Category: Garden

The roar of spring

March 3rd, 2018

March is lioning. Wind howled through the night on March 1st. It shook the house, rattled the windows, scoured the lawn of leftover leaf detritus from winter.

Now, Saturday morning, with a cat on my writing arm, I look out the window and see a red cardinal and tiny house finches perched on the bare branches of the oak, in the slant of morning sun, looking for the feeder we took down so it wouldn’t become a missile in the 60 mph wind gusts. Soft grey doves bob their heads searching for seeds on the ground. The birds twitter and chirp, awaiting their breakfast. It looks warm out there, but it’s not.

A couple of weeks ago, spring teased. For more than a week in February, highs were in the 60s and 70s. I took advantage of the weather. On lunch breaks and between swim meet sessions, I put on my garden gloves and hat, dragged the hose from out front to out back, and grabbed a shovel to dig holes in the new beds I cleared at the top of the hill.

As hopeful as I was that winter was finished, I reluctantly allowed myself the possibility that it was not. I wanted to start transplanting everything I knew I wanted to move: bee balm, Shasta daisies, Rudbeckia; hydrangea, Echinacea, lilac. I really didn’t want any of those to die at my hands because I had moved them too early. So instead I moved a few testers — plants that might not survive anyway (rosemary), and a few that if they did survive, great!, but if not, that’s fine too (mums). I sowed some seeds as well — chamomile, feverfew, Texas bluebonnets I bought on my trip to Arizona with my girlfriends. The packets said to sow when the ground was workable (not frozen) in spring.

I hope the seeds didn’t blow away.

Even though I knew it could get cold again, and the work I did could be destroyed, I’m bummed by the setback. Highs are not in the 70s anymore, and more depressingly, lows are in the 20s for the next week. The wind still gusts as I write, and this is the first weekend in ages that I have free time and had hopes for finally getting into the garden. It’s March! The month I’ve been waiting for! Spring!

It’s supposed to get into the 40s today. I can at least walk the garden looking for frost damage on emerging leaves and flower buds. Tomorrow it will get into the 50s, then drop into the 20s at night. I’m tempted to move the blueberry bushes and maybe a couple other things I want to move around. I’m just not sure if it’s smart to do that when I know temperatures will drop at night (I’m guessing it’s not).

This feels like the longest winter. I have no idea how we survived Minnesota. I’m done with the lion. I’m ready for the lamb.
Can’t stop my brain

January 14th, 2018

I am out of control. Once Christmas ended, and the holiday decorations were all stored and put away in the cubby hole under the stairs, and winter became plain old winter with nothing left to look forward to in it, my mind switched gears to gardening.

Yep. Gardening. In January.

Two years ago, I embarked on a grass-killing spree in our front yard. I converted about 1000 square feet of lawn into flower beds. This past year, I set my eyes on the giant hill out back, the one that makes me feel like I’m going to have a heart attack every time I mow it. I determined to convert that to flower beds as well, and every time I pushed the mower up the hill, or along the hill, or tried to keep the mower from pulling me down the hill, I cursed the grass and dreamed of the day we would never have to mow it again.

Dead grass out back. No more mowing. Yes more butterflies… if winter would ever end.

In November, I killed it. I killed it dead. Seeing all that dry yellow that we’ll no longer have to mow makes me ridiculously happy. In fact, I’m going to expand it because I don’t like the shape, and I messed up the curve down there at the bottom, and what the hell, I just spent $50 on seeds, and an expanded swath of dead grass means less to mow and more room for flowers.

This is where the crazy comes in. Since the beginning of January, when I’m not at work, I think of nothing but gardening. I scour Pinterest for planting combinations. I measured all the beds on a day last week when the temperatures finally broke freezing. I scribble notes in my gardening-specific composition book. I check my gardening-specific blog for when things happened last year, jot notes down in my gardening-specific calendar, and draw plans in my gardening-specific graph-paper notebook. I even created a spreadsheet with all of our current plants, the seeds I ordered, and when to plant and where.

In my sweaters and fuzzy slippers, sipping coffee, I walk from window to window, staring out, studying the spaces, thinking about what we already have that I can transplant to another part of the garden, thinking about what new plants I want to buy, considering color and height, reminding myself of the budget, moving another choice from the “buy at the nursery” to the “start from seed” column, checking to see if my on-paper plans will scale to the real landscape, visualizing. Dreaming about what it’s going to look like when everything fills in. I’ve probably worn the paint off the gardening section of the bookshelf, pulling Essential Perennials for Every Garden and Gardening for Birds, Butterflies, & Bees nearly every day to check, “What was that purple plant I liked?”, “What were those native grasses?”, “What will look good with the bee balm? The yarrow?”

I. Just. Can’t. Stop.

I thought I had gotten to a stopping point yesterday. On Friday I spent about 6 hours, and on Saturday about 10 hours, sketching real-deal, true to scale, plans for both the front and the back: about 2000 square feet of butterfly and bird garden.

Once the plans were set, I ordered seeds and made month-by-month purchase lists in Trello so we’ll make sure to budget the right amount each month.

And I was SO PLEASED! I thought maybe I’d stop thinking about it all. I thought my brain would be free to consider other things, like blogging or our children. And it kind of was, for a minute.

Now I want to just finish this post so I can look up shrubs that might do well on the side of the house where they get blasted by wind, and I want to think about the mailbox bed which I neglected to think about in all the thinking about the bigger gardens. Even though the plans are finally made, I keep doing all the same things I was before, only this time with plans in hand. I hold the back hill plan up against the sliding glass door while I look out at the bird feeder and think, hmmm, will that plant actually work where I think it will? (No.) Then I want to redraw everything, or note alternative plants in case the nursery doesn’t have the one I want.

The good news is that I’ve transitioned from “The amount of space to plant is overwhelming there’s no way I can do this!” to an actual plan, with dates of when to do what. I’ve already put in vacation time for my annual gardening week.

I’m very antsy to get started. I want to clean out all the old brush. I want to kill more grass. I want to learn when and how to prune the roses, how much to cut back the rue, what to do with the forsythia when it blooms. I want to start seeds, and move perennials, and see if I can successfully transplant the milkweed. But it’s only January 14! Only 3 weeks past the winter solstice! I can’t believe I have to wait a whole two months to start doing anything.

I don’t want to wish my life away. But I am. Just these two months. I wish winter were almost over so I could stop thinking and start doing.

This is my contribution to the daily challenge, entertain, as the garden seems to entertain me no matter what time of year it is, even if it also makes me crazy.
Morning amble

August 4th, 2017

I’m taking a day off today. We were planning to camp, but camping when both of us work full-time is a giant pain. It’s more stressful than it is fun, what with all the prep work and cleanup on each end of the trip, and having to leave immediately from work to drive and set up camp, and go straight back to work as soon as we return, while also needing to clean and air all the gear, deal with mountains of laundry, and somehow figure out when to shop for groceries. Plus the weather was supposed to be crummy, and it’s the last weekend before school starts.

So we decided to have a relaxing weekend at home instead, buying school supplies, puttering in the garden, and taking our new sailboat out. I slept until 7am this morning (an extra hour and a half!), unloaded and reloaded the dishwasher, blended a smoothie, slipped my bare feet into green rubber boots, and was in the garden by 7:20.

A cottontail bunny fled as my boots swish-swished through the dewy grass. Out back, our wildflower garden doesn’t look wild in an attractive way, in the stuffed full meadow way, where every patch of available earth bursts with shoots that clamber for the sky, competing for sunlight, waving grasses, flowers, and seed heads in an ocean of golden green.

Our wildflower garden is more of a tangled mess. Calendula, which appears to be the dominant competitor in the wildflower seed mix we sowed mid-April, grows tall and then flops over under its own weight, smothering other plants in a snarl of green snaky stems and yellow flowers. Dense clumps of Calendula, Salvia, and dill clamber for air right next to bare swaths of mulch. Next year, we will plant in rows, with intention, and I’ll use different seeds. The zinnias out front are everyone’s favorite this year, with their happy colors and ruffled petals. I’m sitting under the dogwood tree right now watching butterflies and bumblebees guzzle zinnia nectar, and hummingbirds like to drain them, too.

On my way to the chair I’m writing from, with my pen and pad and tea, thinking about the million at-home things I need to do today, I saw a monarch butterfly flutter up and down, round and round, around the milkweed. It fluttered, landed, fluttered, landed, then finally rested its spindle legs on the top of a milkweed leaf, pinned its wings back, and arched its abdomen to touch the tip of its hind body to the bottom of the leaf. Then, it wobbled away. When I inspected the bottom of the leaf, there it was: a monarch egg.

The milkweed staked its claim to the best real estate in the garden: in the foreground of the stairs that lead up to the front door. This was probably a mistake, to plant it in the most prominent place in the garden, the focal point of the face of our home. It’s not an attractive plant. It gets devoured by aphids (our milkweeds currently drip with their flea-sized orange bodies), it only flowers for a week or two each year, and it starts yellowing and getting leggy by mid August.

But, the butterflies! Butterflies adore the milkweed. The monarch is back as I write, gently opening and closing its clementine colored wings as it drinks deeply from one of the few remaining flowers. The little butter yellow butterflies frequent those flowers, too, as do swallowtails: black, yellow, tiger. And of course, the caterpillars. The kids and I inspect the plants for caterpillars every time we walk up or down the driveway, any time we walk up or down the front steps.

And I watch the milkweed from the lounge chair in the front window, where I write in the morning, work on my laptop in the afternoon, and drink cocktails and listen to records in the evening.

The milkweed itself is not pretty, but it attracts pretty creatures. So for now, it stays.

Monarch butterfly

Monarch caterpillar

My garden seat
I have a blogging problem

June 1st, 2017

I’m going on vacation today, and one of the things I’m most excited about is that I’ll have free time over the next few days to write, and to play with my blog(s). Before heading out of town, I opened my laptop to add my other sites to the menu here on Butterfly Mind, and as I added them, I realized I have five blogs. Five.

If you’re interested in sailing, gardening, words, or American literature, I’ve got blogs for you! While Butterfly Mind is the place where I share whatever thoughts alight on my screen or notebook pages, these other blogs chronicle journeys on the water, on the land, and in books:

Andrea Sails: these are the logs of our adventures on the water. The entries help me keep track of what I’m learning as I venture into this new-to-me world of wind- and human-powered boating.

Andrea’s Gardening Blog: this site is often the result of me blogging with dirt on my hands, from my phone, in the garden, right after I’ve put plants in the ground. I love having a searchable record as each month comes around where I can take a look to see what the garden was doing this time last year: what was blooming? How has everything grown since then? When did I sow those seeds?

Andrea’s Lexicon: these are words I collect that I think are cool. Sometimes I hear them in conversation, sometimes I find them in books. Most of them appeal to me because they’re fun to say. Haberdasher! See what I mean?

Andrea Reads America: this is the chronicle of my journey through the US in literature in three books per state. The three books must be set in the state and be written by an author who is from the state or who has lived in the state. For each state I am reading men, women, and non-Caucasian authors. I’m going in alphabetical order. I’m reading Michigan now, though I still need to write up my Massachusetts reads.

Alright, time for me to hit the road. I’m going to have a hard time deciding which one(s) of these to write for while I’m gone.
Garden infusion

May 27th, 2017

It’s that time of year again, when I get to sit under the dogwood tree and soak up the garden. I am amazed by how much is already happening out here from perennials we planted last year. They are thriving after having a year to get established, and many things are flowering that didn’t flower last year: all of the thymes — creeping, lemon, and regular old — , the rosemary, and the lavender is about to burst into bloom. Blueberries have formed, and the rue is already bushy, covered in yellow flowers, and crawling with caterpillars. It’s not even June.

Caterpillar on rue

Lavender buds

Blueberries forming

A breeze blows on the back of my neck and rustles the dogwood leaves above me. The morning sun is hot on my arm. I need to apply sunscreen. I’m on butterfly and bird watch.

It may be too windy for butterflies, or may be too early in the year, but we’ve got treats for them when their ready. I never appreciated the advantages of perennials, that they come back each year without me having to do anything. In Florida, we didn’t have winter to kill everything back. In Florida, gardening was a year round endeavor. I’m not sure perennial had meaning there.

I never knew how glorious they could be — a one time investment of work for a lifetime of beauty! The yarrow and indigo Salvia are already bonkers with blooms. The Echinacea and blanket flower have plump buds, the cat mint and Russian sage and Guara and columbine wave pink and purple flowers in the breeze.

Yarrow and bird bath

Blanket flower buds

Bee and indigo salvia

Guara

Echinacea

Columbine

I decided to put even more perennials in since they come back so full and vibrant each year — and because I can divide them and get free plants out of them — but I’ve also reserved a swath in front of my dogwood roost for annuals. I like to be able to try something new each year, and this year I went with yellows, reds, and oranges, with some white to break it all up. All butterfly flowers of course: scarlet sage, orange Cuphea, white Pentas, yellow, orange and pink zinnias, yellow Lantana.

The zinnias I planted from seed, and spent some time yesterday moving around to space the seedlings out. They’re doing well, but I am impatient for them to grow and bloom. That’s what money buys you in the gardening world: time. The more you spend, the less time you have to wait. I spent about $1.50 on a seed packet, and six weeks later I have about 50 zinnia seedlings 2-3 inches tall. I don’t know how much longer I’ll need to wait for them to blossom, but at blooming time I can guarantee I wouldn’t be able to buy even one flowering zinnia for $1.50.

I’m eager for the Lantana to fill out and cover the ground in front of the bird bath our daughter made me for Mother’s Day. I’ve put stones in it so butterflies can use it, too, and have a place to rest while they sip. So far I haven’t seen any birds or butterflies bathing or drinking, but I keep the water fresh anyway.

Bird bath, yarrow, and zinnia patch

Despite my impatience for things to grow and bloom, I think this is my favorite time of year in Appalachia: the time when I can sit in the garden and steep in the growth that’s happening all around. It still boggles my mind that a kernel as tiny as a sesame seed can become a knee-, or waist-, or chest-high organism with broad green leaves, bright flower petals, pistils and stamens and complex mechanisms for fertilization, and a renewable food source for other organisms. Life is miraculous to me. A kernal to a bush, an acorn to a tree.

Our yard is not a wilderness. A manicured garden is not the first thing that comes to mind when I think “nature.” But our garden is alive. And our intention with it is to attract more life. I want bees and butterflies, wasps and worms, spiders and sparrows, monarchs and moths. I can’t get enough of watching the world around me interact, of soaking it all in and wondering at the marvel of our existence.

This is my entry for the Daily Post prompt, Infuse.
Waiting for the storm

May 19th, 2017

All day I’ve waited for a storm. The forecast showed thunder and lightning today. Our new meadow garden at the top of the long hill, where the hose doesn’t reach, could use some water.

In the cool of morning, I went out in the front garden, where the hose does reach, and drenched the new plantings: Bananarama Lantana, Becky Shasta daisies, zinnias from seed, butterfly white Pentas, orange firecracker Cuphea, scarlet sage, purple sizzle sage, Franz Schubert phlox, Pink Showers guara, blazing stars, violet-flowered catmint and Russian sage and Beardtongue, Genovese basil, Italian parsley.

Out back, though. Out back is a bother. I can move the front hose back there, but it’s a slithering behemoth and a heavy pain to move. I can use the short hose that lives out back, but that requires spraying over a long distance to get to the new plantings — cone flowers, bee balm, luscious berry Lantana, Joe Pye weed. Instead, I thought, The storm will quench their thirst.

In the hot sun I filled pots with soil, soaked them with fresh water, and snipped cuttings from rue and yarrow to try to root them. I cut fresh growth with sharp scissors just below a leaf node and dipped the wound in rooting hormone. With the point of a pencil, I poked holes in the wet potted soil. I stuck the powdered stems in the dirt and tamped the soil to close the pencil dab.

The sky blackened over the mountains. The storm will water out back.

I took a cool shower, pulled on a sleeveless summer dress, painted my fingernails and toenails a pale pink, and pulled the windows down in case the storm blew through while I was out. I had a lunch date with my husband — falafel wraps and curly fries with cherry Coke — in downtown Blacksburg. We sat outside at a mesh wrought iron table and the wind blew our napkins into the street. We commiserated about the cats waking us up in the middle of the night, like our children did when they were babies. The table’s umbrella kept the sun out of our eyes, and I watched couples lunch at other restaurant tables along the sidewalk. My fingers were sticky after the baklava. Still no storm.

On my way home, I watched thunderheads build over the green mountains. The cloud tops bloomed an ominous gray with brilliant white highlights against the leaden depths behind them. Wind buffeted grasses on the hillsides, pressing swathes of thigh-high blades almost to the ground before they climbed up and got knocked down again. The hills undulated in grassy waves. Dirt and pollen gusted across the road in large yellow eddies, and bursts of wind thumped the side of the car.

Here it comes, I thought. Tree tops whipped in the wild wind. I drove over to the nursery to see if there was anything else our garden couldn’t live without. When I stepped out of the car, the blast was fresh and cool, and an elderly pair sat on a bench outside the shop watching it blow. Potted shoots bent in the breeze, and planted pots toppled off the outdoor tables with each gust. The light was dim; there was no sun at this point. I got back in the car and drove home, hoping to beat the rain.

Inside, I opened the windows and let the wind blow through the house. I photographed the cats while my coffee steeped, and settled into the lounge chair by the window, listening to thunder while I read The Bell Jar. I found myself getting more and more horizontal, until finally I was lying next to the cats, book on the floor, glasses in the window sill, napping.

When I woke, the world outside was yellow and bright. The driveway was dry. The mulch was dry. The sun shone happily. I hear wind — I hear it rustling oak leaves out back — but the sky is blue with white wisps of clouds.

I guess I need to go on out back and water.