Pause

September is my favourite month. For me September is all about warm fleece on cool mornings, sunny afternoons that are a gift instead of a given, and the collective deep breath that comes as things slow down in the perennial garden. The demands of spring and summer have been met (or not) and the massive job of the fall clean up is still a month or two away. This is a time for sitting on the porch swing, enjoying some quiet and appreciating the beauty of the garden that is.

Much of the garden is showing its age, crispy and dry after the heat of the summer, or showing the effects of damage by pests. But there's still some colour to be found. The asters are just beginning to flower...



... and at the other end of their life cycle, the very last of the hosta flowers are hanging on for a few more days.



The wild and crazy dianthus is making a second showing...



... while the butterly weed I planted from seed this year is making its first bright orange showing.



The red valerian wins the longevity prize - it has been flowering non-stop since May, and shows no sign of calling it quits.

The fuschia, which for much of the year is so straggly I am always tempted to take it out, is looking like something from a Japanese block print. A graceful, gentle rebuke. 

I'll be taking a pause for the next month or so. Until I get back I wish you warm days, cool nights, and someone you love to share them with.

One day only

Today, for one day only, I have a perfect garden.

Today my week-long weeding and cleaning blitz came to a close. Today my big, strong, hockey-player student spread four cubic yards of bark mulch in the perennial garden while I followed along behind him tickling the mulch onto all the nooks and crannies.

Today there is not a weed to be seen. The edges are tidy and the paths are swept clean.

Today my student's mom, when she came to pick him up at the end of his shift, called my garden a Martha Stewart Garden.



Tomorrow there will be weeds. Tomorrow there will be more dried-up columbines ready to be cut back. Tomorrow I will wake up and find some disorder where today there is order. But today, for one day, everything is perfect.

And you know what? I'm looking forward to tomorrow.

To my surprise, I find the neatness and order of today's garden just a little unsatisfying. "Hallelujah!" Mother Nature and her angels are shouting, after five years of trying to cure me of my perfectionism. Well, I may be a slow learner, but I think I've finally got this lesson down. Finally I realize there's something to be said for the unpredictability of Mother Nature's version of a garden, for the unexpected odd bits that pop up to surprise you, for the asymmetry and wonkiness and messy bits. My orderly everything-matches-because-it's-just-been-mulched garden is a little . . . well, boring.

So this evening, for one evening only, I'll sit on the verandah and look out on perfection. And tomorrow I'll embrace a less tidy, more real garden, all the more beautiful for its imperfection.

Lilies

When I regained my sense of smell what I most looked forward to were lilacs. And sure enough, as soon as the lilacs bloomed, I spent days with my nose in the blossoms, sniffing up a dozen years worth of missed scent.



I think the only reason I didn't feel the same way about lilies is because they didn't form any part of the scented backdrop to my childhood. Who had lilies way back then? Nobody I knew. But I've got them now, and do they ever smell wonderful.

They smell wonderful when my nose is buried in them, but they also smell wonderful when I'm at the other end of the garden. Holy smokes, does that scent carry! Tonight while I was out watering some new transplants I kept sniffing my arm thinking it was my insect repellent I was smelling. But no, it was the lily gang hanging out in the shade of  the magnolia tree, throwing open their petals and saying "Come sniff!"

So I did.

Oxalis

Last year I was looking for something to plant in the old washing machine tub parked by the pond. I had been filling it with annuals but decided to switch to a perennial because hey, who doesn't like less work? So I went hunting for something with the right scale for the tub, that could handle the part sun, part dappled shade, dry unless I remember to water it conditions. Usually, when I go to the garden store with a list of requirements in hand, I end up getting sucked in by the first pretty thing I see. In this case, it was a picture, because I bought bulbs.

Oxalis deppei is what I came home with. Then I did a Google search and found out how many people battle invasive oxalis in their lawns and garden beds and I thanked my lucky stars that I was planting in a container, not a bed, at a good distance from any of the perennial beds. And I reasoned that since it is hardy only to Zone 7 (which we are only in a good year) any problems would be solved with a good dose of winter.

It did well last year, filling the tub with its two-colour shamrock leaves and pink flowers, and so I was curious this spring whether it would return. It did, not quite as luxuriantly, but it slowly filled out and now it is blooming. Beautifully.

It's about those poppies

You know how much I love the poppies growing here at Mucky Boots. I love them so much I have written at least a dozen posts about them. I have taken photos, and collected seeds to send to all my friends. I have given them names: the Creamsicle, the San Pellegrino, the Ballet Tutu, and the Bordello. I have even declared that when it comes to volunteers, poppies get a free ride, no matter where they pop up.

I think the poppies must have read that post and taken it as permission to embark on a campaign for world domination, because this year the poppies are everywhere.

Here are some examples. First we have poppies with cilantro, in the photo above, and then poppies with concord grape...



... poppies with artichoke...



...poppies with blueberry...



...and finally poppies with raspberry.

 

If all those photos just look like a mass of green foliage, that's exactly my point. Everything else is being buried. Compounding the problem is the fact that I didn't get around to staking and tying up the big heavy poppies this spring, so they are sprawling over everything in their vicinity.

I have come to the conclusion that it may be possible, in fact, to have too much of a good thing.

Hostas: a non-gardener's best friend

Continuing on with the theme of gardening without actually gardening, I have decided my best friend in the perennial beds is the humble hosta.

I admit to having moved to Mucky Boots with a prejudice against hostas in tow. It dates back to the first house Kim and I had, a little place in Toronto with a postage-stamp backyard filled with hostas. I remember them as being slimy and slug infested, and as my introduction to gardening they creeped me out.



So when we got here and I saw all the hostas in the perennial beds I was disappointed. How stupid could I be? Because not only do hostas come in a huge variety of colours and sizes, and fill out a bed in a mounding, lush way, they require nothing of me except a few minutes to clean them up at the end of the fall. They're supposed to be shade lovers, but the ones we've got here seem to tolerate part sun, full sun, moist soil, dry soil, and everything in between.

Just look at that bed: variegated hostas and finer-leaved yellow hostas in the foreground, and an enormous green hosta in the background.  If you hunkered down and looked underneath you would find some of my arch-nemesis the creeping bellflower, but the hostas do such a good job of staking their territory the bellflower never seems to get past the ground cover stage.

And although I hesitate to put this in writing (because as soon as I do I'll be proved wrong) we don't seem to have a problem with slugs. And it's not like we don't have slugs here - look at this sucker, for instance. 

But they don't seem to trouble with the hostas. In fact the only thing that does any damage is an occasional deer that comes to chomp off the flower spikes.

And here's another good thing: hostas give you more hostas. Not only do they tolerate being divided, they like it. Last fall Kim and I went on a hosta-dividing spree and now we have even more hostas doing their lovely thing without a bit of input from me. 

That's a bit of a lopsided friendship: I badmouth the plant and it responds by giving me things. I'm trying not to feel too bad. I'm just trying to mend my ways.

How to garden without gardening

I have been laid up with a sore knee all spring. For a while I was limping along, but for the last month it's been bad enough I've been on crutches or using a cane but mostly parked on my butt. The vegetable garden has been my priority on the days when I can get around a little, so the perennial gardens have mostly been fending for themselves. It's my annual spring arthritis flare-up, and while it has been something of a pain, it could certainly be a lot worse.



But this isn't about my knee, it's about my garden. Specifically, what happens in a garden when there's no gardener tending it, during the most fertile months of the year.

The plants grow.
The flowers bloom.
The weeds multiply.
The world does not end.

During my enforced sit-on-my-butt days (which feel like they have gone on, and on, and on) I have been keeping myself occupied by knitting and listening to audio books. A few days ago there was a moment in the book when a character, reflecting on a war brewing in the book's imaginary world, mused that there might be nobody to see the peonies bloom the following year, but that they would still bloom.

Isn't that the truth, I thought, and if I needed proof all I had to do was look out the window.



Do the peonies care that I haven't been fussing over them? Nope.

Do the poppies mind that they haven't been staked and are sprawling with abandon over their neighbours? Apparently not.

And it seems I don't even have to plant things in order to have flowers, as evidenced by these volunteer foxglove.

Yes, there are weeds everywhere, and I'm going to pay at some point for letting the annual weeds go to seed, but in the meantime they're acting as a pretty good ground cover which is good because I haven't got around to watering, either. 

There is a humbling lesson in all of that: how much do I really matter? I don't mean that in a self-pitying way. I mean it in a reverential I-am-a-mere-mortal-looking-Mother-Nature-in-her-glorious-face kind of way. When it comes down to it, the idea that I can control what happens in my garden is sort of ridiculous, and I think Mother Nature is being very kind to let me try.

But at the end of the day I am still a gardener, and I'm itching to get in there and start cleaning things up. But even though my knee is slowly starting to feel better I know the worst thing I could do is overtax it. So I'm thinking tomorrow I might set the egg timer for 15 minutes, and see what I can get done. The next day, if all goes well, maybe 20.

But that still leaves me today, one more day, to watch the peonies bloom.

Working smarter and ageing gracefully

There is a property down the road from us that I call The Storybook Farm, because it looks like it has been transplanted straight from a children's book about an English country farm. The buildings are faced with stone, there is a matched set of five black horses in the paddock, the potager garden is full of lavender plants lined up with mathematical precision, and the flower pots lining the drive are always beautifully blooming. It's a lovely place, one that fills me with awe every time I drive past it, and while these people exert more control over their garden than I want to or am capable of, they clearly know what they are doing.

So when our third spring at Mucky Boots came around (in other words the first spring I had my head enough above water to notice) and the middle of April came and went with their garden still full of winter stalks and dead stuff, I thought something must be wrong, and even though I don`t know them, I worried. I shouldn't have, because in short order everything was looking as spiffed up as I had become accustomed to. Maybe they were just a little late getting started, I thought with the tiniest amount of self-satisfaction.

And now, near the end of our fifth spring at Mucky Boots, I think I get it. They really do know what they are doing: it's all about working smarter.

My practice has been to dip into all my garden beds multiple times through the spring explosion. I usually manage to get the winter clean-up done before the fast spring growth starts, but pretty quickly I'm going at the creeping bellflower wherever and whenever it appears, and trying to clean up the spring bulbs as soon as they start looking bedraggled. And weeding, weeding, weeding. I figure each of the many beds in the perennial garden gets six or seven passes before the hot weather hits and growth settles down.

Well, I have learned a thing or two. For example, I have learned that the best way to deal with invasive perennial weeds like the creeping bellflower is not to try digging it up, which only compounds the problem as all those little root filaments birth new plants, but to cut it down once or twice a year and never, ever, let it flower. So now instead of going into attack mode every time I see some, I let it be and do a complete pass through the garden when the quantity of it merits.

Here's another example. We have such masses of spring bulbs here (especially winter aconite, snowdrops and bluebells) that when they start to die back the garden looks a bit shabby. In the past I have cut back individual plants as they reach the point of no return, but now I pretty much wait for the bulk of them to reach that point, then I clear them all out (the exception being when they are smothering other perennials just getting started). That's way less work. It means living with a bit of a mess for a while...



...but it also means I can stress less and enjoy more.

That's especially important given that the Annual Spring Arthritis Flare-Up seems to be a regular fixture in my life - just when there's lots of work to do, and just when I'm excited to be getting down to it, my joints require me to carefully weigh the necessity of each task.

Working smarter, and not being in such a rush to clear out my beds, means I have had more opportunity to enjoy the special beauty of blooms past their prime, like the wonky tulip at the top of the post. Which is also smarter, because none of us is getting younger.  So in a spirit of affection and respect for all the ages in my garden, here are a few blooms ageing gracefully.

 

Looking for the really funny "Gotta love that cupholder" post? I'm so sorry, but because of technical issues I threw up my hands and deleted the post. But it was funny. Really, really funny. I'm still laughing...

Fairy godparents in the garden

A few weeks ago our neighbour's dad visited them for a week, and while he was there he pruned their entire orchard. We were sort of hoping he wouldn't realize the friendly fence between us actually marks a property line, and would continue his pruning roll right on into our orchard, but he didn't.

We know the magic of visiting parents willing to pitch in. On her very first visit to Mucky Boots my non-gardening mom weeded the entire strawberry patch, obliterating every trace of the wood sorrel that had infested it. And my dad contributed to my combat-perfectionism-by-enjoying-my-garden-more campaign by assembling new garden loungers that came in a million parts, with nothing but his engineering expertise and some badly translated instructions.



The magic of visiting parents indeed. Fairy godparents in the garden. And we're being visited by some now: Kim's folks are visiting us from Ontario, and, bless his heart, her dad is a gardener and brought his pruners.



Their very first morning here they were on a mission: Ken watered, shovelled compost and spread straw mulch while Saundra helped me plant squash. And that was just the first morning. The next day Kim fired up Johnny D and loaded up the trailer with compost, and then she and her dad started in on the backlog of plants waiting to be transplanted while Saundra weeded, kept us all hydrated, and kept me and my sore joints from overdoing it.

Friends in the garden are as good as fairy godparents, and we were also visited by some of them on the weekend: Margaret and Julie came for tea.



This was Julie's first visit to Mucky Boots, and it was so much fun trailing after her as she recognized historic landmarks from her faithful blog reading: "Oh, that's the chicken door Kim had to crawl through when she locked herself in the coop!"

When the tour was done we had tea in the garden.





Those amazing lilacs aren't ours - Ken bought them for us at the farmer's market, to help me celebrate my new sense of smell.



Tea was accompanied by a treat, of course: rhubarb coffee cake made especially for Margaret, who thinks rhubarb merits its own food group. She has a point.

Tulip Parade 2013

This is an annual event at Mucky Boots: the cataloguing of the year's entrants in the Tulip Parade. You'd think this would be repetitious, because it's not as if I plant any bulbs. So you'd expect the same tulips, appearing in the same locations as last year. And there is some of that. But there are also many surprises: tulips I swear I have never seen before, or in locations they've never been before. Someone has a sense of humour, and I'm guessing it's Mother Nature.

Tulips are the flowers that make me want to be a painter. An impressionist painter. Because when I step out the door and see the mass of green punctuated with bright splashes of colour from all the tulips, and when I try yet again to capture it on camera and fail yet again to capture what I see, I think the license I could take as a painter might allow me to show you how magical it is.

But for now, here is the Parade.

And because they don't get their own parade and the tulips feel sorry for them, here are some tag-a-long columbines.

Oh, and the tulips have also asked me to include a photo of the anemones my friend Elisabeth gave me last year, because they are newcomers to the garden and the tulips want them to feel welcome.