Tag: gardening

September gardening

September 20th, 2015

Cabbages and pansies for garden boxes

We thought we were going to wait till spring to start any gardening, but none of us could stand waiting.

I’ve been poring over gardening books, planning the spring beds. Our house looked sad and bare, though, after we ripped out the previous owner’s shrubbery. So we decided, we can at least put in some evergreens for winter, right?

Hick’s Yew (Taxus x media “Hicksii”)

Japanese Holly (Ilex crenata “Helleri”)

With our freshly painted porch and door, we thought it might be nice to add some garden boxes too.

Fresh paint and garden boxes

We’ve never had garden boxes before. They are my new favorite thing about our house. Besides the turquoise front door. And the oak floors. And the kittens.

Pansies and flowering kale

We wanted something alive at our house when winter comes, and the man at the garden shop said pansies and cabbages would be great for garden boxes. The only real gardening I’ve done was in Florida, and I know nothing about winter plants. I am trusting blindly. Even if they don’t last through winter, though, they look awfully pretty now :-).

Garden box on the front porch rail
Hahn Horticulture Garden: a Microadventure

September 6th, 2015

My coworker Jeremey DuVall wrote recently about adventuring. Specifically, he wrote about taking more microadventures: little adventures taken at little cost, that take you out of your normal routine, and can be done in your own back yard or your own small town.

I took his advice today. For my birthday, my son gave me a book on butterfly gardening with native plants, and now I’ve been bitten hard by the gardening bug. With a naked lawn — a blank slate — I decided I wanted to go find some ideas. So in the early morning, before the tailgaters were out for the big game tomorrow, I packed a water bottle, my real camera, and a Luna bar; slathered on sunscreen and donned a baseball cap; strapped on my day-pack; and I walked across town, across the Virginia Tech campus, to the University’s horticulture garden.

And boy did I find ideas. Now I want a butterfly garden, an herb garden, a woodland garden, a meadow garden, a waterfall, a pond with lily pads, and much, much more.

https://me.sh/10j9up5l

I would also like to identify the plant in the images below. Its fragrance drew me across the entire garden, and I want one. If you know what this is, please let me know!

https://me.sh/wy9xnfr

I think my next microadventure might be a trip to the nursery.
In the weeds

June 21st, 2015

Weeds against brick wall

I know what I’ll be doing every day for the rest of the summer.

more weeds

red wheelbarrow

my conquest
Lavender

April 14th, 2015

I grew lavender in Florida. The world is a more beautiful place for the fragrance of lavender.

When we grew herbs in Florida, I would walk out in the garden every morning and run my hands through the lavender plants to release their perfume. In the coolness of dewy mornings it was a lovely fragrance – how to describe scents? Olfaction is the hardest sense to write. Lavender is herby and floral and evergreen, it is soft wood; it is both warm and cool like its flowers’ colors, light and silvery like its leaves.

Other times of day, when I worked in the garden, I’d brush against its fuzzy blue green needles to smell it again: with my forearm while I dug holes, with my shin as I walked by, with my shoulder when I crouched to investigate leaf bottoms, searching for butterfly eggs. By the end of summer, it was sometimes tall enough that I would brush it with my hip and a warm current of lavender fragrance would drift up and make me stop to breathe it in.

The best part of growing my own, and why I can’t wait to move and start cultivating it again, is that when it is in bloom, and even when it isn’t, we can have bouquets of lavender in our house. I’ll cut sprigs and spears and stems laden with tiny purple flowers, and I’ll fill glass jars with water, and I will place lavender nosegays in every room: on the dining and coffee tables, on the bar, on bright window sills, and best of all, on bedside tables, where we’ll drift to sleep breathing one of the loveliest scents of the earth.

Photo credit: A little arrangement by Lotte Grønkjær

For the month of April, I will be publishing a 10-minute free write each day, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Trying to get back into the writing habit.