24 June: flowers in our garden

Saturday, 24 June 2022

Allan’s neighborhood work

Allan mowed Alicia’s and Norwood lawn, next door to each other and next door to us, and got the timed sprinklers running at the J Crew Cottage across the street. He still has Alicia’s enormous back lawn to do. The others will dry and not need mowing in summer, but like our back lawn, Alicia’s will grow all year because of the high water table.

Alicia and Norwood front lawn

J’s

At home

I was pleased to find a small basket upside down under the dining table (cats!), which is never used for dining. Under the basket were some seed packets including some Cortland onions (too late!) and some cucumbers, Marketmore and Spacemaster, just in time. I knew I had some! So most of the afternoon was spent planting seeds, up-potting some plants and tidying the greenhouse patio. It was far too windy to do what I’d planned, landscaping the bridged swale back in the Bogsy Wood.

In the early evening, I took a tour of the garden.

In front, I have sweet peas.

And Rosa banksia lutea which I hope will bloom next year.

Clematis ‘Taiga’ is so far not as showy as the catalogs promised.

Mine Vs. Theirs so far!

Tetrapanax papyrifer ‘Steroidal Giant’

Stipa barbata is blooming in the driveway garden. I love it so. I have read that it doesn’t propagate from division. It’s hard to find; I got it from Annie’s Annuals which no longer has it.

A first but not very giant Eryngium giganteum in a trough:

Halmiocistus wintonensis ‘Merristwood Cream’

I has the usual thoughts about the driveway garden. I have a small river of Geranium ‘Rozanne’ which I sometimes think of digging up to make it all more xeric (except that the Davidia is not xeric!)

Just starting its blue flowers

But I have a design theory that people see the blue river in the front, and then when they walk into the back garden, they feel a sense of familiarity and completion with the long blue Rozanne river in the center bed. I picture it like a stream flowing from back to front that goes underground and then resurfaces again. (I just realized that it should go the other way, toward the bay!)

Back garden river in 2011…

…and in 2020.

Does anyone even hold that thought and image from front to back? I wonder.

In the back garden, the first lily (I don’t like the shorter asiatic lilies much so don’t grow them at home):

The big pink peony is in several stages of bloom.

A rose nearby:

My mother’s “copper rose” always looks weak and unhappy but still has gorgeous blooms.

A martagon lily:

Behind it, I was infuriated to see bindweed….

….that comes from behind this fence from a bindweed-infested compost pile. It is wrecking my garden. My thoughts turn to a spritz of the leaves along the fence with the weedkiller I inherited from my mother. The previous neighbor mowed and string trimmed along the fence…That’s all it would take to get it under control. Now it’s bindweed and Himalayan blackberries on both sides. I was too tired to get in to the bed behind the rose and start pulling it. Again. Tomorrow!

The plywood keeps some of the bindweed out of sight but it comes through underground.

Rosa pteracantha:

And Rosa moyesii ‘Geranium’ with contorted filbert:

We had our first lettuce salad of the season with dinner. I’ve been too busy to pick leaves till now.

---

---

Since this will publish July 4, I’ve remembered to tell you that I zoomed a Long Beach city council meeting a couple of weeks ago during which the council voted for a ban on consumer fireworks in the Long Beach city limits! I was thrilled. Due to a stupid state law, this won’t take effect till 2023, and it does not cover the beach, which is state parks property. Still, very good news.

As of June 27, I have to amend this while feeling hopping mad: At a city council special meeting where attendees believed the ban would be written into city law, the council revoked and revoked the ban. Council members Murry and Reddy stayed strong. This has pushed our retirement plan forward by a year or two.

---

In bad news, I am appalled this week by the Supreme Court decisions promoting more gun use and abolishing reproductive choice for women. It cast a pall of gloom over my gardening at home today. One of my favorite authors, Susan Wittig Albert, who writes the China Bayles herbal shop mystery series, shared this article about the fascinating herbal history of of how in this country in times past, there was no stigma for remedies to “restore a woman’s menses” up until at least the fourth month of pregnancy, which was known as “quickening”.

“In his draft opinion, Alito chooses to ignore these early statutes, which preserved the quickening distinction and the many judicial opinions stating that cases could not be brought for abortion when the woman wasn’t “quick with child.” He had this information at his disposal; those cases are easily found in the amicus brief submitted to the Supreme Court by two major professional associations of historians in the United States, representing the views of more than 10,000 scholars and teachers. Yet in his draft opinion, Alito relies instead upon just one legal writer, whose work most scholars reject because it “distorts the evidence,” and he conveniently dismisses the significance of quickening in a footnote.”