Here Comes the Sun!

One can read only so many garden magazines. The catalogues with their perfect plants are page worn. All the old garden books are memorized. The internet! But one's eyes eventually glaze over, and there is deep longing for fresh air. What's a pent-up gardener to do? Order a new birdhouse. Order a new tree. And pace, pace, watching the weather, hoping for a day of sunshine.

I would definitely be in trouble if I lived in the far reaches of the North, where there are months of winter gloom. I have had to deal with a few weeks, and finally the sun has returned. On Saturday I stumbled out of the house and gulped the warm rays. The temperature went up into the fifties. Spring! Not really, only a tease, but I didn't care.
The front garden, with the sun shining!

I planted this little coral bark tree last fall. I am impressed with its winter color and look forward to the impact it will make when it grows larger.

The dried stems behind the tree trunk is the ground cover indigofera, in the woodland garden. It has fern-like leaves and pink flowers in the spring.
More views around the woodland garden.

I grabbed my unfortunate son who came for a visit and headed for the garden. We planted the new tree, a variegated weeping redbud, Cercis canadensis 'Whitewater'. I have high hopes for it. Because our ground doesn't freeze, winter is a great time for planting new trees, allowing roots to take hold before the stress of summer heat arrives.It's hard to imagine that this old oak tree behind our house was once as small as my newly planted redbud! It has lived through many years of stressful weather. In 1990, its top was ripped away by a tornado, but it continues to survive.

We also transplanted a dozen ferns. My neighbor Betty had told me there were ferns in the valley behind our house, but although this property belongs to us, the hill is steep and the area wild so I rarely go down there. But on Saturday I was in the mood to plant. I wanted to add to the fern glade in the woodland garden, so I dragged my son down into the wilderness and we began digging. Most of the ferns are beautiful evergreen, holly type woodland ferns. My muscular son got to haul them up the steep hill and then dig holes for me in their new location. There are plenty more left in the valley, and I am looking forward to another pleasant day, hopefully when my son will be visiting, so I can continue to enlarge the fern glade. 

Meanwhile, Lou and I have pruned the apple trees and the crepe myrtles, properly — we commit no crepe murder! (This link takes you to a great article published by Southern Living magazine about pruning crepe myrtles.) I also have potted up some pansies. 

The sun is peeking in and out today. Lou is going to install my new birdhouse. We are rushing to take advantage of the nice weather, as rain will be returning tomorrow, or sooner, as already I see storm clouds on the horizon. Soon we will spray the apple trees and many of our shrubs with an ecologically friendly dormant oil. This will reduce insect damage later in the season and also helps to fight some types of fungus. Our season warms up so quickly that this must be done now, before growth starts.

It may be a few days before I can get out to enjoy my garden again. Here are some more images from here and there, photographed while I was taking in the sunshine:

I hope you are enjoying the week!   Deborah

Final Fall Planting

We recently removed what we fondly called the cancer tree, resulting in a large clearing. A void can't last long in my garden, so yesterday I planted the new space. Where there once was one massive plant, spreading into a foreboding thicket, there is now a Full Moon Japanese maple, a prostrate blue cedar, three coralberries, three deciduous hollies, and a mock orange. I will take photos and show the new area in a future post.

It was a lot of work, but I hardly broke a sweat, as I had both my husband and my oldest son helping me. I pointed, and they dug the holes. They transplanted shrubs from their previous locations to new ones. They carried new plants and lifted them from their pots and placed them in the holes. They shoveled dirt and hauled water. I rather liked my supervisory position, which I shared with Autumn the cat. Autumn kept a close eye on things. But supervision is demanding work, and eventually, like all good supervisors, she had to take a nap.We got all the work done in a few hours. It would have taken me much longer by myself.

The weather was warm and sunny, and it felt like a day in May, rather than November. Nights are chilly, though, and we have had a few days with a pre-winter feel to them. Walking through the garden I still see summer flowers, as well as fall foliage and other signs of the season.

Here are some of the flowers blooming this week:Top: Penelope rose. 2nd row: More Penelope blooms; Camellia 'Leslie Ann' was the first to bloom. 3rd row: a stray daylily bloom; Rosa mutabilis. Bottom row: This camellia was here when we moved here in 1985; fall mums.

Zinnias and other flowers are blooming in the wildflower garden, but here one also sees dried seed heads. The red leafed vine is Virginia Creeper, a native that is often mistaken for poison oak but is easily distinguished by its five leaves, rather than poison oak's three:

There may be flowers and butterflies still around, but the colors of fall definitely are dominant in the garden now. We have been raking a lot of leaves!Top photo is Chinese Pistache tree. Below that are shots showing colorful dogwoods in the garden.

Top photo is Beauty Berry. 2nd row: This photo was taken a few weeks ago. Since then raccoons have eaten all the decorative dried corn; These are magnolia seed pods Lou gathered into a bucket. 3rd row: Canadian Hemlock cones; Decorative cabbage.

Top row: Both shots are of changing colors on a forsythia bush. Middle row: a fallen redbud leaf; dogwood foliage. Third row: Variegated artemesia 'Oriental Limelight' is semi-evergreen; Variegated Pittisporum is evergreen. Both are colorful counterparts to all the red and golden shades of fall.

I think this was my final fall planting job. No more work for me till spring! Haha! Who will believe that joke? After all, I am sure Autumn and I will have some more supervising to do!