Over the horrible rainy and cold weather last week when I was forced inside , and especially while I was chaperoning 15 teenagers at my daughter Erin’s end of school party, I killed lots of time going from website to website, blog to linked blog ,enjoying gardens from a ll over the country and a few in Canada and England too.I thoroughly enjoy seeing how excited people are with the success of their gardens. 

Photos always accompany the stories, and some are amazing in their clarity, detail and lighting, and some (like my own) very amateur and pedestrian. Sometimes the writing is top notch, sometimes not, but I find all the stories endearing because of the love we gardeners and garden bloggers all share for our gardens and our plants.

What I quite frankly do not like, in even the tinniest way, are plant snobs. One website I visited this weekend infuriated me in such a way that I felt inclined to post nasty comments, or even better try to spam his site. He goes by the name Renegade Gardener and honestly, his opinions are full of self-important egotistical hogwash. (He is not alone in his poorly thought out comments , I just was angered at his conviction and nastiness ).

We all want to be better gardeners. I define that as being someone who seeks to better the land space around them, in a way that suits them, causing as little damage to the world at large as possible, and who  is always seeking better and  more efficient ways to grow the plants they love.

See that, the plants THEY love, not the plants YOU love. This guy basically slammed anyone who dared to grow a daylily, or aspired to have a beautiful hedge of arbovitae, or basically anyone who wanted to garden with common plants.

 I do not know how to type the “raspberry” sound or I would give it to him. I enjoy a daylily, and love a deep green hedge of arbs as a background to a flower border.  There are a plethora of  plants I do not care for at all……structural plants like agave and yucca make me wince, hostas bore me because , like many foliage plants , I fail to grasp the pleasure of minute variations of detail in a leave. I am a flower chick.

 BUT I can tell you how fully I appreciate a garden lovingly planted and tended with them, or any other plant for that matter.  The list of stuff I grow here would be an embarrassment to type so I won’t, but suffice it to say, I grow an overused plant ( or 20 ) and totally without apology. On the flip side i have collections of certain plants that you will hardly ever see anywhere else.

 There are many “rare” and or “must have” plants for “serious” gardeners you will never ever see here.  Among them :

Spring ephemerals  (too small, bloom time waaayyy too short),

Plants that push my hardiness zone (here that is a just setting up a date with failure and disappointment )

Large foliage plants like Rodgersia or Castor bean or elephant ears, I have even banned canna ( I get the willies thinking about the rain forest and or jungles, and it is so windy here the leaves tatter so I would not use them even if I loved them , OCD you know)….but as an exception I have ‘sum and substance’ hosta which is huge and grown for foliage, and I like it and that is that.

But YOU can grow them all you want, lots of them. I will tell you how lovely they look in your yard and probably take lots of pictures.

The whole point of any gardening is to take a space and transform it into something you enjoy, so  if you want an acre of daylilys….have at it!  Ignore anyone who tells you your efforts are not good enough, or your taste too simple. Or cheerfully point out their inadequacies and harp on their trend- following- keep up with the joneses- mentality, you’ll feel better.

Moss Phlox: ubiquitous, boring

Bridal Wreath Spirea : Nauseatingly common

Whats wrong with this picture? : apparantly the arborvitae is unnacceptable

Daylilys: Not only orange, but the roadside ditch variety too! BAH!

Guess I need to re-do the whole garden……….    lmao, not a chance!

Although I could not pronounce it to save my life, myrmencochory becomes the very bane of my gardening existence here in the sand box from late May until October.

Myrmencochory refers to the phenomenon of  seed dispersal by ants. Theory is, some  plants evolved to have seeds with an extra ‘food body’ on them that is attractive to the ants, who carry it down to their nest, feed the nutrients from the food body (called an elaisome) to their larvae then discard the seed itself  from the nest where it germinates and grows. This saves the seed from predation and ensures succession of the plant species. What frickin ever, to me it just means more work weeding.

Only certain plants have this symbiotic relationship with ants, I think the other million seedlings they cause are due to their constant  tunneling .In the gardens here ,everything under a few scant inches of improved soil  is sand, therefore the digging is easy. Their massive  nests have taken down entire sides of raised beds, recycled whole areas of gardens so now the sand is on top and the soil is under, and given me hundreds of hours of extra weeding.

Bill calls them “nature’s farmers” which is a better name than they derserve. I call them” milions of creepy soon to be dead crawlies” ,and do not appreciate their farming efforts at all.

All the beds here are either raised up with local rocks, or edged with them , and when they disturb an area enough to knock the rocks out of place and I have to re-place them, I enevitably get bitten by the stupid things whenI  absentmindedly kneel down and pick one up. It hurts like H-E double hockey sticks and then itches like crazy .

While I apprecaite the scientists who study such things to give us a better understanding of the world around us, I also apprecaite the scientists who work for Ortho and give us fancy  ant bait stations to kill the little suckers.  When we moved here not even one living thing greeted us in our yard upon arrival. I think the ants moved in first and started a chain of followers and interlopers  that have conspired to undermine my beautification work and thwart me at every turn.

 Maybe I am paranoid, maybe just a-noid (couldn’t resist…sorry), maybe I should be more tolerant. Sigh.

Up until yesterday, I have always been able to say that if there was something edible growing in this yard it was by accident or coincidence. I have never planted vegetables here, and had no desire to cater to their whims as there is a perfectly wonderful farmers market here in town where the produce is cheap, and I also have friends who chase me around with zucchini and green beans that I think they would pay me to take off their hands becuase  they are so inundated with them and feel guilty composting that which they have worked so hard to grow.

Then, my sister in law had a conversation with my daughter Faith, wherein she explained the unbridled joy of harvesting and eating  your own corn…. and I got that look we mothers are so often greeted with when our offspring realize that there is some fun in the world we have been expressly keeping from them, and the pressure to have a veggie garden was on.

The other part of my reluctance to plant vegetables here stems from the fact that other than Faith, (who will eat corn and broccoli) no one here eats them but me. Occasionally I have stuck a single cherry tomato plant in a porch on the deck and along with the gifted produce  that has been more than enough for my personal consumption. But now, my cutting garden, the source of my beloved zinnias, Bells of Ireland, sunflowers, stock, and endless summer flower  arrangements, will yield corn, Kentucky wonder beans, and cucumbers instead.

In the small plot there was already standing a willow tee-pee that I grew bottle gourds on (for birdhouses and decorations) so the bean seeds went in at it’s base. Then we tilled and mounded and made 5 rows and dutifully planted a seed every few inches down each one. A  little area toward the front has cucumbers that are suppose to grow in a bush, but I am skeptical because I am aware of their vining take over the world nature, and will believe it when I see it. Faith made labels to mark the rows, and last night mother nature watered it for us (yep, more rain) so I hope to see seedlings soon.

But…it doesn’t end there. This past weekend was my garden club’s plant sale and in the odd fit that often grips me at such events I bought something I did not intend to re-plant in my yard: strawberries. Last year it was Heritage raspberry canes which in a fit of a different kind centered around yet another kind of guilt, I planted way way way out back , under a white pine where there is no sun or irrigation , and they have languished since.

Buoyed by Faith’s enthusiasm for the vegetable garden, I mentioned the strawberries, which were greeted with wide eyed wonder and a cheerful willingness to keep gardening with me. So I got out the strawberry pot, which up until now has always grown thyme or sedum , and we planted our new strawberry plants.

On a roll now, I went out back and rescued the poor raspberry canes, a move I know I will come to regret deeply, and moved them to new spaces along the fence near the road. As they take over the world that is my front yard, I am hoping they can repay me for all the expensive real estate I am giving them by using their thorny canes to stop Tigger from charging the fence every time some poor soul tries to walk by with their dog.

We will see what comes of all of this. My experience thus far in life with blueberries, broccoli(at my last house) and even my apple trees , is that the food I am trying to grow  is for the critters, and I am their personal produce provider. The cutting garden is fenced in, so that may deter the rabbits, but the birds are another story, and who knows what else has been anxiously awaiting my foray into edible gardening. At the very least , if we get to enjoy even a few ears of corn, which is Faith’s favorite, I will deem it a success.

Without tempting the unniverse to go sahara  on my a**, could it just be sunny for a little bit? Or maybe just a few degrees warmer so the word “raw ” can be excused from my weather vocabulary for a while? I have things to do, and the garden waits for no woman , what needs doing needs doing now.

My pants are wet, my sweatshirt is so wet it weighs about 40 lbs, my wellies have been keeping my feet dry , but muddy-ing up the deck and walkways, the soil is saturated and the plants are drooping and can I mention wet mulch=heavy mulch and it is much too dificult to spread.

It rained yesterday, the day before that it poured, it rained off and on today and when it was not raining there was a fine mist in the air being blown about by the wind which is highly uncomfortable to be outside in. It will rain tommorow, and the day after that, and maybe even the day after that one too.

I think back to another May we had like this (2004?), that year it went into June the same cold wet  way.  Plants just rotted in the ground and fungal diseases abounded .The poor things  had no way to escape the water and they just turned to mush and there was nothing I could do about it. Frustration ensued and that is just  not pleasant to be around, trust me.

I also can’t  take any decent pictures, but I will post what I have taken so far. The crabapple trees all looked incredible this year, and the lilacs are starting to bloom. The spring blooming shrubbery was unstopable, going for days longer than it ever has. The magnolia never got nipped by frost, the forsythia and azeleas are still in bloom, and three clematis that never bloom this early are all budded out.

[cincopa A8DA0mKRQuL8]

This is usually a great time to show off the garden, but no one wants to be outside and that counts for my worker-bees too. CJ has taken to doing inside chores (folding laundry, vaccuuming etc) so he won’t have to get soaked and chilled to the bone anymore. Our first cookout of the year( in honor of his college graduation) is this weekend.

 I will take partly cloudy, passing brief showers, threat of afternoon quick passing storm, or even  morning rain if it is followed by a sunny afterenoon. I will not accept  any more day long rains with temps in the 40’s and low 50’s .

 The end.

[cincopa AkGAwnqzQ67r]

There are lots of ways to spend a day that will sap every ounce of energy you have and leave you headed for the couch and the advil bottle. My all time least favorite is a day spent at Boston Children’s hospital ( where my daughter is a patient), followed by any trip involving amusement parks, air travel or clothes shopping,  That’s a pretty wacky list, but we are who we are.

Today I got my energy sapped by spending 3 hours volunteering at an historic house in my town, where I am re-doing the gardens, then coming home and spending 5 more planting bare root roses, a few shrubs, dividing  phlox, moving  a few clematis, and trying to make a suitable bed for iris ensata  which wants constantly moist soil, a tough trick for those of us who garden in sand.

Already exhausted, my downward spiral  started with the roses that arrived yesterday and needed to go in the ground ASAP. David Austin Roses sends these bare root roses that first make me laugh at how ridiculously large their bare roots are and then make me cry as I try to dig a hole big enough to fit them. After they were all planted and watered I hit that state where you are too tired to effectively do any task without calling on every muscle you have to pitch regardless of their sutability for said task,   resulting in very awkward digging indeed.

 In that  reduced capacity, I figured why not go for broke ? and dig another hole deep enough to accomadate a large ( 3ft diameter) pan meant for a small fountain to hold soil and water for the iris.

Then on to the phlox, which might as well been welded into the ground for all the effort it took me to dig them out and divide them. Moving the clematis was not so bad because they are just babies, but along the way some more grass had to be taken out and more water lugged and that was when CJ showed up and told me to go shower he was taking me to a movie for Mother’s Day. Sweet sweet CJ, thank you for saving me from myself.

When we got to the theatre ( to see Thor, which was great BTW) CJ was standing outside the car waiting for me to get out and he turned and said, and I quote, “Why are you moving like an old lady today?” Good thing I was too tired to even try to take a swing at him. And I guess the fact that it is a time to celebrate being a mother,and by” celebrate” they don’t mean  “attempt bodily harm on your offspring”  contibuted to his escape as well.

 Now I am home , and evey muscle in my “old lady” body is T I R E D. I want hot tea, a book about anything but gardening, and my comfy bed with 20 pillows stacked up high around me. I want to sleep late, awake to breakfast in bed, and gifts (lots of gifts).

Being exhausted on a day when you have done something you didn’t enjoy, followed by the fact that you may or may not get enough sleep, and may or may not have another horrific day in front of you, feels much different than exhaustion caused by doing your favorite activity on the eve of the only day you are not expected to get up and do anything except open a present or two ….although .it better be more than two, and it better not be plants!