The blog posts I’ve been writing this spring are a primitive narrative of garden preparation and planting, a spring ritual which seems to come simultaneously with garden cleanup. This post finishes the sequence. Gradually the bits and pieces come together. The new front garden gate is finished.
Imprecise but functional
Some nooks and crannies are beginning to come together.
The side garden is constantly mutating.
I was reminded, reading back a few posts, that we lost a lot of irises last fall. Heavy rain was the culprit. The surviving irises are mainly familiar heirloom varieties but many of the expensive modern irises were rescued and will get another chance.
It was an eventful two years, but this rhizome finally got to bloom.
I can’t bring myself to say much about the world beyond the garden, though I feel we are watching a change as profound as any of us have ever seen. I can’t say I’m surprised, after forty years of historical writing. At the moment I am just not sure what to say. I fear I may be turning into an old bore, just repeating that my novel Macaque was always serious. As for us, our fate is partly up to others, and I hate that feeling. A philosopher might say the world always seems to be ending and of course in some ways it always is.
A lavender mood. With orange fur.
Dutch irises voting to be part of reality en masse.
I think most Old Age and New Age gardeners would agree that it’s good to talk to your plants, or at least inevitable. Opinions might vary about the plants talking back, but I have seen it before. It’s not the commonest thing, but it is not entirely unknown.
But I won’t go on and on about iris-talk.
Unlike René Magritte’s "Ceci n’est pas une pipe," this really is a cement owl.
There are other things to look at in the garden, such as saxifrage, also known as rockfoil.
And this rose-breasted grosbeak, which was desperate to be photographed.
“Blue McQuary” heirloom woad among the daylilies.
I don’t want to end this post without mentioning woad. Woad is available from specialty seed suppliers. The ancient Britons must have grown it by the ton, to dye with and to paint themselves blue. A couple of years ago I grew a sizable tub of woad, but in the end the rigors of actually extracting the dye kept me from painting myself. By the time I had my woad it no longer seemed worth the trouble, and possibly it never was. But I had a new respect for the industry of the ancients who made this stuff. We sort of owe it all to them. Anyway, woad escapes. It is a friendly, long-blooming volunteer and it should have its place in any Belgian or Pictish flower border, at least for old times’ sake and to keep the ancient Romans on their toes.
The Treachery of Images, 1929, by Belgian artist Réne Magritte.
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