flashback: 5 July 2009 — the summer of my mother’s garden

On the fifth of July we spent a day grooming mom’s garden for her second garden open day.

From the parking area on the east side of the house, you might not have guessed that a big bright sunny garden awaited.

By her car port, a blue geranium rambled through a cutleaf elderberry.

cutleaf elderberry

Almost all of the lilies now bloomed in the sunny south garden.

flower beds

In her patch of woods, we had hung an old window for decoration.

mom’s bit of woods

Looking west from the lilies above, we could see Mike and Mark’s house:  good neighbours.

looking west

The lawn edging had held up well from tour number one and would not have to be redone for the smaller tour two days from now.

All the containers we’d brought up to enhance the garden for tour day were still in fine fettle.

container with grass and viola

fairy chair

The plants on the fairy chair had started to blend together.  (All purchased at The Basket Case.)

lilies and grass paths

Above, looking from the west to the east down one of the small paths.  In front of the house, two long concrete strips running east-west (for a single wide trailer, originally) had inspired a design of nine geometric garden beds divided by grassy paths.

looking to the west

One of the short north-south paths of the nine flower beds gave this view of the big flower beds that sweep in a curve around the south side of the garden.

looking south

Originally we had kept a doorway pruned through the escallonia hedge, but we had let it close in to keep the deer out.

Just a reminder of what the escallonia hedge had looked like nine years before (yes, it is there, behind the tulips):

in the year 2000

The cosmos were starting to bloom over in that southwest border….

Cosmos

along with a magnificent tall stand of lilies.

lilies backed with escallonia

When I first learned of the existence of Oriental and Asiatic lilies in the late 1980s, I could not believe they would actually grow in my garden.  They seemed far too delicate and tropical. I got a book called “Let’s Grow Lilies”, illustrated with clip-art style cartoons, that said they would not grow well in thickly planted beds but must instead be planted among “little lacy lovelies”.  Yet here they were coming back strongly year after year in my mom’s overgrown garden.  The main trick was keeping the slugs off.

lilies

lilies among apple tree branches

It looks like the lily book from the North American Lily Society has changed its look!

Let’s Grow Lilies then and now

But I digress.  Here we looked back from the south border toward the house, and we walked from the patch of open lawn that divided the geometric beds from the big swooping border and reentered the grid of grass paths.

looking north

back into the grid

An old photo, below, shows the same side of mom’s house in 1999;  it is a good thing she bought the second lot to the south or she would never have had enough room for her garden.  (You can just see the edge of the concrete parking strips that inspired the geometry of the nine garden beds.)

1999, south side of house

2009

Above, in 2009, the birdbath sits just inside of the edge of those concrete strips.

The garden is finessed and again weed and dead-head free and ready for the Vancouver garden club and a few friends to arrive in two days.