow-up footage of the wedding on Saturday, consider yourself introduced to my brother Craig and my newest sister-in-law Jenny! (I was in the wedding, but happily managed to escape the TV camera.) We later found out that a picture of my other brother, Jeff, was on the cover of Saturday's New York Times. He was standing in the water with a boat, waiting for Troy to finish talking to the Coast Guard so they could row to Troy's house and pick up a few more things to entertain the kids at grandma's. Unreal.

The Sunday after a wedding is usually a leisurely day of resting and recovering... but not this week. After tying up a few loose ends we threw on old clothes and work boots, then headed over to my uncle Al's house to help him with cleanup. If you click on the picture of the pile of debris outside his house, you can see the water mark on the foundation shrubs. Notice also how the blades of grass are still coated with fine brown mud. (What you can't see is the stench of decay that permeated the air... I kept feeling like the old Black Swamp must be rising again!)

Al is the kind of person who will come over, rounding up people to take with him along the way, if something happens to an acquaintance or if a DIY project means that there is work that needs to be done. You don't need to call him, he just comes. So you can imagine that he had plenty of help himself this weekend in return, and it didn't take too long to get the flooded basement and garage emptied and scrubbed out with bleach. On Saturday, an electrician had replaced two breakers in his downstairs electrical box, which had been submerged for at least a day, and my Dad helped Al fix the rest of the electrical issues yesterday.

All that remained by late in the afternoon was to let the basement dry out completely, tear out and rebuild a wall of simple wooden shelves in the "tool room" down there, replace some low paneling on the walls around the back door landing, and put back all of the stuff he had been able to salvage as the water rose. Luckily, Al has two teenage boys and a daughter in her 20s so they were able to pull lots of things out of the basement to begin with (including the washer and dryer) and he'll have a lot of help putting things back when the time comes.

Several of us then walked the short block to my other uncle's house to see what we could do to help there--they sit a bit lower and so they had water in their first floor. They also lost several cars that they hadn't moved to higher ground. My aunt's family were there working, and only so many people can remove waterlogged stair treads, drywall, carpeting and subflooring in a small area. So after scrubbing out their garage with bleach and brushes, and powerwashing the floor, we soon discovered that we had outlived our usefulness there. We headed back to Al's, where leftover wedding food awaited us for supper.

As we walked back to my uncle's I was struck by the piles of stuff that lined the street. Some of the biggest piles were in front of the smallest houses, leading me to wonder whether anything was left inside. Dumpsters had started to be dropped off in the streets, and extra people could be seen at almost every house. And I knew that these scenes were being repeated throughout the city, and I tried to imagine what it would be like to have to deal with such mess. Such loss.

We had to head back to Cleveland last night so my boyfriend could make it to work today, but I was very happy to have taken today off. As I worked in my messy garden, picking up spent canna leaves from a cushion of germander and cutting back little bluestem grasses that had fallen into the sedum due to heavy rains last week, I relaxed and thought about the past week. And as I puttered around my urban garden... I realized that this strong sense of community, of helping each other, was one thing I really missed about living in a small town.