Gloria's Oversexed Mind

Flowers for your weekend: June 19th in the garden

It's been too hot outside, and too busy inside, to do much in the garden. But I picked these fresh for you just now.

A couple of yellow lilies to bring merriment.

Newly-blooming canna lilies, the first of hundreds more to come.

Coneflowers and liatrus are finally opening up too.

Blueberries are ripening in the sun and seem to be bigger than ever before.

From across the garden, I spotted a strange black fungus growing on a rock. I approached and...OH!

Yes, yes, you are TOO CUTE, Miss Jasmine! You are.

I'm not too fond of hanging baskets but I love this clockvine outside our front door.

It's spectacularly vibrant and simple, especially up-close.

Hot colors abound in the sun now but this shady spot is ruled by blue hydrangea.

The tiny head of a purple verbena stem.

My favorite summer flower, scarlet monarda. Easy, vigorous, prolific, strange and intense. Hummingbirds are mad for it and so am I.

A patch growing in the middle of the garden.

A closer look at another patch growing outside my front door.

The jungle that was my garden

It's been the weirdest spring. It rained almost every day for a month, and when the clouds finally departed they sucked the spring out of the air and took it with them.  The garden wasn't expecting summer. The soil is so surprised. Until today, when the lawn guys finally had enough dry weather to work, you could barely walk the paths without stepping over weeds, some as high as 2 feet. All that growth came on in a matter of weeks, as if every seed and spore that had ever touched the ground realized 2009 was its best chance at life.

Below, some photos shot June 1st, and (in quotes) some comments from a casual journal I kept last week.

"A hot humid day yields the rancid stench of fertility at night. Insects, mosses, fungi. Everything is too alive."

My gardenias have never bloomed so heavily, or yellowed so quickly. We sat on the deck and inhaled them at night, drunk on the sweetness.

My coral bells' blooms leapt too high too quickly. They look like raisins on stems.

I sat up late every night, listening to the loud hum outside my window. "When I contemplate the amount of fucking, both animal and vegetable, going on right now in my garden, I'm overwhelmed by the magnitude of the universal drives for sex."

Weeds creep in from every direction. When I disturb them, thousands of beetles spill out from under their mantle.

"Aliens live among us. They do not come from other planets. They are the plants and trees and animals whose emotional lives and languages we do not understand."

"Fact: flower petals act like velcro to keep their lover bees longer. Clingy bitches!"

"Flowers are perfectly evolved sex organs, manifest with beauty, mysterious, sublime."

"I think that when bees sip nectar, flowers experience sexual pleasure."

The lawn crew cut most of the weeds away. Still, it wasn't so bad after all to watch this tiny patch of mother earth do what it wanted to do.

Where have all the flowers gone

They have gone to wetness, every one. It looks more like a jungle than a garden out there right now.

A gardener cannot complain when rains are deep and regular. But those of you who enjoy the weekly photo diaries may be disappointed to know that it's been raining so much we can't do more than basic maintenance before the skies get dark. Even our lawn crew skipped their regular visit. Since our garden projects this year require extended periods of sun for paints to dry and soils to set, Will and I followed their lead. We've both dressed and booted up for heavy work a few times in the last weeks only to tromp back to the house, sighing. Will's especially frustrated since we got him a nifty propane-fueled weed burner and he is on a mission to get our paths in order (and, I guess, to satisfy some latent arsonistic urges).

I love rain. All kinds of rain: the intense ones whose heavy drops feel like water balloons when they explode on your skin; the rains that fall clean and sweet and trickle down to your toes; the ones that cover you in a fine layer of mist. More importantly, my gardens love rain. In the six years we've lived here, we've never had so much rain and our long-parched trees are drinking as deeply as camels at an oasis. The tree canopy's never been so lush, the weeds never so numerous, the greenery never so dense, and the populations of tiny critters skittering through never so lively. Long thick juicy worms wherever you stick a trowel, beetles beneath every pot, lizards fleeing underfoot.

The only thing missing is the flowers. Oh, there are hundreds of them all over the place, but by now there should be thousands. And instead of perky blossoms reaching towards the sun, stalks are leaning under the weight of water, and flowers are rotting faster than they should. A stand of stella d'oro lilies opened by the driveway only to drop their petals a few thunderstorms -- and days -- later. Drifts of monarda and asclepias that looked ready to bud 2 weeks ago are greener than ever but notably bare of blooms.  A few plants are gaily growing to such freakish size that I'm worried it will weaken them in the long run.

A few solid days of sun and heat should return the gardens to their proper state. Otherwise, I may have to give up and hang a sign, "Tarzan Welcome Here." 

May 8 in the Garden

The first of the Asian lilies have opened

First ornamental onion (allium) to bloom, engulfed by Virginia Creeper.

Clock vine in hanging pot, and some spiderwort shooting up behind it.

Another patch of spiderwort -- it's migrating all over the place, and I'm letting it because I love the little blue flowers.

And speaking of blue, the blueberries will be ripe soon. Mmmmm.

Fuschia is starting to open

Strawberry begonias are just starting to bloom (those delicate white flower stalks).

I've got about half a dozen rose bushes, of various varieties, but all tough enough to survive minimum care. These three have started their summer show.

Couldn't get a better picture of this rugged, beautiful monster. The blossoms are huge, and some of the stalks are 6-8 feet tall.

The person who appreciates the garden as much as me: Miss Venus, posed here beside her totem, Cupid.

May 2 in the Garden

Just uploaded a new album of garden pix on FaceBook with notes but will post my favorites here without comments. Shot today, right after a violent rainstorm, so everything is wet and subdued.

April 17 in the garden - spring flowers and weeds

What's it take to be a good gardener? Patience, self-sacrifice, hard work, organizational skills, and the ability to learn from mistakes. But most of all it requires a hunger, a driving need, to surround yourself with beauty.

Woodland phlox. In person, the blue is day-glo.

Planted these bulbs just a couple of months ago. Small tulip which allegedly will survive here. I've been disappointed before by tulips. *shaking small fist*

These tulips have come back for me for two years now, so I guess they like it here well enough.

Growing like weeds, a bed of strawberry begonias. Frail white flower spikes will be shooting from them soon and it will look magical but holy crap they're going to eat the garden one day.

I will never ever have to buy coleus plants ever again. I put a six-pack of this dark purple variety in the soil 2 years ago and now its had thousands of babies.  Anyone local want evil coleus? They grow 2-3 ft. tall.

A still young row planting (last year) of coral bells starting to fill in.

Will just laid this 3X5 patio for me of cobblestone-looking concrete blocks from Lowes. Solved a small eyesore and give the firepit a safer base to sit on.

April 17 in the garden - shrubs

Flowering shrubs are opening all over the place. Here, Apollo tries to determine whether azaleas deserve his royal pee.

Red azaleas are just beginning to show.

Lane lined with azaleas.

Close-up of pink azaleas on the lane.

Small, variegated keria in bloom.

Big juicy rhododendrons.

Weigelas are starting to show.

Not a shrub but a tree: our figs are budding! I can almost taste the fresh figs now.

April 17 in the garden - containers

I'm on a recycling jag this year, turning anything suitable into a container. Here an old birdcage holds fake birds and real petunias.

I converted a broken solar fountain into a tiered sedum planter, with ivy spilling out of the top pot.

Saved this cracked kiva for years. Now it's holding some (annual) mexican heather for my butterfly friends.

The blizzard this year claimed a bunch of ceramic planters, some so stuffed with perennials I suspect only the root systems are holding them together (mini roses and creeping jenny in this case). This one's gotta go soon. I'll recycle some ceramic chunks to line the bottoms of the pot which replaces it.

Nothing recycled here, I'm just proud of my containers. See, until about 2-3 years ago, me and containers didn't get along. No matter how hard I tried, they died on me. Ugly, bitter deaths, wasting deaths, the kind of deaths that make gardeners lie awake at night staring into the dark fungi of their souls. Then, suddenly, containers changed their mind about me. They've been nice to me every since. Yeah, it's all good now.

Garden views from me to you, April 17

It's Friday, which means it's garden day on the blog. I spent some time out there today snapping shots of things that have opened up (or opened more) since the last photojournal. Instead of putting it all in one big blog, I'm going to separate the images. I'll start with this. The view from my bedroom window. Dogwoods are blooming, the creek is high. With the torrents of rain we've had, it's the most beautiful spring I can remember here.

First week of April in the garden

The fig trees are putting out leaves now

My new herb containers (formerly mailboxes destroyed on the road by farm machinery passing by), and our darling tuxedo cat who had so much fun playing with the exciting new plantings that she dug half of them up and scattered the mulch far and wide. Guess we'll be enjoying dried herbs a lot sooner than expected.

One of my projects this year is making the (weedy, shady, dry, icky) entry into the garden more inviting. I'm starting to get there. Also SO happy with the results of recycling a rusted out wheelbarrow last summer, that as soon as we can replace some crapped-up old ones we're still using, they're going to become containers too.

Azaleas have begun to bloom

Tulips too.

The garden is waking up.

It looks like paradise to me.