1 March: Howerton Avenue

Monday, 1 March 2021

Ilwaco Community Building

I wanted to just do one thing at the community building: cut back a medium sized ornamental grass that maybe we should just dig out. I have no idea why right on the corner is where I decided to plant it. Maybe I wanted to keep people from cutting across the corner of the garden? Maybe I thought it was a small grass? Anyway, it got trimmed because we had other priorities today. We also trimmed some salal (which I do not like in gardens) by the sidewalk.

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I checked out the rest of the garden to see how it is faring. My note to self is that we must return soon (on a closed library day) to trim ferns in the courtyard garden.

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The courtyard is behind the low wall, behind the heathers and witch hazel.

I seem to be backing up with the photos instead of moving in….

Another witch hazel (Hamamelis ‘Jelena’ perhaps?) grows in the tiered garden.

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I resisted any urge to do more. We moved on to our real goal of the day.

Howerton Avenue curbside gardens

Our mission was to get the ornamental grasses cut all along the street. We started at the David Jensen, architect, building. (His office; he didn’t design the building.)

I got the santolinas trimmed by the Ilwaco Bakery, too.

We went home to offload the debris into our compost bins and found Skooter lounging by the water boxes.

Back along Howerton, we trimmed grasses and santolinas in the curbside bed by the Marie Powell Gallery.

I was having an intensely uncomfortable day. Because of medication I’m taking for a week, I am supposed to avoid the sun. So even though this was the first warm sunny day, I had to look upon the weather with dread and wear layers of thick hot clothing and a hat and slathers of sunscreen. I was worried it would not be enough….but I think it was.

We moved on to the three westernmost beds by Salt Hotel, Skywater Gallery, and Freedom Market (cannabis shop). Allan trimmed grasses and we both trimmed santolinas.

By Skywater Gallery

Looking toward Salt

An early achillea

The Toy makes trimming the santolinas much faster than it used to be.

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Round about this time, the thought crossed my mind that since only my lower face was exposed, wouldn’t it be helpful to have something that covered it from the sun? I thought it was pretty funny when I remembered that, of course, we have masks! We can keep apart from people on this job so only keep one handy just in case. This great and so obvious idea just made the last hour at this job extra miserable. When I try to garden in a mask, I sniffle and gasp and am so uncomfortable. It’s from bending over to weed. I could wear a mask in an office setting for considerably longer without a problem. I decided I had better get out of the sun till it went behind some promising clouds.

While I took refuge at home, Allan mowed Alicia’s lawn.

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At 4:30, with the sun slightly obscured, we returned to the port. I’d been thinking only of finishing the Time Enough Books garden but as we drove along, I remembered that gardens by At the Helm Hotel and the Pavilion (restrooms) have many santolinas and some Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’ to trim.

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The untrimmed ball is Hebe ‘Boughton Dome’. While the santolinas don’t look beautiful when trimmed, it’s what keeps the structural ball shape going year after year.
My favorite bed, below, has more lavender than santolina.

I had despaired of getting the gardens by Time Enough and the Port office trimmed, but we did.

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As I left the port office garden, I encountered a kindly fellow whose boat is moored at the port. We’ve talked before and he is always complimentary about the gardens. He told me that at age 75, it was a bit much to lift the heavy beams or something that he’d been working on in the boatyard today. (My day suddenly seemed easy.) He told me again how much he loves the flowers and that he can even see some from his boat (the port office garden and wild asters on the grassy bank). Then he told me a story.

When he was 13, he and his dad were fishing in Alaska. They were “blown in” to port so stayed on land for a couple of days. He took a walk and passed a garden with roses by the sidewalk and stopped to smell them. The garden owner appeared and asked him if he would like a bouquet and he said yes, as these were the first roses he’d smelled all summer because he had been fishing. She picked him a beautiful bouquet which he took back to the boat and put in a jar with some water and a bit of sugar. His dad said, Where did you steal those? And he replied, I didn’t steal them, a nice lady gave them to me. So his dad made a gift of some canned fish and they walked back to the garden to give something back to the gardener. She invited them both inside and cooked them a magnificent dinner and told them to please come back any time because they were such interesting and wonderful company. That is the sort of thing my grandma used to do during WWII. The story made a wonderful end to a rather difficult day.

The work board tonight

Accidentally clipped and now on the kitchen windowsill