Loooooong Winter................

keeping busy is important....

Awesome August

Here is this year's bushy crop of Joe Pye...makes the
broken-down fence look classy, and makes Awful August
into Awesome August...
(pay no attention to the Japanese knotweed right next to
it, which must be removed, asap)

trying to locate my pic of Joe Pye, the only plant
that gets me out of August doldrums
until the anemones get going...in the meantime, think
I'll go back to June...

My last Festiva Maxima...

 

...and now the long wait for Joe Pye...with purple coneflowers for comfort...and those awful drive-through-bank daylilies, Stella D'Oro, to remind me how amazingly clueless I really really was and am....God, they are ugly, but they bloom so profusely, it is hard to rip them out.  Someday I may have the strength, but now the humidity's up, it's no to that this year.  When I do rip them, do I donate the plants to the nearest traffic island?  Hard to decide...

June...

is it valerian?  is it jupiter's beard?  is it centranthus rubra? 
all of them?  Here's my one plant now come into its own, year two, with the
dilapidated rustic fence in the background.

My Stone Bench Lives Again

When the shade tree came down [scroll downward for that melancholy post] and the garage wall had to be dug out and rebuilt, the other sad casualty was my stone bench, mossy and modestly grand, which had sat in the shade, hard by said garage.
The front-end loader scooped up the boulders, scrambled them in its maw, and dumped them out to the side of the flowerbed.  I am glad I was not present to see this;  my poor lil' heart would have been rent in twain.  [Wow, really am warming up to the frilly-writing I get to use in this post...!]  When I returned to see the situation mid-job, and to visit the two-ton tree stump, there was the sorry pile of my pretty rocks, in ruin.  But, wait a second.  There was no Santa Claus, no Easter Bunny---the stone bench had had a heart of cement blocks!  Inside my bench wasn't more of the poetic moss-covered yumminess that I loved!  My bench had a heart of cement, straight edged, manufactured by humans.  Yuck!  I was genuinely taken aback.  In seconds, though, my disillusionment receded; of course the center was of sturdy cement blocks, stacked to give it stability.  Of course, of course....
So the winter passed, with the rubble of stones sprawled about, waiting for--what?  I didn't really know what to do with them.  The glum mood I was in when I left the property for the year, "I'll never garden here again," may have had as much to do with the diminishing seasonal light as the funk I had going on due to the destruction around the back yard.

Amazingly, once again spring returned, and it was time to deal.  I hauled my enslaved work-crew [my two closest relatives] onto the site to wrestle with this.  Stack the mossy rocks randomly?  Build a border around the flowerbed?  How will I get rid of the cement blocks?  Not needing any instant bookshelves, I could not think of another use for them.
My sibling-helper and I determined to soldier on, and re-build.   Having just watched a lecture on stonewalling, we were inspired, so spent the day hauling the stones one by one to their new location,  under the specimen tree I had tried to highlight on its high ground at the back of the mown lawn.    My poor, neglected willow-leafed pear was miserably lopsided after I had been forced to lop off almost an entire half of its branches.  Snow damage and no pruning over a decade took a toll, and now it was, to any but a loving eye, an eyesore.  This sorry sight of a scraggletree might just like the company of ... a new stone bench!
It lives on, in new combination, with the same cement block heart, waiting for me to plant a green seat upon it.  Kind of looks like a gravestone, but what the hell.

See pics immediately below for before, during and after.

the original stone bench,
built by magic hands...

 front-end loader
had its way with my
beloved stone
bench when the
tree was removed...

 the disassembled
bench, cement
block interior
exposed

Here is the rebuilt bench, under the willow-leafed pear, basking in early spring light.

spring can really hang you up the most

O, joy! This twenty-year old clem montana rubens is very
flowery this year, perhaps
because the far end is now
in sunlight due to the limbing
of a neighbor's tree.