Running With Stilettos
Blue has always been my favorite color (followed by red, so does that mean I have a split personality?) I spent half the evening last night taking glamour shots of all the blue flowers in my garden. Here’s a link to the entire collection on “Open Salon”…
http://open.salon.com/blog/runningwithstilettos/2012/06/07/summertime_blues
I never thought much about the personality and variety of daylilies until I stepped outside the other day with my pocket camera and snapped a bunch. Yes, of course I’ve planted them all myself over the past several years, but I can’t say I really looked all that closely.
What a wonderous display! Some throw their narrow petals outwards like cheerleaders enthusiastically waving pom poms. Others have all the subtlety of Gypsy Rose Lee, with a colorful “look at me” vibe. Still others seem more tightly wrapped, like a shy little girl pulling her cardigan sweater close. Some even remind me of amaryllis at Christmas.
I posted a gallery of shots at Open Salon. Here’s the link. Enjoy what’s left of summer!
http://open.salon.com/blog/runningwithstilettos/2011/08/01/dramatic_daylilies
In the days before I had a big flower garden (which puts me roughly at just last summer), I hadn’t a clue about what fun and suspense and celebration and even mourning could go into watching stuff grow. Or not. Up until then, my gardening experience was pretty much marked by failure and neglect. Once upon a time, when the kids were much younger, I had the spouse dig me up a stretch of the front yard and I kept a few perennials growing, even mulched it with cocoa bean hulls from time to time. But then came the horseback riding accident fifteen years ago that put me in a body cast for three months, and by the time it didn’t hurt so much to bend over again, the weeds had taken over the place. I knew my limitations and gave up.
Now life’s quite a bit different, and by just how much can be measured by the surprise and excitement I felt when I stopped at my local plant nursery a few days ago to pick up a few more delphiniums. Next to the checkout counter lay a single stalk of sedum, with large white flowers about to open and bi-colored leaves. Now generally I don’t even LIKE sedum…but I could appreciate a natural work of splendor anyway. And when I remarked at its beauty, the gal at the counter urged me to take the orphaned stalk, cut the stem back a little and stick it in the ground in the hope that it would take root.
I did, and now every day is marked by a trip out to the lone stalk of sedum with a watering can and a cautious hope that the plan might work. Like a mother hen waiting for her egg to hatch. Yes, I admit to being easily amused…but I’m so glad I have this for a reason! And to revisit the reason I’ve got the gardens in the first place, turn back to Wildflower seeds and beer to see how the gardening story started.
The grass in the front yard is chin deep on the retriever. Days of torrential rain have kept it too wet to cut, as well as filling the national news pages with tales of catastrophic flooding, human misery, disaster, closed highways, swollen rivers, sand bags, and the emptying of Lake Delton here in Wisconsin.
But there’s always a silver lining somewhere for someone, and right now it’s a banner year for my garden. Not that I have a baseline of comparison! Before this summer, I had always considered myself a person who held the kiss of death for plants in my small-ish hands. I didn’t think of myself as a gardener of any sort, much less one with a sense of optimism.
But the coral bells, the delphiniums, the phlox and clematis and peonies and coneflowers are just bursting out of the soil. This is their debut summer to shine. Last year around this time, they were just getting their roots wet, and I still had an aching back from digging out the rocks they replaced. But it’s a long, sweet story. To read more about it, turn to “Wildflower Seeds and Beer.”
