ARE YOU A GARDENER, OR ARE YOU A GARDEN ADMIRER? YOU CAN BE BOTH!
I must confess that I am incurably afflicted with the malady commonly known as “garden fever”.
I love to garden and to visit gardens, large or small, roof top or city lot, arboretum or patio. It matters not where the garden is for wherever a flower grows, I find joy.
In the six years we’ve lived here, we have made enhancements to the beds already here and added new ones, which generally means Tom draws the plans and does the back breaking work then I color inside the lines with plants.
Our previous garden was truly our own, but it took a while for it to become so. I knew every plant as well as I knew my own face.
Tom built a deck around a Wealthy apple tree,. It was truly our “giving tree” where Mr. and Mrs. Wren nested one year and presented their fledglings on the Fourth of July.
Tom also built a gateway to connect the paths from the front to the back. I searched for two years until I found a golden hosta called Moon Glow. I planted it at a precise spot in the back garden. As the sun set in late summer, its rays would slowly slip through the gateway of the arbor and for all of three minutes the rays would touch this one hosta. It would purely glow.
Here on the Cutoff , in spite of the challenges of deer, the gardens are gradually becoming ours.
We have learned to hang a fuchsia on a shepherd’s hook next to the living room window. Hummingbirds come to it for nectar as we watch from inside. We have a new arbor, sturdy with seats. A sweet place to rest with a glass of iced tea and a book. It was a project of Tom’s that is a focal point. Here, climbing roses and clematis have finally taken hold and if the deer don’t get to them, they will be laced with blossoms in a month or so.
Our garden beds are filled with plants from friends; cuttings and divisions and seeds they have passed along. Marilyn’s burning bush and feverfew, Bev and Jerry’s daffodils and hydrangea, Thor’s daylilies, and Dorothy’s ladies’mantle all hold a piece of real estate.
We’ve planted trees; a sapling from June’s ginkgo and a David Wyman crabapple. There is the book club’s rose and the Moonie’s hydrangea, a clethra from Jennifer and Jason and a Korean lilac that is just about ready to bloom.
Or my, I do go on and on. I must remember my manners and let you answer this gardening question as well.
While you think about your answer, some of you may remember Ricky Nelson’s Garden Party.
Your garden sounds like a dream come true. I love the way you say ‘I color inside the lines with plants.’ You and Tom must be a great team, to create such beauty. i miss having a garden now that I’m living in an apartment. When I visit my son’s place, I get out into his garden and pull weeds, just to feel like a gardener again.
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Thank you, Juliet. The beauty of the garden in the end is always satisfying to us, but we do manage to throw some dirt at each other from time-to-time in the process. I’m sure you do miss having a garden, I know the day will come will I do. I’m glad your son has a garden to “mess around” in. Once a gardener, there is always the urge to pull weeds no matter where we roam, isn’t there?
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Mostly just an admirer and a wishful-thinker, Penny. I do, however, currently have some peas and cucumbers sprouting on the kitchen table…got to get a place ready to move them outside soon. We’re on a rented space here, so most planting has to be in containers (digging good uproot vital things like electric or cable lines), but I’m not ambitious (nor muscled) enough to do large scale gardening anyway! 🙂 Thanks for sharing Ricky!
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A very good thing to be, Karen. Isn’t it life-affirming to watch those seeds grow right there in your kitchen? I’m not very good at starting plants from seed. I do quite a bit of container gardening myself, however. I know you will enjoy those peas and cucumbers before you know it. You are welcome!
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That’s supposed to be “digging could”….it would not be “good!”
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Penny, your garden sounds beautiful and you obviously put a lot of love and care into its upkeep. I am still a novice about gardening, but am learning all the time. I have a small garden with four parterres edged in teucrium hedges. Each parterre is anchored by a dwarf lemon or orange tree in big blue pots. In the middle these four parterres is an antique fountain I found in Pasadena. We love our garden and get so much pleasure from sitting in it during the warm months.
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Oh, Sunday, that sounds like much more than a novice garden. How wonderful those oranges and lemons must smell and how striking the blue pots must be. I can just imagine mid-summer, the fountain, and peacefulness of sitting in your garden. Bliss!
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In my past I have been a gardener after your own heart, Penny, with borders which show the history of friendships. There is nothing sweeter than a walk round a garden in the early morning, noting the tiny changes which travel at the pace of happiness. But my life is filled with small paved gardens, exuberant dogs, nephews who like to weed with indiscriminate enthusiasm, and a dearth of time.
Later in life I will have a beautiful garden, with a greenhouse, once more 🙂
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I just love those morning walks, awakening with the garden, and those changes Kate. You speak like a seasoned gardener. You are already a gardener and the time will come again for you to play in the dirt. It took me a good many years to ever have a garden, though I always knew I would.
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I love the way you describe the careful planning of your garden, Penny. I think one of the very first posts of yours I read told me about your garden, and I knew we would be friends. Gardening is so important to me, but I do admit I don’t tend to the details the way I once did…but I’m always working at it, and I do work hard to give it character. The iris were my grandmother’s and mother-in-law’s (going back close to 40 years) and even some of my roses came from their gardens when they passed away and before their homes were sold. The oak tree in the back yard is almost legendary in the family and I’d miss it most if we ever moved. So many details that tell a story and I believe the garden, in whatever shape we find it, is still our sanctuary. I do love hearing about yours and I also enjoy your trips to the local botanical and arboretum gardens! Debra
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Debra, I thank you. You warm my heart. I don’t tend to the garden as I used to either. I can no longer get down on my knees due to a car injury, so the weeds have a way of taking over, but I still love to bend and pull and pinch and rake. How wonderful to have family plants, is it not? They are truly heirlooms. Sanctuary. Yes.
Do you walk through a nursery and deadhead? I do it all the time and watch to see who else does. It is where you can tell the real gardeners.
I’m so pleased to hear you enjoy my local jaunts to gardens, Debra. I think I’ve mentioned before, a most memorable one was the Huntington, with those roses. Katy and I walked it. I told her to close her eyes and I held a stem for her to smell, saying that whenever she caught the scent she would think of our day at the Huntington.
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I love your story about Katy and the Huntington! What a precious memory! I’ll be going again soon and probably posting about it. I’ll be sure to take pictures of the spring rose garden. And yes, I do deadhead, but not as brazenly as my mother-in-law who we still laugh about! She would walk through and take significant pieces off of plants, put them in her purse to bring home, and always said, “It’s good for the plants!” We couldn’t stop her! LOL!
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It was such a wonderful day for us, Debra. I will look forward to those pictures. Oh, that’s so funny. I’m not quite that bad. I’ll bet she was taking them for cuttings. A true gardener.
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I am a garden admirer with a great wish to be a gardener. The few things we have here are bulb or root things that come up year after year. Now that I have retired from teaching, I hope to spend more time on flowers and plants. We have nearly thirteen acres. About 5 of those acres are cash rented to a farmer. Part of our land is woods, and we have two small ponds. The rest has us fighting with clay and prairie sod. I do have a few flowers here and there, but nothing like I want to have. So, I will be making a start of it a little bit at a time. I hope most of our dirt moving is over for now. I am determined to be as brave as those little tulips, jonquils, and peonies that fight that prairie clay to come up year after year. I will browse through pictures of your beautiful garden to give me inspiration to forge ahead in the gardening business. Now all I need is someone to help finance this endeavor. Oh well, a little at a time.
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Isn’t it a wonder to admire gardens of all kinds, Janet? I love to hear about your land – your prairie and woods and ponds. Janet on the Prairie. Even up here we fight with that clay, though we don’t have as much here as in our other house. A little at a time is right. Have you thought of converting part of your land into native plants? Big Bluestem? Oat grass? They are hardy and adapt to the clay and Illinois soil. You can start small. I’m thinking of doing that with some of the land here some day.
As you say, a little at a time.
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I was once a gardener, Penny. I had a forty bush rose garden, and I loved/hated it. I loved having the roses all over my house, cut and fresh. I hated everything else about it. 🙂
I admire gardens, and I have a green thumb, but I am going to enjoy the coming months of having nothing but a green roof on my building to admire, one that I don’t have to take care of at that. 🙂
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Now, THAT was a rose garden, Andra. Roses can be a bit of work, can’t they? Forty, well, that is a lot of work, but they must have been beautiful. I think that when it is no longer pleasurable to garden, I will hang up my rake.
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Penny, I remember thinking Ricky Nelson was the most handsome boy in the world! I never missed the Ozzie and Harriet Show.
I am a garden admirer as I have no green thumb. The excursions around your garden and the descriptions you give supply me with the pleasure I crave.
At this point I remember flowers more than gardens: corsages that I wore to church on Easter as a child, poinsettias, roses on Valentine’d Day wrist corsages for proms. All flowers for the seasons of my life.
My husband retired from the wholesale floral business so flowers were always a much appreciated given in our home.
My favorites though are wild flowers, so simple and pure.
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I thought so, too, Marilyn, and watched Ozzie and Harriet as well.
I love that thought. Flowers for the season of your life. To remember those corsages and the flowers in your house must bring such warm memories to you. I think that flowers in a home make it so much more inviting and a pleasure to be amid. It is wonderful that your home was full of flowers, though I’m sure your husband put in many long hours in the floral business.
I love wild flowers as well. They look so beautiful in a field, but don’t last long in a vase. I’ve learned to love them exactly where they are.
Thanks for the lovely comment, Marilyn.
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I really enjoyed reading your description of your garden/garden in progress. I enjoy reading books about nature/gardening but I also enjoy gardening myself – always want to sit on my hands this time of year. I start out wearing gloves but by the time I am finished I have my bare hands in the dirt! We have been eating asparagus every day. Yummy. How I hated it as a child! 🙂 I noticed today the Hot Shot roses are blooming and petunias are really pretty. I’m thinking this had to be a different type of petunia than I usually plant to have stayed green all winter. Blanket flowers are blooming as well. I’ve planted a few more herbs this year. Do you grow herbs?
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Thank you, Joyce. I can get as lost in a gardening book as in a garden. I’m not good with gloves, either, though I keep a pair handy around the roses. Petunias already? I’m envious. Did you have a hard, sustained frost there? If not, that may be why they stayed green.
I do grow herbs. Some are in the garden, but I don’t pick them to eat as they have usually picked up the deer spray. I have a whiskey barrel filled with herbs right at the door to our deck. It is right off of the kitchen and I love to go out and snip whatever I need for supper. Basil, oregano, parsley. The oregano, not perennial here, is green. Such is the winter we had. Enjoy that asparagus.!
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Have you posted pictures of that earlier garden? Were you in a more rural area then?
And poor, poor Ricky.
This song is quite biting, isn’t it.
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I haven’t, Nan. I have lots of pictures of that garden, but it was before I entered the digital age. I’ll scan them some time and post a few. It wasn’t rural at all. Just an average suburban lot. While I love it here, I sometimes miss the old garden. I knew every inch of it.
Indeed. Ricky just wanted to be Rick and move on with his career and his fans didn’t.
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