Each Little World

The white garden

It's the rare gardener who has not been seduced by Vita Sackville-West's famed White Garden at Sissinghurst Castle. Certainly I count myself among their numbers. But though I love white flowers, I like too many other colors to be disciplined enough to limit myself to a one-color garden. Instead I let my white flowers act as dramatic accents. 

A recent article in The Guardian newspaper about The White Garden mentioned that many of its plants are too large for most modern gardens. This full-size, almost 60-year-old McIntosh apple tree is my equivalent. It's huge and scents the entire garden when covered with blossoms as it was this week.

The view of the tree from our neighbor's garden.

Equally fragrant, equally beautiful and even more dramatic in bloom is the diminutive crabapple, Malus sargentii 'Tina'

Tina has red buds which open white. She was blooming in the front garden while the big apple was in flower in the back garden.

I do have one small bed that's mostly white flowers including a white bleeding heart, Pulmonaria 'Sissinghurst White' and this Korean azalea, Rhododendron yedoense poukhanense 'Alba'

This Paeonia rockii from Seneca Hill has buds like giant marshmallows and massive ruffled flowers.

I've had good luck with foxgloves and just added this one, Digitalis purpurea 'Pam's Choice'

Primula sieboldii invaded by self-sown Trilliums

This massive Trillium grandiflorum was in the garden when we moved here.

One of the tiny "bells" from our Carolina Silverbell tree, Halesia tetrapetra. The falling petals carpet everything around the tree when they come down. We've surprised a lot of visitors with our "flowering" pine tree.

 

Spring green

Spring Green is a name familiar to most Wisconsinites as the location of Frank Lloyd Wright's masterful creation, Taliesin. At this time of year one can easily understand why the town fathers gave their community that beautiful, evocative title. Here's some of my own personal favorite Spring greens:

 

May is busting out all over: Part 2

Though our Purple Fountain Weeping Beech tree is the drama queen when it comes to leafing out, I've never met a tree that I didn't  love at this season of the year. Here are a few favorites from our spring garden.

Korean maple (Acer pseudosieboldiana):

Pagoda Dogwood (Cornus alternifolia):

Doublefile Viburnam (Viburnum plicatum tomentosum 'Mariesi'):

Tschonoskii maple (Acer tschonoskii):

LIttle Gem maple (Acer circinatum 'Little Gem'):

Golden Shadows pagoda dogwood (Cornus alternifolia 'Golden Shadows'); note the tip chomped by the rabbits:

May is busting out all over

Everywhere you turn something is unfurling in the garden. The leaves on the weeping purple beech (Fagus sylvatica 'Purple Fountain') seem to have exploded in just a day or two. This is a dramatic tree at any time but never more so than in May. It heralds the new season with hairy, pleated, bronzed leaves that brazenly shout their arrival as well as that of Spring.

Double bloodroot

Our garden has been the beneficiary of our neighbor's interest in spring ephemerals, both native and not. We've received many gifts of flower clumps dug up and handed over the fence. Others have arrived via seeds, wind and critters. Each spring our garden is filled with Dutchman's breeches, Merrybells, great white Trillium, checkered lily and Bloodroot — all from our neighbor.

Bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis) is wonderful at every stage and I never know where they may show up. They are also one of the rare plants whose double form is even more beautiful (all photos). 

I've purchased the double variety of Bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis 'Multiplex') four or five times over the years and have had no success with it. No matter where I planted it, it disappeared never to be seen again. That was the case until I got a clump in the mail from fellow-blogger Kathy Purdy of Cold Climate Gardening. Whatever the reason, her plant has come back beautifully and the clump seems to be increasing in place.

These photos were taken late in the day when the bright sun made it easier to capture a good shot. What that means is that these flowers actually open even more widely earlier in the day. While their many petals are still obvious in these pictures, the flowers are actually beginning to close up for the night.

Another sign of Spring?

We're in the midst of a big stretch of rainy weather. Anything to help replenish the groundwater depleted by last summer's drought is welcome. But there's still so much frozen ground that we're under flood warnings until the weekend. We've already got water in the basement and this morning I woke to a landscape covered in ice. And I just got a call that Olbrich is rescheduling the hands-on class, "Gardening with the Pros," that I was scheduled to take on Friday morning. Too wet to work in the garden whether you're a pro or an amateur!

Photos of my lolipop lilac and assorted maples taken with my phone.

Spring officially arrives

Yesterday afternoon about 3:30 p.m. I glanced out the living room window and was taken aback to see our resident ducks — Fred and Ethel — had arrived. As you can see in these photos, there is so little open water in our pond that I had no expectations of seeing them for another few days — if at all. They've been coming each spring as soon as the snow melts off the pond, typically arriving in mid-March. This is the latest date that they've landed since they started coming in 1998.

The life expectancy of Mallard ducks is 20 years so they must definitely getting up there in years, given we've been seeing them each spring for 16 years. And we have no idea of their age when we first saw them. They always look the same; Mark and I are the ones who are visibily aging.  

But it is a joy to see them as we've come to count on their annual visit. They animate the garden in a way that few other creatures do. Seeing them is the surest sign that Spring is really here despite the snow that's still on the ground.

 

No foolin'

Many parts of the country have suffered through a long, cold, very snowy winter. Unfortunately we count ourselves among that group. Though the temps have risen significantly and we've seen a fair amount of sunshine, the snow is lingering to say the least. You can get a sense of what I mean in this group of photos that comprise a brief tour of our front and back gardens. I wish it were an April Fool's joke but we're not laughing!

Looking west from the driveway:

Looking towards the house from the street:

A tighter shot of the same view shows how dirty, hard and crusty the snow is at the end of the season. Nothing pretty about it. The brown leaves you see on the left are Acers that hold their leaves all winter.

Looking from the east edge of our lot line where you can see our neighbor's bags of chopped leaves in his annual Maginot Line of demarcation:

We've come around the east side of the house and are now looking up the dry stream and across the pond (in the center) to the tea house:

Snow or no, we did grill out on Easter yesterday. Looking west across the deck:

If you enlarge this photo, you can see the clump of bamboo is righting itself after being buried under snow since Dec. 19. Pretty amazing recovery. This view is looking southwest from the front edge of the deck:

The next three images were all taken in the southwest corner of the garden where the big Austrian pine came down in December and took out two other trees. You can see sawdust, logs, the big stump and broken tree trunks:

The stump in the background (above) is a crabapple that we took out a number of years ago. The one sign of Spring that has me excited is the arrival of the first snowdrops. These are all doubles growing next to the cement foundation of the house on the south side. I picked my first bouquet to put on the kitchen windowsill for Easter. 

"Inside the Gardener's Head in Spring"

My concept for a fall silhouette using pine needles, seed pods, stones and other natural materials from the garden proved so frustrating that I gave up on it — and decided that maybe my winter silhouette was going to be my lone fiber project. Then, a book I'd placed on hold at the public library came in and changed everything.

"The Art of Embroidery: Inspirational Stitches, Textures and Surfaces" by Francoise Tellier-Loumagne is the most inspirational embroidery book I've ever looked at. It is less about technique and more about how to interpret your ideas in fiber. Great photo illustrations (also by the author) including stitch samples all done on heavy white paper making for the clearest instruction I've seen.

I was so excited by Tellier-Loumagne's book that I sat down and started another textile silhouette. This time I focused on Spring with all the greens pushing through the snowy winter detritus. I cut two silhouettes out of dark green net and then cut them into pairs of puzzle-like pieces. I experimented with a number of techniques for stuffing, stitching and attaching them to the black background. 

They're filled with felt, fabric, ribbon, threads pulled from assorted fabrics, and bits of green plastic bags. Some pieces have small pieces of white lace inside them but most of that fabric is melting across the large silhouette image, held in place with beads and sequins.

I've started a summer silhouette but my concept involves more preliminary background stitching than the first two pieces, and it feels more like a chore than creative work. Hoping to be ready to move on to the fun parts soon!

You can read about my winter silhouette, the first work in this four-part series, here.

First day of Spring: 2013

Last year on this date the garden was already quite green and growing due to our unseasonably warm temperatures (see picture above). Last year the high temperature for the first day of spring in Madison set a record at 81 degrees F. Frankly it was more than a little disconcerting to have it so hot so early in the season, but I am definitely no happier with today's predicted high of 19! And the forecast shows a possible two more inches of snow on Monday. Definitely very tired of winter and dreaming about seeing my moss garden again.

This was the scene on our side of town yesterday. Wind seems to be gone this morning and it looks like a sunny day at least. Photo by MPKing/Wisconsin State Journal.