Remember that old hymn that goes,
I come to the garden alone
While the dew is still on the roses
And the voice I hear, falling on my ear,
The Son of God discloses.And He walks with me, and He talks with me,
And He tells me I am His own,
And the Joy we share as we tarry there,
None other has ever known.
I cannot sleep tonight, and have been visiting some beautiful gardening blogs. I realize that I’ve been so busy the past few weeks that I have neglected my gardens. Today for the first time in weeks, I strolled around the yard to see my gardens. My vegetable garden is weedy, but productive. It was not a good year for lettuce, unfortunately (we eat a lot of salad), but the peas, green beans, and squash are thriving despite my neglect.
Stray tomato plants are everywhere in the garden. Last year, I’d composted old tomatoes, and the seeds survived. They sprouted everywhere I spread the compost. I have left them to grow up between the rows, and now they are bullying the potatoes and beans. Oh well. I have a hard time getting rid of any plant and would rather just let them all grow. Thinning sprouts is an agonizing job for me.
My cucumbers are the cutest, fuzziest little things, still smaller than my pinky. I have a few marble-sized cantaloupe growing, but since we only have about 7 weeks of reliably warm weather left, I wonder if any will mature in time. Onions are poor this year, due to my late sowing and lack of rain. Carrots and turnips look good.
Well, the reason I am thinking of that hymn, one of my old favorites as a girl, is that today I got to see how my flower beds are doing. It was a lovely, colorful walk. My daughters have kept up with the weeding quite well during the five weeks I was bedridden. The weeds have only just returned because we’ve been busy with the plaster and the drywell. But my purple butterfly bush is blooming– oh the joy!
“A Boy and His Cat”
Walking down through my garden path, I realized that I must love yellow/orange and blue/purple flowers together. I hardly have any other combination. Besides the butterfly bush, I have purple Veronica, Russian sage, purple coneflower, magenta bee balm, purple iris, blue anemone, pink turtleheads, blue hydrangea, and several blue Rose of Sharon bushes. I also have a glorious stalk of Purple Loosestrife growing. All these purple flowers are woven between my orange daylilies (which have finally bloomed– they always bloom three weeks after everyone else’s and I don’t know why), black-eyed Susans, orange-red Asian lilies, yellow potentilla, and orange torchlilies. Besides a few white/pink stargazer lilies, that’s it! All together, it is quite a beautiful collage.
Here’s a shot of my pride and joy– my Red Oak that I have nurtured these past four years since it was a little twig in the ground. My house is surrounded by asphalt (being an old parsonage property); in the summer, the steamy asphalt scorches up the yard and house to unbearable levels. My precious oak will resolve that in a few years.
About the Purple Loosestrife– I stole it from a roadside swamp. Shh. I don’t care how much the treehuggers hate it, I love it. You see, loosestrife grows in wet, swampy areas, and chokes off the flow of water. But I have far too much water on my property.
I am waterlogged, actually. So I am going to plant great swaths of loosestrife in the soggy area of my yard. It is also a very colorful and pretty plant, so that’s a plus. Desperate times call for desperate measures! I am going to also get more iris, which likes its feet wet, and some summersweet, which also thrives in wet areas. Hopefully this will solve most of my water problems, before a pond forms permanently!
Here’s an interesting shot– a male peacock and his peahen flew up on top of our shed, then into an oak tree. The neighbors have a variety of birds and critters, and this pair of exotic birds likes to wander in my yard.
It was evening, and the picture came out poorly, but can you make out the iridescent blue between the leaves? They were in the tree for a few hours after nightfall, making the loudest, strangest noises. Reminded me of an owl’s “whooo” a little.
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[...] Oh yeah, and I had a vegetable garden and multitudes of perennial gardens to keep up with, too. Makes me tired to remember it all! Read about the garden here. [...]