a day “overseas” and a new nursery

We have been in the midst of annuals planting hell.  Planting is my least favourite gardening task; I like setting the plants out but not so much putting them in the soil.  Perhaps this is because we plant with obsessive attention to detail, putting water and a mix of Zeba Quench and Dr Earth fertilizer in each hole so it’s time consuming and very detailed and I never feel we have enough time.  Today we were going up to the Wiegardt Gallery to plant cosmos but considerable rain decided us to go Warrenton and Seaside plant shopping instead. On the Long Beach Peninsula, oldtimers call going to Astoria and the north Oregon coast going “overseas”, from days when there was a ferry instead of the (long, scary) bridge.  I’d been planning to go on Thursday because I could not stop wondering what other nurseries had to offer that I did not already have…. Today was better because Thursday will be a big push to get all our public gardens perfect for memorial day weekend.

First we went to Seven Dees in Seaside.  Only when we went into a back greenhouse did I find a few things that thrilled me; I knew it would be fairly picked over on a Sunday.  I did find the wonderful pink and green leaf variegated Eryngium and another Eryngium called something like “Big Blue”…snagged them of course.  (I let my pink and green Eryngium halfway revert to green….)   And saw this water feature which spoke to me….Oh, it would look so wonderful next to our bogsy woods.  It was marked sold and I did not even ask the price.  Right now an old bathtub is pretty much the limit of my water feature budget.

stunning, peaceful water feature

The fairy garden container also pleased me even though I spend my budget on plants rather than little things….

tiny details in fairy garden

We only filled our small car up maybe halfway with plants.  Occasionally I do find something cool at Fred Meyer:  last year, some good inexpensive ferns and a whole flat of small Salvia patens.  I wondered if perhaps this time we would have room for groceries without juggling plants.  I used to often travel home with a flat of plants on my lap till I realized that the air back going off would kill me with the hard plastic flat.  How ironic that would be.

On a whim, we went west into Gearhart to check out the former Fitzgeralds, once a good nursery, last year just an outpost of Seven Dees with nothing much exicting.  How thrilled I was to find new owners and wonderful new plants, well priced, a lot of them from Xera.  I learned that last year “Back Alley Gardens” was a hidden treasure of a shop in Seaside, and now it’s in the old Fitzgeralds building.  The Fitzgeralds sign is still there with “Natural Nook” and “Back Alley” gardens signage underneath (washed out in this photo).

Back Alley Gardens

I got a few lavenders that were new to me, one irresistibly named ‘Dilly Dilly’.  The lovely ‘Raspberry Ruffles’ lavender in the front of the photograph, below, I already have from one of our good Peninsula nurseries, The Basket Case Greenhouse.  The best thing at Back Alley for me was a whole selection of new plants that did not duplicate anything I already have…some cool salvias, a couple of gorgeous cold-hardy Jasmines, a pewter-hued small grass, a couple of plants from Xera that were new to me.  I didn’t take pictures till I had half cleaned out one table, and bought so much we ended up having to layer plants on top of each other in the car.

plant tables at Back Alley

It’s great to know there’s a place closer than Cistus and Joy Creek that can fill my lust for the unusual.  Our local nurseries are so good to us and will order pretty much anything we want, but I crave the excitement of finding trays of plants that I did not even know existed.  And because we are going to be on the garden tour this year, I’ve given myself license to buy, buy, buy.

Two of the three owners our purchases….

Inside, the shop had, as Fitzgeralds used to, lots of appealing home and garden decor.

inside the shop

I’m still trying to get back to posting about garden touring 2011….(which by manipulating the publishing date I am putting where it belongs in the timeline)  When the annuals are planted and we settle into my favourite activity, garden care, I should have some writing time.  Or maybe tomorrow, whose weather promises rain and wind…

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Tulips 2012

in gallery form, a tulip (and occasionally narcissi) tour of all “our” gardens….  It’s not intuitive that if you click on the first photo, the gallery appears in a larger format that you can click through.

Tulips are  favourite of deer so in many of the gardens we care for, they cannot be grown.

Spring 2012 was a tough time for tulips. The deer grazed on some of the tulips right on the main street in the Long Beach planters, and the foliage got beaten up with water spots and looked, to me anyway, diseased and uninviting.  But once the flowers came out, the foliage no longer mattered.  I use a lot of single late tulips so that they will still be in bloom by the parades that take place in Long Beach and Ilwaco around the first of May each year.  And all my displays are heavy on viridiflora (green) tulips because they are my favourites of all.

3-8, Marilyn’s

3-15, Ilwaco

3-17, Ilwaco Post Office

4-1, Long Beach

4-14, our garden

4-10 Ilwaco Boat Yard

4-14, our garden

4-14, our garden

4-15, our garden

4-16, Anchorage Cottages

4-17, our garden

4-17, Long Beach

4-18, our garden

4-18, our garden

April, Discovery Heights

4-21, Klipsan Beach Cottages

4-21, Klipsan Beach Cottages

4-21, Klipsan Beach Cottages

4-21, Klipsan Beach Cottages

4-28 in our garden

4-28 in our garden

4-28, our garden

4-28, Klipsan Beach Cottages

4-28, Klipsan Beach Cottages

4-28, Klipsan Beach Cottages

4-28, Klipsan Beach Cottages, broken by rain

4-29, Long Beach

4-29, Long Beach

4-29, Long Beach, ‘Spring Green’

4-29, Long Beach, ‘Gavota’

4-29, Long Beach

4-29, Long Beach

5-7, Klipsan Beach Cottages

5-1, Time Enough Books

5-7, Klipsan Beach Cottages

5-9, kitchen window

5-18, Klipsan Beach Cottages

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Sylvia Beach Hotel: room journals

Mark Twain room deck…perfect journal reading weather

During our late April visit in 2012, Carol read a few of the room journals and then went out for walks, even in stormy weather.  But I immersed myself in the journals, first in the comfy chair way up in the library attic, then in the trundle bed of the Oscar Wilde room, where I caught up with old entries by Patricia Lent with whom (having discovered she and her teddy bear were frequent returnees and having left my address for her in a Wilde room journal) I had corresponded for a couple of years (pre- email).  I was sad to find an entry

Emily Dickinson room journal

that revealed that her financial circumstances or health had changed and she would no longer return as often.  Through the course of the two days I also found many entries by her and a very prolific regular guest named Pat Henderson in the journals of the “single” rooms and also the common library journals.

I got the bright idea to photograph my favourite entries so that I could reread them later.

Because we were there on two weekdays, many of the rooms turned over and I was able to snag journals from several.  This is always an occasion for anxiety…Will i get the journals read and returned before the next guest checks in?  I always have the back up plan of hanging them in a bag on the doorknob to the room, but so far I have never been caught short.  I sat for awhile in the Jane Austen room and read the journals there.  The smaller rooms, with smaller or single beds, lead to more introspective entries.  (I found a treasure trove of thoughtful posts in the Emily Dickinson room journals.)  Larger rooms have more honeymoon and anniversary entries of love and lust.

pile of journals from library attic

It worries me (as I mentioned in the entry just prior to this one) that as the rooms change, the wealth of years’ worth of journal entries are lost.  While I found a pile of journals from EB White and a few from Poe (which always inspired entries that attempted to mimic Poe, just as the Hemingway journal writes imitated his brusque style), I fear that many have been lost or taken away.  I scoured the shelves of the library attic looking for more, but these were all I could find.

I did the same amount of journal

Tennessee Williams room

reading during my visit in 2008 and as soon as I returned home, I posted in the Sylvia Beach Hotel Lovers group on Facebook:    My favourite thing to do at SBH is to read the room journals. On my latest trip, I read all ten of the Colette journals, caught up on E.B. White and the library journals since last year, and managed to get my hands on a few from Tennessee Williams, Melville, and Mark Twain. Must stay in the Mark Twain room as it has LOTS of journals. Had I known the guests for that room did not show up Sat night, I would have snuck in there and stayed up reading!

in the library

There is a theme through the Mark Twain journals that I want to follow: an articulate teenager named Megan W____ wrote every year as she was growing up, and the other guests followed her story. I Googled her and I found a Megan W_____ who is a successful chef. Does anyone here know her? Entries in the later journals were hoping that she had ended up with a good life…

I found out about Edna, an octagernarian who used to rent the RLS room for two months out of every summer from ’88 to perhaps the mid 90s or later.

Pat H___ is a name which recurs often in the library and dorm room diaries.  I have put together a few facts about him, including that he likes to greet the day “skyclad”.

In one of the journals this time, I found this moving entry:

“This is the first time since 1962 that I have been back. As a child we stayed next door at the Gilmore Apts–a shabby companion to the Gilmore Hotel (now the SBH) next door. The apartment house fell victim to the 1962 storms but the tips of the foundations are still visible from the beach. In those days only the little sea cottages were nearby and a skating rink (now a parking lot) and the tiny business block which used to include a saltwater taffy store, a cheap shell souvenir shop and a mom and pop grocery.

“How odd it is to hold the memory of what should be visible. I am the only one left of that little group who travelled to visit Mrs. Gilmore in the late 50s. Tonight I hung my cell phone out the window of the Herman Melville room so my mom in Idaho could hear the surf at her old Newport Beach. She cried and so did I, for times past, family gone, and some things eternal–like the ocean that buffets this dear old hotel still,”
Robyn 3-23-93 (Melville room)

Another entry in the Melville room:

“Herman Melville…the great novelist. I particularly fancied his masterpiece ‘One Fish, two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish’. Or was that Dr. Suess?

From the Colette room:

September 2005 “Alone now. Wife dead, son dead, this sweet place resonates with affirmations of love and reminds this old fellow of things eternal. Blessings to all who follow.”

And good advice from the Colette room journals:

“Never stay less than two nights, and never leave the premises during your stay unless you have to.”

After I posted this in the group, I got a wealth of responses, including one from someone who tracked down young Megan from the Mark Twain journals and found that she does want to get back to the hotel.  It kind of made me sad, when in 2012 I read the Twain journals, to see that she did not continue to visit and write as an adult.  Even better, someone in the group remember Edna and wrote:

“…your first entry on this thread mentions an octagernarian by the name of Edna. I have read many of the journals on my many stays but have not come across any with Edna’s entries. 

I was very fortunate to have met Edna on her very first (of many) visits to the hotel. She walked the beach daily in her “nice clothes”, didn’t seem to mind getting blown by the wind. She had stories to tell of her life (England, New York, etc.) and you could find her either at breakfast with the whole table listing to her or later in the day/night up in the living room with guests sitting around her on the floor like little children listing to her tales. 

On her second visit to the hotel, I happened to be there. She remembered me from the year before and asked about the “young man” that had been with me! Surprised me; she was a “sharp as a tack” as they say. 

At that time, she mentioned that she was going to move to Portland. Her kids didn’t like the idea but she had all the details worked out and was going to tell the kids AFTER she was settled in her new location.

Just a beautiful person; anyone who actually got to met her will never forget her.”

Now I will get back to letting the 2012 journals speak for themselves:

Tennessee Williams room

on dreams

Some entries are laid out beautifully.

Some are a challenge…or impossible.

It’s rare to find a crabby one.

SBH has no television, no wi fi, cell phones are discouraged in the common areas.

..and guests prefer it that way.

religion and philosophy

“I must go down to the sea again, to the land of sea and sky. I left my pants and socks there. I wonder if they’re dry.”

heartbreaking

how it feels to be here

from the Mark Twain room

‘Bachelor Brothers’ Bed and Breakfast’ is a wonderful book.

in the library

honeymoon

unrekindled flame

Dear Emily…

friends

cats

thoughts about the journals

On our last morning, the weather was beautiful…Not as beautiful to me as rainy journal reading days, but the kind of weather that made it easier to leave the hotel and return home.

view from the hotel

We admired the garden and a neighbourhood cat who visited the entryway.

window by front door

tulips

neighbour cat

Thinking about my own cats also made it easier to leave, but I departed with that feeling of loss for all the journals I did not get to read and all the ones who have gone who knows where, on a shelf in a private home perhaps, and lost to me forever.

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