As happens most days that we are home, we heard pitiful cries from Zinc and found her pinned down and bullied by Faerie. Half an hour after the rescue, we found them both in a Chewy box.
I hope that look is not a plea for rescue.
Skooter had gone out at 9 AM and did not come back which led to much worrying, because the day brought lots of rain and wind and usually he doesn’t stay out long in the rain. I took a walk in the drenching rain all the way to the willow grove looking for him. Never have I seen the water so deep in the garden in the month of May.
from Willows Loop Junction to the fire circlenorth edge of the Bogsy Woodwest end of the Deep Pathlooking north from the Bogsy Woodthe bridged swalethe deep swalethe bridge to the willow grovethe stepping stones from the willow grove, mostlyunderwater the deep swale from the willow grove
the frog bog outside out south fence:
north into the garden again:
the vee of the metal paththe metal paththe Deep Path bridge Deep Path east endfire circle south side
Interesting watery garden views but no Skooter even though I called his name all the way. We even drove around town looking for him. Finally, at five, he returned, meowing, from the rental cabin next door, and we wondered if he had been sleeping on their couch or eating tuna fish! What a relief, because during the time we weren’t searching, I was reading The Garden Awakening by Mary Reynolds, as recommended by Sharon Blackie, and couldn’t relax into it as much as I’d like because of worry over Skooter. Despite perfect reading weather, I didn’t get quite a fourth of the way done. I will have much to say about it when I do finish it.
I knew rain was due by noon but thought I might have time, when I went outdoors at about 11 AM, to sift a load of compost. Planting a few plants before the rain drew me into the garden. My coyote willow had finally leafed out so I planted it and a couple of other willow starts by the deep swale.
Skooter followed me while I looked for places to put the other two willow starts, unnamed cuttings from willows I have encountered here and there.
Camassia ‘Pink Stars’
Skooter followed me while I looked for somewhere to plant the cuttings.
I want to weed the bridged swale which will look much better with just the golden grass.
I made my weeding life difficult by digging the deep swale and the deep path, creating areas where I can’t weed till the water dries up.
That dark red quince is still flowering, has been flowering since late winter.
At the fire circle, I decided to pull just some of the maianthemum, a pesky native plant that is swamping my choice plants. I had been meaning to do this for quite awhile.
the always annoying maianthemum
And what were the bumblebees feeding on? Not the native maianthemum; they were favoring the invasive Spanish bluebell.
As I walked back to get the grey wheelbarrow, the rain began.
I noticed that all my cannas survived the icy late winter freeze!
Back at the fire circle, I weeded two garden areas like fury! Even though I can’t get all the roots of the maianthemum out, pulling it is good, before it goes to seed and then goes dormant and yellowy-brown and has to be pulled anyway. The windless not too cold rain was not bad to work in for awhile.
Maianthemum had done its best to take over this bed in just one year.
This bed needs and will get some sort of centrepiece where I used to have my precious bladdernut tree start from Markham Farm. I moved it to a slightly damper area where it’s doing better.
The happier bladdernut is in the middle of the other bed I was weeding today.
I managed to reveal plants at the front, and limbed up my favourite fuchsia, ‘Grayrigg’, to the right, for the sake of the plants underneath it. The back of the bed badly need weeding, too:
…But by then I was getting cold, wet, and slightly miserable. Allan came to see what had become of me and emptied the full wheelbarrow for me.
He even raked the debris off of the lawn after I had departed.
He noticed some flowers:
You might be able to see, on the path back to the house, that I cut the lower leaves from the Angelica that were starting to block the path (to the right):
I was stopped by the sight the large tatty sarracenia by the little pond (a very hardy plant that was outside all winter) so I did a bit of a tidy.
last weektoday
And I did have to water in the main greenhouse.
I was ever so glad to get indoors and get warmed up and churn out five blog posts.
Meanwhile, not having gotten as sodden yet, Allan did a bit of tidying in his fern garden and took some photos of the unfurling croziers.
Scott and Tony and their dog Rudy came over so that Tony could get his belated birthday present. Tony took himself on a garden tour, with many lovely photos, as follows. I appreciate his visits because he notices things and never fails to explore to the furthest corners. Allan had just mowed and edged our lawn.
Tony’s birthday gift was The Jewel Box Garden by Thomas Hobbs, one of my favourite garden writers.
Zincloves company.unweeded cat memorial garden and (weeded) garden boat
The garden looked sparkly and vibrant when I went outdoors.
Epimedium sulphureum growing through a chaise longue that I still intend to spray paint green. I think it was garden writer Thomas Hobbs who had some stern words about people who buy white garden furniture, a quote I will have to find if I ever get round to spray painting it. (Like almost all my garden furniture, it’s a passalong, quite comfy with the cushion on it.)
We did a couple of projects, the biggest one being to hang the great wall of china, which Allan has to do from a ladder or standing on a sturdy section of the plants tables, something I didn’t think about when I asked him to build the big tables there. It scares me to watch!
I’d like to figure out a new way to add tables on the west side of the house and turn the wall of china area into a nice sheltered sit spot, which would even have wifi from the house, with a partial wind shelter wall made from the glass bricks that I bought for an indoor project that isn’t going to happen.
Allan had recently snagged a cast off concrete vault, probably the last one we will acquire now that we no longer have access to the Long Beach works yard debris area. Because getting it was his idea, I didn’t feel guilty about him hoisting the heavy thing into place. I do regret missing the action photo of him, age 71, lifting it into place.
I filled it with a mixture of potting soil and cherry stone poultry grit…
…and planted new plants, and these tulips whose flowers I sadly broke while digging the bulbs (won’t be good for the bulbs but they may eventually flower again).
Allan raked up the flowers from his rhododendron.
I sifted some compost…
…and while I was sifting it, I looked to one side and noticed some very tall bamboo poles stores behind the garage. I had forgotten about them.
What a thrill! They made a perfect addition to my new discovery of putting poles into the broken corners of the kitchen garden fish totes.
Excellent!
Allan was mowing Alicia’s enormous back lawn, which I could see because of the cut back escallonia hedge.
Scott and Tony and Rudy came over, as invited …
….and I gave Tony his belated birthday present, a copy of one of my top favourite gardening books, The Jewel Box Garden by Thomas Hobbs.
Tony took photos of the garden, which will be tomorrow’s post.
In the early evening, I sifted another barrow of rough compost and applied it to an area where I had dug out a lot of elephant garlic.
I wanted to do a third load but for some reason I was too tired.
In the driveway garden in the evening, Davidia involucrata ‘Sonoma, which I hope passersby are noticing:
We went to buy mulch, and I found some irresistible plants. Allan took photos.
Teresa showed us a bird nest in a pot, protected by hydrangea stems and flowers from the plant being bought. The birds had already fledged.
Basket Case Greenhouse
I was scoping out what they had for future reference, but of course bought some plants. Allan again took some photos.
Diane’s garden
We weeded and added some mulch and a few plants to the septic vault garden.
I had a nice view through the next door trees of a horse.
I weeded and deadheaded the container area.
Last year, Van Engelen mistakenly sent unnamed tulips instead of white and blue hyacinths. They did not charge for them because of the error. They turned out to be parrot tulips that don’t stand up well here to rain.
At least they were free!
Allan weeded along the road and planted three more clumps of sweet peas that I had seeded in pots this spring. We will add some more plants this month. We want to make it extra good because this might be our last year at this job, as we will both be over 70 next year. But I don’t know if I can tear myself away from our animals friends on these jobs! White flowers are a spectacular Crambe maritima.
Although Diane and her dog Holly were not home, Bentley showed up from next door for his biscuit.
This time, I had a big biscuit for him instead of the new small ones that disappointed him last week. But right after this photo was taken, his young housemate Quinn stole the biscuit and ran off with it. Being old and slightly befuddled, Bentley turned down a replacement biscuit and sadly wandered off.
I tried to get him to take another biscuit but he would have none of it.
The Red Barn
Allan walked through the barn to put our bill in the drop box and said hello to a horse.
Bentley showed up again, and this time took a biscuit and wandered off to bury it. He always buries them. Later, after we had weeded the little garden (oops, all we photographed was animals!), one of Bentley’s human friends said to him, ‘You just buried something!” We wondered how she knew, and later realized it was because his snout was dirty from digging the bone into the sandy pastureland soil!
I guess you can tell that the garden in mid spring is not as showy as the animals. (We haven’t seen Cosmo the barn cat for two weeks; we inquired, and he was probably napping in the barn loft.)
Oh dear, it looks looks like the weeding job that had started east of the Freedom Market has come to a halt. Later, we drove along the port and saw that many of the curbside beds are still unweeded. I wonder what happened? Some of the beds have been unweeded since June of 2022. It is simply ridiculous for public gardens to be allowed decline like this.
Fortunately, Freedom Market (the cannabis shop) hires us to do their curbside bed.
Libertiaa promising Eryngium giganteum, might bloom this yearan aquilegia that is showier than most of them in this bed
Ilwaco Fire Station
We weeded at our volunteer garden.
Allan saw that the California poppy seeds I planted have germinated on the east side.
Southwest corner, before a bit of weeding…
…and after a bit of weeding.
another promising Eryngium giganteumLily that I hope deer don’t eat Dutch iris
West side:
Cerinthe major purpurascens
Ilwaco Post Office garden
At our other volunteer garden, Allan took out another section of the annoying pink geranium which arrived unbidden from somewhere and wants to take over…
…still leaving the part that is creeping along the neighbour’s fence to tackle next time.
I was disheartened to find that deer had nipped the tops of about half of the lilies. I left the ones that remain good but dug out the ones that are bitten off and replanted them at home. It is clear I am going to have to rethink this garden. Replacements will have to be from what I can grow or propagate for free. I am hoping for some successful cosmos to transplant into the garden.
The huge English laurel to the west, a plant that is disliked by many knowledgable gardeners in the Pacific Northwest, is not helping by overshadowing the garden and just being rooty and unfriendly to our plants.
not a great success, in fact, rather a public failure
The lilies were the showpiece of that garden, in staggered bloom from asiatics to late blooming orientals and oirenpets. Phooey on the deer.
Norwood garden
I weeded the little garden two doors down and enjoyed some Dutch iris that had been blown about by the wind…
…and a white lilac.
Allan mowed the lawns there, front and back.
at home
We’d had rain overnight.
I didn’t have much energy left so did some general and, as I write this four days later, unmemorable puttering.
When he rested, he chose a spot that was right on top of my target weeds.
…and didn’t move while I weeded around his legs.
Finally, he gave me some room.
I dug out a lot of elephant garlic from under the Cox’s Orange Pippin apple tree, where it had flopped all over in the shade and was not at all attractive. I must have planted it when the tree was small and not much of a shade caster. The tree is blooming now.
Then I sat in some light rain and cut the bulbs off of all the garlics so that the green parts could go into the compost bins.
I admired the ferns unfurling in Allan’s garden but only photographed one:
In the evening, we put some tools in the van for work tomorrow and I noticed that my Davidia involucrata ‘Sonoma’ is in bloom. I hadn’t been in the front driveway for a few days and had missed it!
Allan’s outing
Allan dropped some books off in the library drop box and noticed the witchhazel by the entrance and some flowers left over from when we used to garden there. A friend who was involved with the original installation of the garden had recently pruned a sucker that was detrimental to the tree.
And, as almost always, Allan had a look at nearby Black Lake where a kayaker was fishing.
Tomorrow begins a two day work week. We decided to do two shorter days rather than one very long day this week.
I am pleased to report that I have celery sprouting from the kitchen windowsill six packs. I have never grown it before and will have to read up on its idiosyncracies.
And I have tomatoes and cucumbers, which I hope don’t get too leggy because it won’t be till around the 12th that I can move them into the greenhouse.
The dogwood outside the kitchen window:
The rhododendron in Allan’s garden is shedding its flowers.
Last year my next door neighbour planted a bit of this golden sedum around an old stump in her back yard.
I did some vigorous weeding despite being driven into the greenhouse by some squalls of heavy rain.
view from the greenhouse
A t shirt that was part of the Hardy Plant Society Study Weekend in 2007 (the weekend when I had a big revelation about work that it took me another decade to truly and completely start to firmly apply to life) finally has too many holes. I could have framed it but decided it must join the compost instead.
Here is another favourite shirt that has been in the bins for awhile.
I turned and sifted some compost from bin two to bin three.
Because of the rain, I only got a couple of buckets full to apply to the garden.
Saturday, 27 April 2024
reading
The days are in reverse order because some people might find gardening more interesting than many thoughts about a book, an interlibrary loan, that I found deeply meaningful.
I had read some of it during the week and finished it on Saturday, another day of nonstop delightful rain. I loved this book.
Just a few of many, many takeaways:
About change in one’s life: “Psychological research carried out at Harvard University….showed that at each stage of our lives we consistently doubt our ability to achieve change. The researchers called this phenomenon the ‘end-of-history illusion’. When we look back into the past, their study tells us, we readily acknowledge how different we once were, and how much we have changed in the intervening years. But when we imagine our futures, we just can’t believe that we’ll carry on changing in such fundamental ways.” That is reassuring when one is feeling kind of glum! “Or, as Daniel Gilbert, one of the study’s authors, said to the New York Times: ‘At every age we think we’re having the last laugh, and at every age we’re wrong.'” I think that is amazing…because I think this book might have changed me. And when I think how incredibly different I am now in some ways between 1982 and 1992, it is kind of astonishing to think that if I lived another decade, I might change in some profound way again??
She writes about a heron, in a description that I think Mr. Tootlepedal (who has a heron friend named Mr Grumpy) might enjoy. “…. in … all the mythical power of the heron in my native Irish mythology. Heron is an edge-dweller, a stalker of riverbanks and lochsides, a walker-between-worlds who passes easily from water to land to air; she guards the entrance to the Otherworld.”
Sharon Blackie has lived in several homes that she loved and remembers well and she believes in making a strong connection to where you live. “I knew that the process of learning to belong to any new place is in part a process of …. emotional mapping, as the landscape begins to reveal its mysteries to you, to hint at its stories, and you begin to form a bond with it.” I had intense bonds with several previous homes, three in particular in Seattle and three here on the Long Beach Peninsula. An tiny upstairs apartment I lived in on Seattle’s Capitol Hill where I had a garden cut out of the back lawn, my Grandma’s house and garden,, a remarkable house on Queen Anne Hill with hardly any garden, and down here, the Sou’wester Lodge, and my previous Ilwaco home and where I am now. I can evoke all of them in every detail.
She lived in some places that were much less than idyllic and that she couldn’t bond with, and has this to say about that: “It’s more important than ever when we’re living in places we find difficult or challenging. because it can be all too easy to dissociate ourselves from those places, to pretend we’re not really in them, to hold ourselves back from engaging with them because they’re only temporary, and we’re hoping someday for something better. But the places where we live deserve more from us, because those places literally make our existence possible.” You might be able to find some beauty there… “…don’t hold yourself back from the hurt or broken places, the industrial wastelands….Always look for the small beauties beneath surface ugliness…. the butterflies around the landfill sites, the crows holding a colloquium in the middle of a busy, fume-filled traffic island.” I had that experience with Ilwaco; I loved my first little home and garden here but disliked the town. When the realtor said in 1994 that she had a place to show me, I said I didn’t even want to look at a place in Ilwaco…but she told me it had a pond … It took ten years for me to fall in love with Ilwaco, and after another ten years I fell out of love, but who knows, I might fall back in love someday.
Sharon Blackie advises having a sit spot and actually sitting in it, something I don’t do. I mean to try to follow her advice. “A Sit Spot is a place that you should visit regularly (as close to every day as you can manage) and sit in for a while, tuning in to what is happening in the world around you..”
I will try to take to heart what Sharon Blackie learned about the wind while living by the sea on the island of Lewis.
“You couldn’t extricate the land from the weather – and it hit me then that I didn’t live in a landscape – I lived in a sort of weatherscape. And I wasn’t walking on the surface of the land, while weather happened above it and apart from it: I lived inside a coalescing world of sea, land and sky, all tangled up together, in which the weather was dynamic, always changing, always engrossed its own process of becoming. The wind was not happening to me, the wind was in relationship with me.”
“I understood now that I inhabited this living biosphere – that I was a living being, living inside the body of another living being, immersed in the land and the air and the weather, just as fish are immersed in a warm or a cool, and a calm or a choppy, sea.”
I hope I can remember this and stop disliking the wind so much. It is so much stronger here than it was in my hometown, Seattle, which should not have surprised me so much. [Four days later: Despite being so inspired by Sharon Blackie’s words, I am still complaining when the wind is cold and strong.]
One of her quotations is one that I also love so much I’ve painted it on a sign and am reminded to repaint it:
(It is true that when I read books about the concept of home, I inescapably think about people without homes. But back to those of us lucky enough to have a place to live…)
Even though she has a lovely spouse whom she loves, Sharon has no fear of solitude:
“Lately, I have begun longing for what I insist on calling a ‘Baba Yaga’ hut: a simple wooden shed in a hidden corner of our land, preferably among the trees. There would be no electricity there, no ‘mod cons’, nothing much to separate me from the outside. I would fill it with feathers and fleece, with found bones and bundles of herbs. I don’t really know what I would do there, other than to sit sometimes, and pretend that I might one day grow into a magical old woman who lived alone in a wood.” I appreciate that after reading in the most recent Anne Lamott book some passages that I quoted a few days ago that implied solitude to be a lesser state of being.
She writes a fascinating chapter about a woman named Joanna Gilar and her difficulty with builders, even sympathetic ones, in building a house that met zoning codes and regulations and also used all recycled materials. “Joanna told me, ‘I was still passionate about creating a house that was not only beautiful, but that addressed my concerns and questions about the way we live now, But it wasn’t easy to achieve: instead, the building company besieged us with catalogues of glossy perfection, of floors and doors and stylishly rustic windows.”
This I loved so much: “…we [Joanna and the carpenter] were arguing about whether or not we needed to buy freshly felled wood for the inside of the kitchen cupboards, or could instead use some old plywood which would otherwise be thrown away: ‘Surely, at the end of the day, you just want the best kitchen.’ But I didn’t, I wanted to say.” Now that is someone I would love to know. I get so tired of people looking at a kitchen or bathroom in a house for sale and saying “Well, that room has to be updated.” Ok, maybe a better stove for someone who is a chef, but otherwise I wish people would stop being so greedy for the new and perfect.
Sharon adds, “The houses which shelter us and nurture us and our loved ones are worthy not just of our attention, but of our devotion. They are intrinsic to the fabric of our lives, and deserve to be fully inhabited, loved and filled with beauty. They deserve too to be filled with life: save a corner for the odd family of spiders…”
I am also going to seek out this book (have already ordered it through interlibrary loan):
I learned that Reynolds as a young woman won a gold at the Chelsea Flower Show and that a perhaps somewhat fictionalised film called Dare to be Wild tells her story. I will be watching it soon.
The chapter about Mary Reynolds, with quotations from conversations with her, is wonderfully inspirational.
[We did watch the movie a few days later, free with our Prime subscription, and enjoyed it very much. And the library just told me that The Garden Awakening book is waiting for me there.]
Such great stuff! I tell my friends, who think otherwise, that I am not a spiritual person. Maybe I once was and this book made me feel so again. It kind of blasted through a feeling of disconnection with life itself.
I would like to hang on to the feeling that her books gave me, especially this one. They are, in order, If Women Rose Rooted, The Enchanted Life, and Hagitude. Any stubborn scepticism I had about the mystical stuff in the other two books was blown away by this one. Thanks so much for whichever friend recommended Hagitude and enabled me to discover Sharon Blackie.
Another book I read one the 27th when rain kept me indoors was by an author who, for awhile, lived on the Long Beach Peninsula and who, before that, co-authored an invaluable kitchen garden book called The Bountiful Container. Her new book is on a similar theme but with new information and laced with stories about WWII Victory Gardens.
It was most enjoyable, with stories like this one of a railway worker planting potatoes for others to harvest:
” Even as a youngster, Marian recognized Uncle Con’s pride in his job with the Union Pacific railroad, and so she understood what a profound tragedy it was when a traumatic injury at the railyards forced him into retirement. But Uncle Con loved those trains and loved his coworkers, and even after he was no longer actually on the payroll, he spent many afternoons walking the tracks, checking for any trouble spots.
Marian and her cousins often tagged along, captivated by the stories he told them as they walked, and watching as he stopped here and there along the railbed to scuff up a small hole and tuck in a few of the seed potatoes he always seemed to have in his pocket.
Later, Marian says, when they went back over the same areas to harvest the potatoes, they often found that others had been there first. But Uncle Con didn’t seem angry; he just smiled and said something like, “Well, guess someone needed them more than us. It was many years before Marian realized that was his plan all along to do what he could to see that the men riding the rails in those rough years had a little something to eat.”
Aside from the many equally wonderful stories, including some from familiar Peninsula names, it is chock a block with useful information about what kind of veg and fruit thrive best in containers, down to the exact cultivars to choose and where to buy them, and amusing asides such as this:
Speaking of books, I have had to abandon the project of sharing the garden thoughts and projects as written by George Orwell in his diaries. I wanted to, because that is another book that affected me deeply, but he was so prolific in his writing about April that I just can’t do it without taking too much time or getting in trouble by using too much of it. I think the only way to do it properly would be to include a quotation or two from each date at the end of my April (and other months) entries, which might be a project to accomplish next year when I am more fully retired.
During a Thursday of writing blog posts and reading, we had an unexpectedly dry day. We’d had a lot of very welcome rain yesterday and overnight. It was such a relief to not have to worry about watering.
Allan took the opportunity to mow the lawn at the J Crew Cottage and to do a quick weeding of the front garden.
J Crew Cottage front garden
…and then, at my request, he dug up a big libertia that had reseeded in an awkward place by the front garden hose hanger.
I spent the next couple of hours making three big square flats of assorted sizes of the plant, chopping it up with an axe and washing the roots. During that time, we both took a break when Patty came over with a plate of chocolate chip cookies (to thank Allan for working on her catio roof). The three of us sat around on Alicia’s cozy patio and tried to solve some of the world’s problems.
I took a walk back into the willow grove looking for a few starts of elderberry to pot up, and found only one. I am sure there are more. I enjoyed the garden tour.
The Deep Path is full again.
The metal path did not fill up…
…and there was just a trace of water under the old bridge.
The deep swale refilled.
And the frog bog, which had quite unusually for April dropped by half, was full again.
an epimedium whose tag has gone astrayby the fire circle, the glow of Physocarpus ‘Dart’s Gold’ and a Japanese maple
I sifted some compost for a spot by that golden maple which was looking like a sheet of clay.
There is no trace of this lost plant…but the Impatiens omeiana looks unstoppable.
Next to it, another ajuga is thriving.
I forgot a photo of the nicely fluffed-with-compost area but did record this image of the plant table on the other side of the fire circle.
In the west big bed, I dug up a whole clump of elephant garlic and some undesirable alliums.
In the west fence bed, I dug up a huge plant that I’ve been watching while trying to figure out what it is.
I found that the mystery plant came from this!
When, at the compost bins, I cut the bulbs off of the alliums and elephant garlic (which is also an allium) and the mystery plant, I found the inside of its base is white, not a beet as I expected (although I did grow one white beet, but can’t remember if it had a red exterior…I think not).
That is not beet foliage and I was not about to taste it. Does anyone know what it is?
The foliage of all those things, sans bulbs, made a good addition to bin three.
The bounty of the day continued when Margarita stopped by, so quickly I didn’t even see her, and gave us a large dish of delicious Mexican burritos for dinner.
And to continue the bountiful theme, I had gotten a phone call from the Ilwaco library branch that I had won the drawing for the prize for the winter reading contest, and that a gift awaited me if I “or my husband Allan” could come pick it up. I guess they know I am a recluse since Allan always gets my books for me.
I was astonished at the bounty in the basket. Gardening was their theme, including a gift certificate from The Planter Box, a garden book and journal, some seeds, and garden globes and a garden plaque and stickers. It was coincidentally an ideal basket for me. Amazing and wonderful.
As an extra bonus, a local friend says I may share her Facebook post with you, from the present day, May 3rd.
I pruned an enormous pale pink Fuchsia magellanica with our tiny rechargeable chainsaw, cutting off some arching branches that had beautifully survived and leafed out after the cold winter but were now shading out some lilies and a metapanax that I want to show off. Although I loved the arching form, it could not be allowed. The area also has a rampant climbing rose which I don’t remember planting and which had to be cut back from swamping the metapanax and lilies. If it is the white one that I call Maxine’s rose (after the beloved late client from whom I got a cutting), I also have it by the west fence and don’t want it in this bed, its original home in this garden before I moved it to the fence. I will have to let it what is left of it bloom to see what it is.
My photos show the process as I kept trying to get it right. Before:
I ended up so blocked in by cut branches that I had to abandon my rollator to escape.
Fortunately, Allan arrived to help me get the branches dragged to the future-shredding pile while I cut the climbing rose into pieces for the wheelie bin.
After, below. I lost some of the feeling of hidden-ness between paths, but lower plants will now be able to grow tall and that mysterious feeling will return. I will share a couple of these in the fun “image compare” format.
A big shock to lose the enclosed feeling! But it will return.
Metapanax leaves unfurlingLooking northwest: The view of the white garage will disappear when the escallonia along the fence grows back.
I look forward to being able to get into that area and do some serious weeding.
We are now due for a week of rain which I hope to use as reading weather to finish my stack of library books.
Tangly Cottage Gardening 