24 Feb: Boreas spring clean up

Wednesday, 24 February 2021

My day began with two more phone calls about my bureaucratic quagmire. I then said I have to go to work because it is a nice day and left it in the hands of the Powers that Be. I spent some time thinking what it would be like to just do comparatively little jobs with no more big showy public jobs. It wouldn’t be so bad. I’d lose my identity but have more time to read.

Skooter hanging out next door.

Boreas Inn

Now here’s a place that at least some members of the public see: guests of the inn. The main garden is in the back yard to the west of the inn and before the path to the ocean. It felt strange for the first big work day to not be doing Long Beach. For years now, my first work blog post of the year was called “And so it begins…” (a little shoutout to Babylon 5) and always took place in Fifth Street Park. We saw the new city gardener doing Fifth Street Park when we drove home today! I was glad to see that and hope she gets as much joy and satisfaction out of that job as we did.

I had warned our Boreas friend and client, innkeeper Susie, that this year I was determined to remove the huge lupines, a semi wild and rangy blue one, from the front and center of two of the garden beds where they stopped flowering in early summer and then had horridly tatty foliage that had to be cut back, leaving a visual hole from July through autumn. We moved two big clumps to a funny little square bed beside the lawn island beds. The bed with the most lupines had an ugly little conifer that I had always despised for being unbalanced with the other beds. I was overjoyed to see that it was dying so I could finally get rid of it.

I would like to make that funny little square bed a little curvier on the ends so it fits in with the other beds better.

The funny little square bed has never done well. When Allan dug down deep to plant the lupines, he found plastic underneath, which might explain the poor performance of the plants there.

He also dug out clumps of lady’s mantle that had spread into the center of one of the lawn beds and then planted them along the outer edge of the funny little square bed. They are ridiculous as a center plant. I don’t much like them at all because their bloom time is so short. Susie loves them for bouquets, and they are very good at bouquet filler, I must admit, which is why I just might let one or two grow in my garden.

The bed formerly heavy with lady’s mantle will look much better with the tall phlomis, Solidago ‘Fireworks’, and cosmos in the middle, unencroached.

During a couple of years when I didn’t work at the Boreas (I let it go to focus on public gardens), one of the Artemesia ‘Powis Castle’ had gotten way too woody. I gave up on it today and Allan dug it out.

It needs to be trimmed back every year to stay lush and silvery grey.

I moved a few lupines myself. There were a lot of them dominating the garden. Some might grow over in the wild dune grasses, if they are feeling cooperative.

It might seem all I wanted to do today was take plants out. But soon I’ll be bringing some good deer-resistant plants that I have propagated with this garden in mind.

While Allan moved the rest of the targeted lady’s mantle, I trimmed back ornamental grasses in the property line bed…

…and then trimmed the Garden Suite bed and cut back the sword ferns. They look sad when trimmed, but it’s a lot quicker than waiting till the croziers unfurl.

View from Garden Suite deck

The lawn beds, shown after, below, also lost their orange day lilies whose foliage the deer chomped even before they could put out a flower. I think the garden will be much better now.

Full of possibilities…

We both moved to the entry garden in the east side of the house. Allan raked leaves while I cut back the sword ferns. He tidied some montbretia by the work shed…

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….but unfortunately, neither of us took photos of the quite charming entry garden either before or after except for these:

We are out of practice on work blogging.

We took home the trimmed grasses and perennials and ferns to add to my compost bins.

The work board tonight:

I did not accomplish one thing on my indoor at home tasks this last winter. My home garden list, now upper right, is just about as long as it was in January because I worked on the willow grove and new Bogsy path instead of completely finishing the weeding.