Friday, 3 August 2018
During the week, I’d had a big idea. Being tired of the way the table of ladies in waiting blocked the view of Allan’s garden, I had come up with a new place for that table.
I got Allan’s help moving the pots off one of two long boards and then finding a new home for it back by the bogsy wood.
I have an even better idea now. How cool would this be mounted as a shelf on the fence in the shade somewhere!? I am sure Allan could do that. (Later, I realized there is no fence space not hidden by plants, so never mind.)
I dug out a wider edge on the lawn and reset the edging pavers.
While Allan edged and mowed the lawn, I dragged the table into place and rearranged the ladies in waiting.
Allan’s garden became visible again.
He can see it from his desk window, instead of a clutter of tables and potted plants.
I then had a sad event: I pulled the second to last sick agastache from the agastache catastrophe (and later in the week pulled one more from a job). This was from a batch of diseased agastaches that came from a nursery I will not name, that turned bad within a couple of days of my acquiring them. The worst thing was losing the plants. The next worst things, tied for second place, were losing the money and the fact that the plants were acquired second hand so I was unable to pursue a refund or credit. Today, the worst thing was putting the plant in the garbage can. For the next four days, I kept thinking of it in there, in the dark, plucked from its pot where it had been valiantly blooming despite its horrible leaves.
I anthropomorphized this plant (and the other plants in this ongoing fiasco) so much that it makes me feel all choked up as I write this 6 days later.
Saturday, 4 August 2018
Skooter in the morning:
Allan was off boating with J9, an excursion that you can read about here, on his blog. I had thought I might read and watch an episode of Gardeners’ World after an hour of gardening. And then I got stuck into a project.
The East Willows Loop path had disappeared as plants had grown in.
I am going to dig out a couple of daylilies and a big clump of Siberian iris later on. The daylilies will go to the Shelburne’s edible flower back garden, and the iris will go to friends.
I then realized how much the wild willow was shading the shrubs underneath it and preventing them from getting any rain water that might fall. I got Allan’s chainsaw and the hand pruning saw and much limbing up ensued. The day was too hot for me, around 70 F, so working in the shade was good.
I removed some but not quite all of the blackberry that was coming from behind the hydrangea (which is one of the very few shrubs that were here when we bought the place).
A clematis was twined through the blackberries. I got too punchy at the end to be careful untangling it so left the rest of the blackberry for next weekend.
At the south end of the east bed, I revealed a beloved cutleaf elderberry from Joy Creek that has been hidden by a Fuchsia magellanica that came up right by its trunk.
I should have removed the fuchsia when it was small. It is going to be a trick to dig it out now without damaging the little tree.
Other than some broken Joe Pye flowers, the only casualty of falling willow branches was the one pitiful sunflower that I had managed to grow from seed.
Quite exhausted by hauling willow branches to the debris pile outside the big arbor (to be made smaller and taken away later), I went inside shortly after Allan returned from boating. I heard voices as I sat at my desk and looked out to see that young Flynn from Salt Hotel was having a garden tour. I was too comfortable indoors by then to join in.
Allan’s photos:
Sunday, 5 August
We had another day almost off, with a “do” at the Bayside Garden (tomorrow’s post). On the way there, we stopped at the Shelburne Hotel with the idea of some quick deadheading and ended up doing a hurried watering (and some deadheading), enough to keep the garden happy till Monday.
On your home garden tour post about a week ago, you had a “problem area”. The pic had Scooter hanging out there. Would this work for fence shelving? Or was it too sunny? I do like your shelves on a fence idea.
The view of Alan’s garden looks much better now.
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It would work for now but I’m still trying to get something tall to grow there. I made the mistake of planting something deciduous when I should have gone evergreen. Now I have the Pittosporum ‘Tasman Ruffles’ there that I moved four times and thought I’d killed. It is two inches tall now but has new leaves!
I’m going to get a couple of blocks so I can at least raise that bench up.
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tee hee. Skooter . . . and Frosty.
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🙂
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