Sunday, 7 March 2021
At home
Day five after second Pfizer jab. 😬
I folded some laundry and planted three new Canna ‘Stuttgart’ tubers in pots and watered the greenhouse and suddenly was so exhausted I had to sit down.
I don’t like being so TIRED. I have THINGS TO DO. I guess I’ll watch more eps of The Beechgrove Garden on HDClump.
I have been trying to grow that Canna for three years. Got teeny tiny soft tubers from Brent and Becky’s, tubers with no buds from Home Depot**, and finally this year got three nice sprouted tubers from Dutch Gardens*** which I hope will finally give me the plant I want. Even just one would make me so happy.
*They would likely have made it right if I had complained.
**I usually don’t buy from them but was looking for any source.
***Allan told me I had got some seeds so I didn’t look in the mail stash for three days and two of the tubers were going soft at the end. I trimmed off the soft bit and pray to the cosmos they will be ok. The sprouted bit was good.
I think I overwatered them when first planting them before because I thought they liked saturation. This time I went online and read some instructions. 🙄. They don’t need a whole lot of water while sprouting.
I had seen it in a garden in Manzanita, Oregon, whose kind owners, when I blogged about it, commented that I could come back for a piece of it, but then the pandemic happened. Canna ‘Stuttgart’ in Manzanita:
I regret that I only took my old iPhone out when planting the tubers instead of at least a halfway decent camera. But that’s the way it was.
The canna tubers look promising. The most promising I’ve managed to acquire.
I had read that it helps to not use cold potting soil. Fortunately, I had some warmed up soil in the greenhouse in the window box liners in which very old salad green seeds had (not surprisingly) not germinated.
So I used that soil to make three pots of cannas.
I’m well chuffed with the scented geraniums I grew from cuttings for my hobby plant sale…
…and with the Melianthus major I grew from layered stems and, below the shelf, with the water collection bin that Allan set up for me inside the greenhouse.
My hope for a few good photos of spring bulbs in the garden were dashed by my phone camera being rather lousy. I was going to upgrade last year but am being frugal. About some things.
That was it for today’s accomplishments. I turned to the book I’m reading (The Dark Net by Jamie Bartlett) but mostly to episodes of The Beechgrove Garden. I have finished all of the available online episodes of Recreating Eden and found a place from Canada to order the rest (at a rather high price, thus frugal in only some things).
Some of the best shows I have seen lately (I may be repeating myself on some of these).
Recreating Eden on community gardening in Toronto
Recreating Eden: Alexander Sefert’s garden creation
Recreating Eden: Douglas Chambers’ literary garden, Stonybrook. He died of Covid 19 in May. I weep. I must read his book. Here is in article about him and some gay Canadian history and his obituary and a review of his book about his garden.
And the last Recreating Eden that I was able to find online, about Thomas Hobbs, who wrote one of my most favourite gardening books, Shocking Beauty. I was utterly thrilled.
The Beechgrove Garden, an episode including a tour of the Edinburgh Botanic Garden during spring 2020 when it was closed to the public, followed by a garden with an astonishing display of erythroniums.
The Beechgrove Garden, an episode with an exquisite tiny garden created by an alpine enthusiast, at about the five minute mark.
The Beechgrove Garden with a garden toward the end of the episode with a stream and hillside bog and a terraced garden.
Last night, I watched an excellent lecture with great slides by Steve and John of The Bayside Garden, in which they share their tour of Rhododendrons in Finland. The Finnish tour organizer and rhododendron expert Kristian Theqvst, had opened his extraordinary garden (which is never open for touring) to the tour group. The lecture had been shared in a zoom meeting of the American Rhodendron Society, and I got teary-eyed when a member, who was clearly an especially nice man, said to Mr. Theqvst, “I want to thank you for everything you did. This was the first time you had ever opened your garden. It was a once in a lifetime experience, and for us personally it was our fiftieth anniversary, and we got to celebrate it with you. You are an amazing person, your garden is world class, and the gift you gave us is beyond belief.”
Be still, my heart.
Those ending words are so lovely and heartfelt. Why don’t we say such things more often? On that note…oh, your Bogsy Wood edge! Enchanting. Hope your fatigue soon goes away.
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Thanks, feeling better today.
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Love your crocuses! Hope you have your energy back soon, Skyler.
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I might have replied to this already. Today was a little better.
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You seemed to have managed to get enough work done to be going on with. A bit of rest might be a good thing after a trying year.
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Canna was one of the very few items that I actually purchased. (I typically grow whatever I want from pieces of plants that I encounter.) I really wanted ‘Australia’ canna for my planter box downtown, so payed only a few dollars for a few rhizomes by mail order. (A neighboring merchant really likes bronze foliage.) The rhizomes were planted in two small colonies of only two or three rhizomes each. They were slow to get started. When they finally grew, one colony was stolen. Then, a contractor who did some tile work in the men’s room at the neighboring business dumped the slurry from his tile grout into my planter box, on top of the other surviving colony! It was like something Wiley E. Coyote would have done while trying to catch the Roadrunner. There was a solid pancake of cemented slurry with the now gray foliage of the cannas protruding through. That was likely the most inane thing that ever happened to my planter box. The good news is that cannas are growing there now, although not as happily as yours
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That is just such a typical tale of the maddening side of public gardening, I can so relate!!!
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