our garden this week

I think that unless I get a weekday off, I will start saving the week’s photos (before and after work) of our garden for a Sunday update.  That may change if I start taking a different (or no) day off.

3 April

I found, on a real estate site, a photo of our house when it was for sale in 2010.  (I was checking comparable values and oddly, even though it is manufactured and thus depreciates, our house is holding more value than some historic houses on the street!)

early summer 2010

I want to use this as the basis of a series of photos of the garden progress, but already had forgotten the photo angle to use when I took this:

3 April 2013

front garden

front garden

tulips and cardoon

a stunning yellow tulip

6 April

First, a bunch of photos from right by where we park our car when we go to and from work.

the first Dutch iris

Narcissi ‘Merlin’

I love the very small cupped narcissi.  I also have realized this week that I love the apricot coloured cups on the ones that Nancy and Lorna picked out for their gardens.  I did not think I would.  Some of them are the ones that are supposed to be pink.  Next year I am going to order lots of them.

an Erysimum

This Erythronium is precious to me because it came from my mother’s garden.

Erythronium (dogtooth violet)

Fritillaria meleagris (checkered lily, guinea hen flower)

I am going to give a clump of the fritillaries to Judy.

In the back garden, the boat is coming on with tulips.  I put up a sweet pea tee pee around which I planted the ‘Alan Titchmarsh’ sweet peas that my friend Sheila kindly shared with me.  The wind has blown it over, but more wind is predicted for tonight so I will put it upright later.  I remember the optimistic moment when I put it in place earlier this week and thought “I don’t need to lash this to the boat because the big winds are over.”  No.

garden boat

Later, that view would have included the two red gale warning flags flying over the Port Office.

My favourite ornamental grass, Stipa gigantea, is already putting out some fronds.  I have more than nine of them in the back garden.

Stipa gigantea backed with clean debris heap and crab pots

Today

The day began with rain, so I started reading Mr. Tootlepedal’s Blog (April 2011).  Then out came the sun and I began to feel guilty, so after finishing the month of April in the borders (UK), I went outside with the intention of pulling one bucket of weeds, just one.  I soon came back in and started reading May, because my hands got so cold.  The sun peeked out again, and guilt drove me back outside, and then the rain came and I came back in to my reading.  Here’s what I saw in our garden today:

view from front porch while I pondered weather

Hmm, Allan had a measuring tape next to his garden bed.

What is he up to?

He is planning to make a new grid on which to record his plants (on paper) and has driven in screws a foot apart for future reference.

Allan’s tidy garden

I found a tragedy in my front garden bed:  a very precious and expensive Allium bud rotted off (and the one on the right looks iffy, like it might be rotting):

allium disaster

I love the emerging spears of Baptisia australis:

Baptisia (false indigo)

and white bleeding heart:

Dicentra spectabilis alba

And the new leaves on Pieris:

Pieris (My grandmother called it Andromeda)

One of my favourite tulips, ‘Leo’, is coming back and a good thing too because I did not get any more of it.

two favourites:  (left) Tulip sylvestris on the way out, (right) Tulip ‘Leo’ on the way in

I like all the different cultivars of Muscari and try to add new ones every year.

Muscari latifolium

But I was horrifed to see Geranium ‘A.T. Johnson’ making its way into the garden…and this photo is after I yanked half of it out.  I used to love it, but its extreme vigor has worn out its welcome.

that pesky hardy geranium

But the rains came so I got back to my reading.  My achievement:  only 7/8 of a five gallon bucket of weeds pulled.

Speaking of wearing out one’s welcome, which I felt I was doing by stopping daily by Olde Towne café to photograph their progress in reopening in a new location, I am pleased to say that the news is that they are opening on Tuesday.  So the heart of Ilwaco is almost back.

Postscript:  Food

Reading the Tootlepedal blog often makes me crave tea and biscuits, and Mr. T. often writes of his friend Dropscone, a former baker who makes a delicacy called Drop Scones.  (Oddly enough.)   I forwarded the recipe to Allan (via email to the next room in the house) and he did try to make them.  They are similar to pancakes and did not look quite like Dropscone’s results but were tasty anyway.

first attempt at dropscones, served with Rose’s lime marmalade

The next night, he made scones which turned out looking better, and tasted good, but the drop scones were just delicious.

Allan’s scones

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prequel: 2004 in my mom’s garden

My mother’s garden, begun in June 1999, was coming along beautifully.

Below: The entry garden in springtime…This reminds me of a scene out of Narnia (the lamp post).

the lamp post

Before, the above area was all nasty boring scratchy Juniper tams.

front garden

In early spring Robert, who had been living with her after our breakup, moved out of her house and moved into an trailer in Andy’s Long Beach yard. Over the winter, Andy’s love Lily had died of ALS. I had seen her a couple of times and always wished I had known her long before; I remember a day her sisters all gathered and crowned her the queen and took a last set of photos of all of them together.

Robert had been a great help to them, helping to make the bathroom wheelchair accessible, and after moving into Andy’s trailer he helped created the garden that Lily had visualized, in her memory.

My mother and I became closer and thus I had many more photos of her garden in 2004 compared to the previous year (none).

Mom’s south garden

On the south side of her house lay the second lot of her property, all gardened, except in an grove of trees in the southeast corner.

south garden

We both agreed that there was way too much Valerian; it had reseeded too freely.

When Mom had said she was having the house painted green, I was thrilled, until I found it was olive drab. (I had pictured Shelburne green!) She loved it because, she said, it matched her Marine Corps uniform.

looking from south to north at the new paint job

She had also hired a local builder to enclose her porch into a sunroom.

summer

Lily and Physocarpus ‘Diablo’

mom working in her garden, summer 2004

lily and variegated Buddleia in mom’s garden

lily and fully grown Escallonia hedge

Below:  Mom’s prolific vegetable garden.  I may have done some weeding, but that year at age 80 she was still doing a lot of the gardening herself.

vegetable garden

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prequel: my mother’s garden, ’99-’00

My mother moved to Long Beach in June 1999.   We talked her into it over the two years after my father died.

She had come to gardening late, getting interested in it when she was 50.  As a child, she had worked on her father’s farm after school and swore she would never garden again, but the passion for plants finally caught up to her.

Below:  her house before we started the new garden.

Before, south side. The property was two lots.

looking south from the house, with a pile of soil

We spent every Sunday that whole summer and fall creating garden beds for her. The concrete strips had originally supported a single wide home. The previous owner had planted some shrubs and trees in that strip, some of which we moved to further out along the edges of the garden.

mom’s, south side, before, with a pile of soil and some rocks having been delivered

Robert working on a new border in Mom’s garden

spring 2000

early spring 2000, looking south from the porch

spring 2000. An escallonia hedge curved along the outside is still in its infancy.

late spring 2000

She had had doubts about moving and leaving her large retirement garden near Yelm, where she had lived for 18 years.  But within a year of coming to Long Beach, her new garden proved completely satisfactory.

before, the east side

hellebores in that same area a few years later

tulips on the east side where we had torn out some horrible juniper tams and added rocks.

 

Ten years after she bought the property, the garden was on the Peninsula garden tour in 2009.

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a gardener’s passing

I am hoping to write a memoir entry with more about my mother’s garden.  She died unexpectedly almost two weeks ago.  Although what was diagnosed as a relatively  minor heart condition had led her to move into Golden Sands Assisted Living a year ago, her friends and caregivers there…and I…expected her to go on for another ten years enjoying the garden that we have been creating in the facility’s enclosed courtyard.  We will continue to do that garden, while we try to decide what to do with my mother’s house and garden in Long Beach. It has been for sale for a year but remains unsold.  I am pretty firmly fixed on continuing to live at the mouth of the Columbia even though Long Beach is a lovely town.  It is true that gardening is one form of art that dies with the artist, so with our decision to probably not live in her house, I am not sure what will become of the garden there.

The one thing my mother and I bonded on was gardening, and also a love of reading, where our taste did overlap on Dick Francis books.

at her memorial at Golden Sands, photos of her life in the Marine Corps in WWII

At her memorial, photos of her as a baby, young woman, and in her garden..and of her cat, Tabby.

At her memorial, we displayed photos along with a bouquet sent by Allan’s family in Seattle (his mother died earlier this year), and two bouquets from her garden and from my garden.

I am now flummoxed with many decisions and with such a sad feeling that she did not live to see us turn the whole courtyard outside her apartment window into a garden paradise.  It was nice enough this first summer but did not grow as lushly as I had hoped.  The sandy soil needs more improvement and there is a surprisingly severe slug or snail problem in the enclosed courtyard.  She waited all summer for her dahlias to bloom.  Finally one did, and I do hope she got to see it the day before she died.  (“Oh, so NOW you decide to bloom!” I thought at it when we went up to begin to clear out her apartment the day after her death.)

belated dahlia in the Golden Sands courtyard

A few days before she died, we had agreed to help install a new garden at the local mortuary, Penttila’s Chapel by the Sea.  The plants were mostly chosen by the mortician and his partner.  (It helps a lot to be acquainted and friendly with the mortician when someone dies…eases the making of arrangements.)  As it happened, we were planting up the garden on a day six days past her death….and while her style ran more to gladiolas, dahlias and lilies and roses, I think she would have liked the results.

Penttila’s entry garden, where once was lawn.

Penttila’s entry garden, view from chapel entry

Here is the link to her obituary.

She wrote a short autobiography for her women veteran’s group:

Virginia (Cox) Johnston    USMCWR

(“Ginger”)

 

I was born in Seattle and raised north of the city in Snohomish County.  I graduated from Edmonds High School in 1942 and went to an office job in Seattle.  In 1944, I had the idea to join the Air Corps in honor of my fiancé, who was shot down in a Boeing Flying Fortress in a raid over Germany.  However, the Air Corps wouldn’t even take my name until I was 20 (in April).  I walked down the sidewalk and saw the Marine Corps recruiting office. (“Be a Marine and Free a Marine to Fight.”)  They signed me up, gave me a physical exam, etc., and told me to come back on my birthday to take the oath, which I did.

I had my boot training at Camp Lejeune, NC.  After about two weeks at camp, they were going to discharge me because I was “not up to the physical standards of the USMC.”   When I said I wanted to stay, they sent me to a psychiatrist, who decided if I wanted to be Marine so bad they would let me stay.

After graduating, I drew six weeks mess duty (to serve the next class).  Then I was assigned to Marine Headquarters in Washington, D.C..  I was given a stripe right away because “they didn’t want any Privates walking around the nation’s capitol.”  I reported to the Ordnance Division where I worked for the next three years.

The highlight of my time in Washington was when my boss at work wanted to form a rifle team.  We competed with any team we could find (even high school boys).  Then a group of four or five of us started competing at civilian rifle matches up and down the east coast from Pennsylvania to North Carolina.

A big disappointment was not being able to march in the funeral parade for President Roosevelt.  (I wasn’t tall enough.)  But I did march in the parade for Admiral Nimitz when he came back from the Pacific.

As the war wound down, most of the WRs wanted out.  They needed clerks to handle the return of thousand of Marines coming back, so I shipped over for another ten months.  After I got home, I joined the action reserves.  1950 rolled around with the “police action” in Korea and our unit was called up.  I was newly married and I didn’t want to go.  I finagled a medical discharge.  My husband walked with me when I signed out so I wouldn’t change my mind when they played the USMC hymn.

In 1977, we both left our jobs with the City of Seattle.  (He retired at 63 and I quit at 55.) We moved to our retirement home outside of Yelm.  Then for ten years we snowbirded to Mesa, Arizona, six months out of the year.

After Bruce died in 1995, my daughter wanted me to move to the Long Beach Peninsula to be nearer to her.  (She lives in Ilwaco.)  I moved to Long Beach in 1999 where I lived until 2009, when I moved to Golden Sands Assisted Living Facility.  If I can’t live at my home, this is a wonderful place to be.

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flashback: 22 November 2009 — the winter of my mother’s garden

On the night of November 21st a wind whipped the Peninsula, nothing as fierce as the big blow of 2007 but enough to create considerable havoc.  We went out the next morning to check out our jobs.

The fences at Jo’s garden had fared rather badly. The top of an arbour had blown off and decorative pieces had blown to the ground.

Jo’s fences and tree

Chen’s Chinese Restaurant’s big and seemingly sturdy sign made a difficult clean up task.

Chen’s sign down

Most shocking to us, a road closed sign ominously blocked our access to check on my mother’s house, sitting empty and for sale.  Trees in the road and a downed power line prevented our safe access but we came in from the north, determined to see what had happened.

trees down by my mother’s house

Inside the garden, the root mass of trees had pulled up flower beds and path on the east side.  Shortly before mom’s heart attack, Allan and I had had an enjoyable day blazing a walking path for her among the trees of her little patch of woods.  She had thought it would add more interest to have a defined path along the back of the south garden next time she had a garden open day.  The entry to the woodsy trail had been upended.

huge rootballs

Where once had been the fairy chair, the calla lilies, ferns, and hellebores had become a confusing mishmass of sand, landscape fabric and bark from the path, and dislodged plants.  We rescued what plants we could to take to mom’s new garden at Golden Sands and were mighty glad we’d taken the fairy chair back to our own garden.

From this….

July 2009

to this…

November 2009

From this:

July 2009

to this:

November 2009

My mother had mentally and emotionally moved on from her garden.  She’d had to or she’d not have been able to enjoy her new and much more social life in assisted living.  In a way she had begun to let go a couple of years before when she could no longer do her own gardening and had held on, with our help, till her garden had seen its summer of glory earlier in 2009.  Now we knew that whoever bought the home and garden would truly be beginning anew and that at least part of the garden would be so changed that very little remained of what it had been.

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flashback: August 2009 and onward — losses and gains

After just a few days in the hospital, my mother had been doing a lot of thinking and planning.  She had already been inspired by the socializing on her garden tour days to imagine that someday she might live in the local assisted living center, Golden Sands.  Because of her crippling shyness, she had always found it hard to reach out and make friends.  In all my years I had never known her to have any but situational friends….workmates, and one neighbour in retirement with whom she’d lost touch when the neighbour moved away.

Even the social life inside the hospital made her feel, she said, that she did not want to go back to her life of solitude.  So Allan and I went up to have a look at Golden Sands for her.  We immediately took to the director, Linda, who showed us a room overlooking the courtyard garden, and said that we could create a garden for my mother outside of her window.

a room (center windows) overlooking a courtyard

The courtyard had four quadrants of boring lawn, an oval walking path, a center lawn/swale for drainage, and was completely enclosed by the building:  thus, no deer!

courtyard fountain

Linda pointed to the window that could be mom’s little studio apartment, with its own bathroom, bedsitting room, and tiny kitchenette with microwave and mini-refrigerator….and garden view.

Linda in the future garden

She showed us the studio and its view of the potential garden.  (The pillars are outside the dining room where residents can choose to take their meals.)

the room and the view

Below, another view of the possible garden from “my mom’s room” (as we thought it might be), and a view of the courtyard

two courtyard views

We went back to the hospital that evening with my computer to show my mom the photos we had taken…only to find she had already made her decision.  She had called Linda, met with her, and signed the papers.  She wanted to go straight from hospital to her new apartment, partly to avoid the wrench of going home and partly on health advice from her doctor, so we were charged with a quick move of a bed, dresser, and essentials into the empty room.

new home

She decided to sell her house rather than rent it. The photos we took while we sorted out all her stuff for an estate sale give some idea of the enormity of moving a person from a two bedroom home with sunporch and garden shed and storage room into a studio apartment.  She had not gotten rid of much over the course of her life, and we found (as we’ve heard is often true in these situations) cases of expired food, old home-canned beans that she had moved to her Long Beach home in 1999, old books and records and clothing, all of which had to be sorted, discarded, donated, or sold.

sorting out for the sale

Golden Sands allowed her to have her big plant stand in a nook of the public hallway.  Other than that, she amazed me by being right about the amount of stuff she could fit into that studio apartment.  I was sure there would not be room for two dressers, a table, a desk, the bed, three chairs for visitors and her recliner…but indeed, we kept bringing and she kept arranging with the help of the staff, and it worked.

the essential plant stand and Gram’s china cabinet

The plant stand with African violets passed down from my grandmother did go to Golden Sands even though there was no way it could fit in mom’s new room.  To our house went my grandmother’s china cabinet and its dishes, always intended to pass to me.  We had to tear out some bookshelves to make it fit, but so it did.

While sorting through papers, we came across so much from my mom’s life:  her youth, her years with my father, their retirement together, and her years in WWII in the Marine Corps.  She had always said the Marine Corps years were her happiest.

Virginia (Ginger) Johnston, champion sharpshooter, left and front left

Mom’s Marine Corps days

While I saved all such memorabilia for mom to share with new friends, the estate sale required much letting go of things, including some of mine that I had stored there.  Would I have kept more had I known that a year later Allan and I would move to a bigger house?  Possibly not, because I was afraid the hoarding tendencies might be inherited.

letting go….

We let go of paintings….and of dolls (who went to a doll collector who will love and restore them), the little desk my dad made for me (which I definitely would have kept had I the room), and even a dress I wore as a punk rocker, which I am happy to say went to a new generation rocker girl.  My mother did not want to keep the dark brown painting of the house she grew up in.  My gram divorced, back when it was a scandal, and did not have custody of her two children.  She saw them only on weekends.  My mother and uncle grew up in that gloomy looking house with their father and aunt, and mom did not have happy memories of that place.

As we had the weekend estate sale in mid September after two weeks of steady sorting, the garden still looked so beautiful that estate sale customers took impromptu tours of it.

September: lilies by sunporch, dahlias, the garden in bloom

I had made a photo album for mom as a Golden Sands housewarming gift with every photo I had of her garden through the years.  Her initial social experience had been discouraging, as she had been seated at a dinner table with residents who suffered dementia and could not carry on much of a conversation, but Linda had that sorted with a day and put mom with a group of sharp-witted and funny women.  For the first time in years, she had friends to share a garden photo album with, peers with whom to exchange life stories, and a roster of daily events that would keep anyone busy.

Golden Sands schedule

It seemed to me that year, and still does, that she did not look back with much regret.  I think I was having a harder time letting go of the idea of her garden than she was.  The development of a new garden right outside her window helped, as Allan and I removed the thin sod and planted many lilies and spring bulbs and divisions of plants from mom’s own garden.  We moved her two favourite rose bushes….two Joseph’s Coat climbers and the red velvety and the copper-sheened rose.  After we finished planting the quadrant outside her window, we also did the one across the path, to restore balance.

December 3rd, gardening up the second quadrant

For one year, my mom had an extraordinarily good time.

Halloween 2009

She wore her Marine Corps cap for Halloween, and had laughs with her friends and activity director Pam Fox.  Best of all, she made a true best friend, Wanda.

Mom at a party and with her best friend Wanda

In August 2010, she was proud to tell us that she had taken a ride on a motorcycle.

a ride around Golden Sands

Pam and Linda and the nurses and staff all thought mom would have ten happy years there.

Perhaps the best words of hope from this story are that memories of gardens live on in photos, and that there is hope even the shyest and loneliest person can emerge from her shell and find friends.

mom’s garden, 8 Sept 2009

mom’s garden, 8 September 2009

Mom’s Golden Sands garden in July 2010

P.S.  We continued to feed mom’s feral cats with the help of our friend Stacey until the house sold over a year later, and the new owner promised to take over the feeding.

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flashback: 19 August 2009 — and so life changes

All it can take is one day to change life in a dramatic way.  Sometimes what seems like the worst change can turn out to be beneficial.  But it is hard to see any change as good when it involves being forced by financial woes, a new job, a divorce, or ill health to leave a beautiful garden behind.

On August 19th we went up to Laurie’s mid-Peninsula garden where we weeded and deadheaded.  Not a huge amount had to be done because the garden was still holding up well from having been on the garden tour.  I wafted about for a bit taking photos of the lilies, then got down to the business of light weeding.

Laurie’s health was on the upswing again and she had been able to enjoy the garden a bit more.  As soon as we had finished our light workday, we planned to spend some time visiting with her.

Lily and Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’

Lily and orange montbretia

white lily with pink freckles

And then….my cell phone rang.  The sunshine and lilies and the view of the bay fell away as my mother told me that she could not catch her breath and the pain in her shoulder was much worse…and had been since a few hours after we’d had our usual evening phone call the night before.  How long had this been going on?  All night and into this next afternoon.  She kept hoping to feel better but did not.  She did not want us to call 911, so we flung our tools into the car, bade a quick goodbye to Laurie and took the fifteen minute drive back down the Peninsula to mom’s house in Long Beach.

Ocean Beach Hospital

There she sat on her bed, dressed and ready to go, still refusing to have us call 911.  We helped her to the car and on down to the emergency room in Ilwaco.

By the time I had finished the paperwork, she had been given some medication to relieve fluid build up and had been diagnosed with congestive heart failure and a mild heart attack.

We sat with her for hours in the room, refusing her suggestion that we just leave her there and go back to work.  Finally they checked her into a nice room with a window and said they would keep her in for a few days to monitor her condition and decide what steps to take next.  We assured her we would feed her feral feline friends and finally went home, heads full of worries, unable to visualize what would happen in the immediate future.  At least we had been assured that the heart attack was not life-threatening.  Had it been, she would have been taken to Portland, Oregon, on the Life Flight helicopter.  The pilot had been at the ready but was advised that he could stand down.

The pain in mom’s shoulder, and the fact that it had been worse at night when she lay down, was a strong symptom of congestive heart failure’s fluid build up, if only we had known.

The next five days found us visiting the hospital every day, before and after work.  Mom, being such a night owl, found it difficult to shift her sleep time and usually napped during the hospital days.  In the evenings when we fed the wild cats I would take a walk through mom’s garden and wonder what would happen next.

We took a couple of breaks from work and worry and walked down to the beach from our Long Beach job to take pictures at the Kite Festival (next entry).  Planters had to be watered in Ilwaco and Long Beach, public gardens needed grooming and deadheading, but other than necessary watering, our private jobs simply fell away for awhile.

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