Things Are Shaping Up Nicely

My title is taken from a the mouth of a character in one of the novels of the French author, Colette, who I remember reading during the summer of 1977 after I moved to Vermont to join my life with that of my wife of one year, "San."  I think the novel was The Vagabond, but won't swear to it.  San and I gardened like mad in our northern Vermont property, eighteen years of rural happiness before we moved to a city neighborhood in St. Louis and lived the best, and the last, twelve years of our marriage.  San died of breast cancer in 2008.

I became attached to Kathy Wofford six months later, and we married in 2009, hoping for decades together, but having only five years.  Kathy's life ran out last August.

My fiancee, Karen Berry, has been wearing an engagement ring for a month now.  We have been moving pieces of her carefully-chosen plant collection from her cottage twenty miles east of here to this landscape.  I have made room inside the house and outside the house for Karen's presence, her interests, and her creative soul.

Karen knew Kathy.  Karen was a new member of our daylily club when Kathy was elected President, just months before her diagnosis and treatment for head and neck cancer.  Kathy had the misfortune to have to inform the club membership of the board's decision to host a regional convention with only 18 months' lead time.  The matter was not put to the membership for approval, and a good number of members were hopping mad that the club's traditional way of undertaking a big project had been sidestepped.

Kathy weathered the onslaught without a ruffle, visible or invisible.  Cancer was the ruffle in her life.  Reporting a board decision to the membership was not in the same league.

Karen was the only member of the club who approached Kathy a year later and asked how she was holding up with her battle.  And Karen was the only person outside the family who Kathy told that she was worried how hard I would take her death when her time ran out.

During the change of season from summer to fall, Karen and I became a couple and Karen moved into a house in which Kathy's presence is visible everywhere you look.  Kathy was a designer by nature.  When we bought this house, she set upon a program of converting a trashy place into a classy place.  The closets are her doing, the doors, the new windows here and there, the new sliding doors, the new front entrance and the stone work leading up to it, the raised vegetable beds, the shade garden, the redesign of the block wall outside the garage, the placement of artwork in every room.

I began last fall to make space for Karen in this house.  I removed Kathy's rug and Kathy's filing boxes from our "office" and opened that space for Karen's work-from-home office.  We donated Kathy's bed from our guest room and have a replacement on order.  We took down most of Kathy's collection of Shawnee pottery and made space for Karen's collections of horse figurines and glass objects.  We replaced the dishware with Karen's Fiestaware, replaced San's Farberware cookware with Karen's preference for All-Clad and cast iron.  We have retained San's Le Creuset set.

This is Karen's place now, and we are shaping the landscape for our garden projects.

Today my contractor, Steve Brandt (right) and Tim Yankow arrived to contour the ground where storm water runs off the high side of the neighborhood over my neighbor's lawn and then across my "highland" daylily beds.  They are contouring a curved swale to  direct the flow of storm water around the daylily beds and over to the main drainage channel to the right of their position.

They are shaping the side of the new channel so that 36" wide mowing equipment can easily follow the curve without shaving off the top.  The whole area will be covered with sod tomorrow.

Here Tim is raking out the side of the swale.  You can see the elevation of the rest of the neighborhood with respect to my gardens.

Tim asked  Steve to break up one more area here.  They picked a perfect time for this work.  A few days earlier and the ground would have been too wet.  A few days later and it would have been hard as a brick.

Just below the curve of that swale is a new garden for Karen to "curate" her collection of vines and butterfly-friendly plants.  Steve and Tim will put up a 5-foot fence on the left side, thirty-six feet long, for the vines.  They will surround the bed with metal edging.  Karen will start moving plants this weekend.

Our car park area is serving as a staging ground for trays and pots of plants that will go all over the landscape.  I have three trays of a variety of Portulaca that resembles Purslane, but with narrower leaves.  I used this last summer and thought it was sensational.

We're going to try some coleus and lots of "blue stuff" and at least one Clematis.  Who knows?  I may put in four or five of them!

It was just a year ago that Kathy's friend Laurel visited here and helped me plant trays of annuals along the front.  It was seven years ago that San was unable to finish the last week of her classes at SIUE.  She passed away seven weeks later.

Spring is the season of the assertion of life in the garden.  I have been blessed in all my marriages to share the lives of women who loved plants, birds, art, and music.  Grief may continue at its own pace; but so may life.

Structures

We're into another phase of remodeling the house.  There's nothing more to do this season in the gardens except continue to weed them and apply Preen before the winter weeds germinate.  The Henbit has already begun to appear, so the time for action is now!

Our "big" summer project was shaping up the raised beds for vegetables.  This is the view of the back yard Left a week ago, the cool weather crops having sprouted.

Three weeks ago on a Sunday morning I finished the "small" summer project of contouring the ground in the middle of the back yard so that water flowing downhill from the house would not pool in the area of the circular bed in the picture below.

I killed the grass around the circle and spent several work sessions shaving dirt away to make a shallow trough that tilts toward the dock.  The last step was four car trips to the local nursery to bring back half a pallet of fescue sod and lay it on the shaped earth.  I finished that before lunch and watered it well.  You can make out small white flags I put at the edges of the new sod so that the man who mows our lawn knows where not to bring the machine.  Machinery at this stage would dislodge the small pieces around the curves.  We need to let roots penetrate the ground and fasten the sod before we use a mower there.

Here's my favorite structure outside, a new seedling of mine with a winsome face.

This is the last flower on the first scape produced by my seedling number 12-25, meaning it is the 25th seedling I've given a number in 2012.  In 2011 I assigned 250 numbers and decided to keep the best 85.  The crazy weather of 2012 depressed the bloom in my new seedling beds and I had very little to look at.  I can't wait to see this next summer!

Here is a seedling I've had in the garden for four years, number 08-55.

This was blooming on its second scape earlier this week when I took the picture on a cool morning.  There is nothing distinctive about the face of this flower.  What's interesting to me is that the patterned eye of FANTASY EYES, the pollen parent, was passed to this child by way of a toothy pod parent, ROMANTIC STARES, which seems to lack a patterned eye.

I chose ROMANTIC STARES as a parent because it is Dormant, has good plant structure, is fertile both ways, and is a child of ANGEL'S SMILE, which is known to encourage jazzy results in the eyezone.  Here is ROMANTIC STARES.

There is only a hint of that jagged edge on my seedling, but the eye is more interesting.  Here is FANTASY EYES.

You can see that there are subtle rings of blue violet color in the eye, and there's an edge with two colors.  The thing about my seedling that is most interesting to me is the structure of its scape.  Here is a picture of its second scape, a rebloom that began in late September.  Notice the wide branching extending down the scape and the beautiful presentation of the flowers.

I want to breed this seedling to other patterned flowers in the hopes of retaining the healthy plant and well-formed scape.  On the right edge of the picture you might be able to see the top of a third scape coming along in the hopes of blooming before Halloween.  We'll probably have a frost before that scape can bloom.

Our "big" fall project is the remodeling of the front entrance of our house.  We knew when we bought the house that the front door didn't suit the design of the house.  The windows belong on some other kind of house and we don't care for double doors.  We've ordered a single door with two sidelights.  As long as we were correcting the door, Kathy designed a new front set of steps and a small patio, with planters extending out on either side.  We are using the same blocks as we've used on the wall around our car park area and the same pavers we used on the patio in back.

After removing eight inches of dirt and more than a hundred pounds of old tree roots, Steve Brandt and his helper Tim Yankow worked on building footers to support the rows of blocks that will surround two wide landings before a third step down to the level of the sidewalk.

They removed a large concrete step and found a large void under the existing landing.  Here's Tim pushing gravel up into that void.  Steve is on the left inspecting the first section of the first landing.  Before they finished filling the void, they pushed two blocks under the front of the landing to provide additional support.

Steve spent a lot of time getting the level of the first course of blocks perfect.  Everything else goes much faster if the foundation is correct.  Here's where they stopped Thursday as the rains moved in.

They will put pavers on top of the existing bricks on the top landing to finish that part of the project, but first they will have to address the fact that the existing landing is not quite level.

They've already laid out the foundation row for the front edge of the next landing down.  It will be a step down from the top of about five and a half inches.  We wanted three shallow steps rather than two of standard height.  The second landing will come out to where the grass is and will be about five and a half inches above the sidewalk.  That piece of sidewalk you see on the left will be cut away to make room for the final landing.

The new door is expected in about two weeks, so its arrival should coincide with the completion of the stonework.

This is not the final project we have in mind.  I you look again at the dock at the top of this post, you'll see how decrepit it is.  Kathy will design its replacement over the winter.  It will probably be a summer project, when the lake is at its lowest level.

A Second Season of Planting Our Landscape

Last night just before Kathy served grilled salmon, I stepped out on the deck with my camera to record a few things that please me.  We've had a fantastic April in terms of beautiful working conditions and beautiful results from our repeated "nursery crawls" all over the metro area.  Our favorite nursery still is the closest to us, Daniel's Farm and Nursery.  They are not the biggest nursery around, but everything about their site, their people, and their plants resonates with our life histories of living in rural areas and getting to know "real" people who operate distinctive family businesses.

On one of our trips there a couple of weeks ago, we walked through one greenhouse devoted entirely to Hostas, and we walked out with eight pots of "First Frost" for the east-facing border of our patio.  Here is the view straight down when you walk out of the dining room and cross the eight-foot-wide sitting area there.

There are the pavers that Steve and Tim laid last fall, and there is the new sod from Daniel's that came in the nick of time before the November rains provided all the watering needed.  There is Hosta "First Frost" with cranesbill "Max Frei" growing next to it.  Kathy has planted Max Frei at intervals between the clumps of First Frost.  The powder blue leaves with cream accents make a perfectly composed emotional impression, and the small purple flowers of Max Frei lift that impression out of the merely sedate and into the sublime.

Here's a look at more of the border and more of the plants.

Looking beyond the patio, I see the product of Kathy's afternoon work on the bed she envisioned outside the basement and below the master bedroom.  She laid out the curved stones at the end of the summer.  This month a local youth brought more stones down and laid them in a row.  Kathy didn't like the lack of symmetry, so she took a tape measure and moved the near end of the row out onto the grass a foot or so, making the bed of uniform depth.  We're going to remove the old Hostas there and replace them with some majestic beauties, anchored by a dwarf Colorado blue spruce bush at the far end.  We bought the bush this afternoon.

Our neighbor's son, Adam Dobbs, planted those two Japanese maples and helped with planting a dozen other trees last week.  He's a great worker.

Looking in the other direction, there's our only shaded garden spot so far.  This hillside was eroding from storm water that washed over the driveway in small surges and flowed through the blocks of that wall.  In my previous blog post I showed the work on a new French drain in the flood side of that wall.  Kathy has been working on that shade bed for a year, and it is really starting to show what it will look like when the plants grow in.

At the base of that hill is the veggie garden plot.  Since it receives any runoff, it seldom dries out, and so it seldom is tillable.  Kathy had one of our helpers move some bricks and blocks down there so that she can build five raised beds in that area.

Then looking to the right you see the daylily beds we planted in early June last year.

I am moving a lot of plants right now, and every time I dig a place in those beds, I encounter more of the buried rubble that was hauled in years ago to raise the level of the back yard.  In a way, this back yard is "historic," if highway construction refuse is truly history.  Why wouldn't it be?  Whatever happens is part of the story and there's nothing that's outside the story of God's creation.

I am removing the clay I dig out of the hole and dumping it along the shoreline to build up the border there.  I'm replacing the bad soil with a topsoil/compost mix from Daniel's Nursery.

Down on the shore Kathy has placed two white poles to mark the locations for two more smoke trees. We'll have a trio down there, two yellow and one deep purple.

Back up on the deck, we have creatures great and small who like inspecting the world from behind those comforting vertical bars.  There's Topper, the immense and extremely conversational cat, with Lola the Poodle.

And there's Ginger, the resourceful hunter of birds and the lover of evening Netflix movies on the couch.

This is the cat who chose Kathy years ago in West Plains and who carries her mystique about her at all times.  I am happy to be a part of those times!

In the Last Week of March

Where has March gone, this glorious month of perfect outdoor weather?  Kathy and I took on a couple of epic projects and brought our favorite contractor back to help with two jobs we knew we couldn't do well on our own. 

One rainy day last week I bought a walk-behind lawn mower with powered wheels, a 21" Honda, so that I could do the tender areas where I don't want heavy lawn machinery chewing up the sod.  The early spring put the grass into a burst of growth, so I mowed most of the property in two big sessions on Sunday and Monday.  Today I feel like well-rusted machinery in a junk yard.  I'm used to 30 minutes on a treadmill at the gym.  Two hours behind a lawn mower put my legs into a state of emergency, and I had to do another hour or so yesterday to do the back yard.

This is not whining.  I am delighted to have the exercise outside rather than on a treadmill in a gym.

Steve Brandt and Tim Yanko have been correcting the French drain that probably never drained anything in its life.

This wall is on the right as you walk out of the garage.  On the other side is a steep grassy hill that was showing signs of steady erosion last spring, owing to the failure of the drain to catch any of the storm water that flows down the driveway and through the wall on the way to the lake below.  The French drain connects to a buried drainage pipe that Steve installed on the other side last April.  It empties into the storm drainage swale in the distance beyond the wall.  We'll get to that part of the story in a minute.

Opposite this wall is a companion wall on the left as you walk out of the garage.  They are moving the wall so that we can plant on either side of it.

They finished laying a new base yesterday afternoon.  The original wall was laid up without a base.  Since the soil can become waterlogged after a long rain, we wanted to protect against settling and tilting, so the base includes at least six inches of crushed rock.

Kathy has been at work since Sunday planting one of the two corner berms we built last May.

She planted creeping phlox in two colors all along the outer edge.  The wispy shrubs on the crest of the berm are Russian Sage plants just coming back to life.  The three trees are Kousa dogwoods.  They flower after leafing out in the spring and are suited to a full-sun location.  Our "line-out" beds for daylilies are laid out in S-curves inside the berm.

Looking at it from the other end, you can make out the pretty blue perennials (Lithodora) she alternated with a small variety of creeping Thyme.  The Lithodora is a creeping plant that she hopes will join with the Thyme in covering the surface.

The collapsed drainage swale I've been writing about is within two more work sessions of being emptied of rubble and paving brick.  I spent two hours yesterday lobbing bricks onto the grass.

I finally exposed the ugly break that had been obscured by layers of paving bricks.  Not that this is any better, but "inquiring minds want to know."  I imagine the developer built this swale in the same fly-by-night manner he built the house we live in.  Over the years it cracked, and water got under it, and a trickle became a rivulet, and so on, until a big section collapsed into the undermined area and broke apart. 

The problem I saw when we first inspected the property is that the mass of fill material was mounded up down the center of the channel, forcing storm water out to the sides and sometimes over the bank.  The sides in this area have been considerably widened by water flows, and the slope of the broken concrete exacerbates the problem.  A great deal of the rock I've tossed out has to go back in on the sides to protect the banks and force the water toward the middle, which has to be lowered.

"Sometimes in this life, Baby, ya see things ya don't wanna see."  There's one more pile of paving bricks in the way of seeing what I have to deal with, and one more small zone of rocks beyond the bricks.  I might have to invite Steve and Tim back with their jackhammer to break up that big sloping section, but there's another big section under the last brick pile. 

By the end of this week, I want to know what this looks like without rubble.

For the Love of Landscape

Yesterday the Branco work crew was rained out at noon while fine-tuning the deck frame.  We had a gentle soaker rain all afternoon.  It's exactly what the ground needed, but it's only a beginning of nature's restoration of all the life-giving moisture she sucked out of the ground in the past ten weeks.  Today is one of the happy times to celebrate the renewal of growth in the gardens with members of our daylily club.  We're having a picnic at the finest and largest Victorian-era walking park outside of England.  I mean, of course, Tower Grove Park, near the Missouri Botanical Garden.

We're playing a "take-away" game at the picnic.  It's like musical chairs, but it involves taking away a prize donated by a member, either from the prize table or from another member who already claimed a prize you wanted.  Kathy and I are donating two of my hybrid daylily creations.

This one is named MOM'S MIRTH for the brightness and bigness of my mother's capacity for enjoying a joke.  I knew the moment I first saw it in 2000 that it was likely to be registered.  I had crossed Bill Munson's very fine COLLECTOR'S CHOICE with my favorite Whatley, ROSE IMPACT.  This 7-inch whopper is bigger and brighter than either parent.  It expresses the form of Collector's Choice and the rich color and veining of Rose Impact, picking up a good scape from both parents and hardiness from Rose Impact. It has four branches and 27 buds. It starts early and usually reblooms in the first week of July.  I call the color "popsicle cherry."  I introduced it in 2010.

The one below is DAVID AND ALAN, my first registration in 2005, also selected in 2000 after I was revived from the shock of first seeing it in a crowded section I was clearing out.  Having heard that CATHERINE NEAL was a superb parent, I took its pollen to every red, purple, and rose daylily in my collection in 1997.  One of the pod parents was Bryant Millikan's CARLOTTA, and that cross gave me this winner.

The color of this is a super-saturated cherry-violet blend, quite distinctive in intensity and hue.  It's a vigorous grower, a sun-lover for best performance, and a fine parent to boot!  It has four branches and 25 buds.  It survives, but does not really thrive, in the zone 5a garden of its namesakes, David and Alan, north of Burlington, Vermont in a micro-climate near the shore of Lake Champlain.  It perished in a Zone 4 garden about five miles inland from there.  In some other Zone 4 gardens it can live.  It does best in zones 6 and 7.  I've sent a few plants to warmer zones, but have no information on how they have done.

Plants like these two will be grown into 5-foot masses in our huge back yard, where the view from the house or the deck will require large graphic effects to create satisfaction or pleasure.  Any patterns on the flowers will not be visible from our vantage points.

Here is the view looking left from the sliding glass door of our kitchen/dining room.

The darker boards show the "Sierra" deck stain I brushed on last weekend.  If the wood dries out by tomorrow afternoon, I'll stain at least the top of the new boards.  I can get the sides done if time permits, or later, but certainly not in one afternoon.  Staining the tops will give some protection when they lay down the flooring boards.

Now, making a quarter turn to the right and looking straight out to Hidden Lake, this is the view:

 

There are too many small clumps of daylilies in the gardens below.  Over time, we'll reduce the size of the collection and have larger clumps with better spacing and a variety of other perennials.  In those "empty" beds to the right, I'm going to plant some peonies and some Japanese, Siberian, and Louisiana irises.

Turning another quarter turn to the right, this is the view of the seedling production and evaluation area:

To the far right is an evaluation bed so large I have named it "Nebraska."  Kathy's almost finished applying leaf mulch between the rows of selected seedlings.  Just below that bed is the first of two beds to receive transplanted seedlings I hybridized in 2010 and germinated in a dense planting in one of the lower beds.  The little transplants are mostly of good size for moving now.  They will bloom in 2012 and 2013, when I'll make final selections from this crop.

The heavy clay soil was impossible to till, having baked into brick hardness all summer.  I let the lawn sprinkler run for a three hour session on those beds and the Troy-bilt "horse" tiller made quick work of the task.  Once I broke up the soil, I tilled in two thick layers of leaf mulch to lighten it up.

As I raked the beds smooth for planting, I also made new measurements to assure no more than five feet of width for these garden strips.  The ground-breaking process had encroached by at least a foot into the grassy paths, so I marked the restored boundary with small yellow construction flags.  Once I finish planting the two beds (I am halfway through the crop now), I'll rake a light layer of topsoil over the grassy path and reseed with a fescue mix. 

Then I'll till and form the other beds so that side of the property will look neat, and I'll weed the two seedling strips closest to the lake shore.  They are choked with weeds right now.  Kathy plans to get some fall vegetable crops into those extra beds if I'm able to get them prepared soon.

It's work that couldn't be done if we weren't retired and if we didn't love to develop gardens and landscaping.

Filling in the Design

I didn't plan to fill these beds with daylilies, but I'm in a race to get hundreds of them in the ground by the end of this week.  This morning I filled the bed on the right and started in on the bed beyond.  I took these pictures after breakfast, so there's a reddish cast to the light because of the low angle of the sun.

This angle of view gives you a better idea of how I'm using circles and curves in the back yard.  The lot is shaped like a quarter of a pie, and the house is a long box, so I'm using curves wherever possible.

In the bed on the right I started to introduce perennials other than daylilies.  I liked the effect, so after lunch I went out and bought a carload of more perennials for the next areas I plant.  Some of the plants in the near beds were "cooked" on Friday or Saturday when I dug and planted them.  I may have laid them out in the sun too long.  I think four to six of them are looking so bad that I'll be amazed if they recover.  I corrected my methods in case what I did was the cause of the plants' distress.

This is my "keeper" bed for further evaluation of selected seedlings.  At the moment it's about half-full.  I expect I'll fill it and overflow it by the weekend as I work through all the pots in the driveway.

 Meanwhile, my contractor, Steve Brandt, who has been working out rain drainage away from the basement and grading the top of the back yard, got the idea of breaking up the soil of my seedling beds with his backhoe.  This was a godsend, because there are big chunks of stone and Highway 94 asphalt in the ground.  The rubble dates back to a request by the former owner for some "fill" from the highway crew.  He should have said "clean fill."  Instead, he got something that must have caused no end of tale-telling at MODOT.  Some joke, huh?

This is my seedling crop now.  Only a few crosses haven't germinated.

These will be transplanted in August to the beds that Steve broke up yesterday and today.  I'll go through them with my tiller and amend the soil with compost as I go.

Blooming in the display bed in front this morning was a breathtaking large flower by Gerda Brooker, AUTUMN REFLECTION.  It is registered as a "tangerine self."  If you factor out the red shift from morning sunlight, what I have is a creamy yellow that wouldn't ever pass for tangerine color.

It's a stunning flower out of J.T. Davis x Tet. Siloam Ralph Henry.  Maybe it will show a tangerine side to its personality when established in the garden.

A Man and His Horse

In the early morning mulch
With a tiller in my hand
With a sweatband on my head
And a horse at my command,
I’m a long way from done,
Don’t know how long I will last
In the early morning mulch,
With a tee shirt from the past.

See the corner, see the shade,
See the place we’ll make a berm.
There’ll be dogwoods in a glade
On a mound we hope is firm.
There’ll be flowers on the curve
When we line them out in blocks;
All the colors, all the forms,
All the social after-shocks.

What a shape we have to tend,
Like a quarter of a pie,
With a swamp we must rescind
Where the low spots never dry.
So we garden on the left
And we garden on the right,
Always thinking of a curve
For the senses to delight.

This will be a redbud stand
In a shape that’s like the lot.
We’ll have three there on a berm
Long before the Spring is shot.
We’ll have veggies in the back,
With a view of Heron’s Cove,
With the company of birds;
This is why we made the move.

Things look closer than the pic,
It’s a wide-angle, you know.
It is only half a click
To the haven down below.
There are turtles on a log,
There are ducks upon the dock.
You can feel how tired I am,
Like a run-down mantel clock.

One more pass before I quit,
Then another, then again.
Haven’t done this since Vermont,
Sixteen years ago was when.
I was fifty, I was fit,
There was a river in the view;
Now we live on Hidden Lake,
KEB and me, and sometimes you.