5-18 & 19: garden drama

Annuals hell is now getting to the point of disarray and arguments.  It is like when a person is moving, and plans that the move will be completely organized with everything going into labelled boxes, and then at the end the possessions are thrown into any old container willy nilly, and maybe one even moves a box of dirty dishes.  Not that I have ever done that.

Yesterday (Saturday) after the fascinating Coast Guard open house, we went at 2:30 P.M. to the Basket Case to check out the new shipment of perennials and to pick up the annuals for the Red Barn planters.

stunning variegated Diascia ‘Katherine’. I wanted them all but was kind enough to leave a few for other customers.

At the Red Barn, it was distressing to see how bad the four whiskey barrels looked with dead bulb foliage.  We had left it too long.  My friend Misty came over to say hello.  That was cheering.

Misty did not mind about the old bulb foliage.

By the time we left, the barrels were all  planted with red Calibrachroa, yellow Sanvitalia, and a centerpiece of Agyranthemum ‘Butterfly’, and in some, Diascia ‘Denim Blue’ that had come through from last year.

Allan planting

I love sanvitalia’s tiny bright yellow green centered flowers.

It is also cheering to say hi to the horses.

Next year I will not take a trip in April so that I have just three more days to keep on top of work and, one hopes, not have any jobs where dead bulb foliage is allowed to droop and offend the eye.

We then re did all 20? of the Ilwaco street planters (and the two at the library and one at Peninsula Sanitation office).   And planted a few things at the Ilwaco boatyard, where the Allium albopilosum is opening with its usual fabulosity and which I pray will not fall victim to finger blight.

boatyard garden

please no finger blight here

The horsetail is coming back, but we just do not have time to deal with it right now.

on the sidewalk’s edge: horsetail, bindweed, dock

boatyard garden

Across the street from the boatyard a porch is draped in wisteria.

Wisteria at First and Eagle

At the same house, I long to see the holly hedge brought down to the lower level, and then let grow, which would give so much privacy to the garden and be low enough to let in sunlight.

Don’t you agree?

Most of the planters were a straightforward bulb cleanup and planting task.

one of the tidied and planted planters

In the planters:  Sanvitalia, Diascias of assorted colours, an Erysimum ‘Bowles Mauve’ in the center, maybe a painted sage.  A few have golden marjoram and Nepeta (catmint) and one or two have a trailing rosemary that survived; I tried it in all of them but it only hung on in a couple.

At First and Main, the Col Pacific Motel has a good display of bearded iris.  The owners have been working to make their strip of garden look good.

iris

At the corner of First and Lake, one of the planters has become stagnant and goopy and had to be totally dug out.

It was stinky!

We found the bottom had no hole, and have emailed city hall to get the crew to punch one through.  It is a mystery to me how some that have no hole have not filled up with mucky water before.

not right!

So I don’t have the satisfaction of checking Ilwaco planters off my list yet…

Back in 2008, the empty lot where Red’s Restaurant used to be was allowed to flower with wild beach pea.

2008 by Ilwaco Pharmacy

Does it really look better sprayed with Round Up (not by the city, by the owner of the lot).  I THINK NOT!

not an improvement

By the end of the day we were working in a drenching rain.  It was surprising, when we got home at 8:30 PM, to see a pink sky in the west.

sunset over Lake Street

Today (Sunday), I began by taking a bouquet to my neighbour, Nora.   She is now in a hospital bed, and can barely speak,  with family in attendance, and I wept (but not so she could see).

a bouquet for Nora

I said to her grand daughter how terrible I feel that this is the time of year when we work so much, but Elisha understood.  Nora has been the ideal neighbour; the only thing better would have been to have known her in younger days when she could still tend her pretty garden.

All this should put life into perspective, but…the day managed to be annoying despite better intentions.

We went to the Boreas Inn to plant a few perennials, only to find that one flat with santolinas and a wonderful Russian Sage called Lacy Blue had been left at home.  “Take the flat out behind your seat” (in the car), I had said.  Allan took out two flats.  One needed to be put back in.  “Bring the one with the Knautia ‘Thunder and Lightning’ in it,” I said.   But two flats had that Knautia, so the wrong one rode with us all day, filled with that pretty variegated Diascia that we did not need at any of today’s jobs.

missing plants at the Boreas

Then to the Anchorage to plant some more windowbox plants, and they did get one of those variegated Diascias that were not supposed to be with us today.  And then The Planter Box to pick up Cosmos and painted sage for Marilyn’s garden.

Planter Box has Eryngium ‘Jade Frost’, one of my favourites!

and herbs

We picked up some lovely purple violas for Monday’s job.

pansies or violas? Monday’s client likes both.

We scooted over to The Basket Case to pick up a couple more perennials for Marilyn’s garden and two annuals that we needed for the two Ilwaco library planters (for symmetry:  a pink scabiosa had died, and we needed to balance it with another, and oddly an Agyranthemum had lived and also needed to be balanced!)

Then way up north to Marilyn’s garden.  I walked the path first to check on things and something was not right.  Not right at all.  It took me a little while to figure out the garden catastrophe:  Someone had round up-ed the path and had seriously oversprayed into the garden.  The results were dire.  Marilyn’s daughter Nancy was there and kindly listened to my cries of woe and walked the path with me to share my sorrow over the plants.  We could only figure that the person who does some maintenance of the lot must have taken it upon himself to round up the path with a lavish back and forth spraying motion.  It will not happen again, but that was little comfort for the dying plants.  Now, they might have revived and grown out of it if cut way back….but this garden is going to be on the garden tour just two months from tomorrow so it cannot have wrecked plants.  Once this happened at The Anchorage and it took the edge of the garden two years to look right again.

my favourite Eryngium, blighted on the edges.

Round up on Oregano.

round up on catmint; the front is yellowed and twisty

a sprayed artemisia

another sprayed catmint (front half is yellow)

damaged scabiosa

round up and Rosemary

damaged rosemary

So what was this diligent sprayer after?  In the path, scabiosas and linaria that had reseeded and would actually have been transplantable to Golden Sands or the Boatyard or in some places would have looked cute and pretty where they were.

Do reseeded flowers really look better sprayed and dead than alive and green? I ASK YOU!

I’ve noticed that people who apply round up seem to have no problem with the fact that the sprayed plants are the same size but dead and brown and still need to be removed.  This is so strange to both me and Allan.  How is this an improvement?

As if we needed all the extra work during annuals hell…. Our plan had been to weed enough to plant some six packs of sage and cosmos and a few perennials to get them established and well grown for the tour,  go back to the Anchorage and finish planting the windowboxes, and get home in time to do some needed spreadsheet work tonight.  As soon as annuals hell ended, we would have come back to Marilyn’s to do a full day of weeding.  Instead, we ended up having to remove with the heavy pick maybe twenty damaged edge plants, big ones (catmint, lavender, oregano, scabiosa, and more), smooth out the soil, and now we have a huge load of debris to dispose of tomorrow along with everything else we had in mind for that day.

However, all the kvetching aside, we did have lots of painted sage with us so we used it to fill in the edges and will get some Dianthus later.  (I think the person who sprayed should pay for some new lavenders, but…)   It looked rather nice when we were done.  I just pray that there is no residue in the soil that will mess up the new plants.   If there is, this garden will have to be pulled off the garden tour and I will be annoyed beyond, well, beyond anything annoying that has happened in any garden of “ours” in the last twenty years, including when the truck went into the Shelburne garden (because that was an accident!)

This is the only area NOT cleared because of round up. It had too big a grass at the edge.

the path

The big Phygelius (right) also showed signs of spray damage.

Re-planted all along the edge

Some Allium albopilosum near the edge are also twisty and messed up by the overspray.  I am so sad because I wanted LOTS of them for the tour day.

Before, the plants, especially catmint, were billowing and spilling over the edge.  Will this possibly look filled in and melded with the back of the garden in two months?  I am anxious.

from back deck; neighbour’s garage will soon almost disappear.

looking north-ish.

The one advantage:   The round rock edge shows again.  My mind still boggles that someone had the chutzpah to walk that path with a round up sprayer and cause so much damage to the garden.  I am so glad we have the support of the owners to fix it, and hope that it looks healed by tour day.

We were well out of time by the end of all this and did not get the rest of the windowbox plants to the Anchorage so that job has now spilled over onto tomorrow….  We were sorting plants from the car and dealing with trying to get some of the round up plant debris into our garbage can (to make the trailer lighter weight) until dark and we are both just a little bit crabby.

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P.S.  Tomorrow:  Cash mob at The Basket Case.