Saturday, I had a glorious reading day, finishing the excellent memoir and science study Heartbreak by Florence Williams and then reading a novel by Joan Aiken, Blackground. How glorious to find an adult book by her that I hadn’t read. It was perfection. She also wrote many great books for children, including The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. The only outdoor thing I did (between books) was to plant my sweet peas.
Sunday, 27 March 2022
Ilwaco
Oh, what a delightfully short day I thought we’d have. A bit of weeding and poppy seed planting at the port, some weeding of our two volunteer gardens, a tidy up at the Ilwaco Community Building garden and a couple of branches cut by Azure Salon. Surely we’d be home by three. I pictured myself then sitting next to a wheelbarrow of potting soil, up-potting some rooted cuttings.
Of course, everything took longer than estimated. I still have not learned that this almost always happens.
Time Enough Books
So many little bitty weeds in the curbside garden. We got it well weeded and I planted five different colors of California poppy seeds. I had forgotten to bring a few poppy plants that had grown in my fish tote veg garden, so we went home to get them. Their tap roots were so long they might not take. It’s worth a try. We also got two divisions off of the orange red watsonia from that garden, which was originally given to me by Prissy, expert gardener from Cannon Beach and Seaside.
We tried then to go to the post office garden. I had forgotten (well, never knew) that the local theatre group, Peninsula Players, across the street, was having a matinee of their long-delayed production that was supposed to have happened in 2020. There was nowhere at all to park.
Ilwaco Fire Department garden
So we went to the fire station instead. I found that Solidago ‘Fireworks’, the formerly polite clumping goldenrod, had gone on the run like it did in my own garden, and it took awhile to get under control. The garden got a division of the almost fire engine red watsonia. We noticed someone had been using weed killer along the sidewalk edge of the west garden. This made us nervous, although it did seem whoever did it had aimed the nozzle so it did not hit the garden plants. Allan ran the string trimmer to get rid of the dead plants. Why do people think dead brown plants hit with weed killer look better than even the greenest of weeds?
Azure Salon
There was still no parking at the post office, but we found a spot by the street tree around the corner and trimmed it to reveal the Azure Salon sign.
Ilwaco Community Building
We weeded all around the various garden beds and did some trimming of the maple trees that were poking branches into the parking lot.
My favorite area is behind the wall at the entrance to the library.
Allan dug out some Sanguisorba ‘Pink Elephant’ that had seeded too close to the edge of the tiered garden.
Along the sidewalk, I loathe the salal that runs into the rhododendrons. At the north end, at least the salal is contained in its own area.
I love the white anemone in a tiny bed by the entrance ramp, and the Muscari ‘Golden Fragrance’ which is easy to lean over and smell in this raised area. Give it a sniff!
Next door to the library is the hospital and its garden maintained by a landscaping service which severely prunes flowering shrubs…in a way that pains me.
(Two days later, a Facebook memories post popped up in which I fretted about the same pruning job and posted photos that I’d taken of these osmanthus in spring of 2017, when they had briefly escaped pruning but were sheared back into tight balls a week later.)
Ilwaco Post Office
By then, it was 5 PM and the matinee was over. We spent time weeding and pulling the annoying wild onion.
The problem with using a lot of bulbs is that there is too much bulb foliage!
I broke my heart by breaking off a nice lily shoot while trying to control more suddenly belligerent Fireworks goldenrod.
Our friends the J Crew (Jodie and Jay and dogs) walked by.
At 6, I had an important phone call to make about local events, but even without that I would have been all out of energy do any garden tasks at home. I think we will have to take a weekday off to make up for today.
Tangly Cottage Gardening 