Sometimes when I look at my garden...er, no, make that every time I look at my garden--I'm overwhelmed by a feeling of utter futility. For all the hours spent weeding and planting and lugging soil, and all the achy muscles afterward, after 15 years it still often looks like I'm only getting started.
To keep from being completely disheartened, I put on blinkers and look for the patches that are achieving that close-packed, cottage-garden atmosphere that I'm laboriously trying to achieve. This was a particularly useful exercise this weekend since everybody has been flattened by a particularly vicious cold and no work could be done at all.
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| This sedum has filled in a rocky niche in the front garden. |
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| The sunrose is twining among assorted variegated perennials. |
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| For a limited time only, the flowers are cooperating in putting on a pastel fireworks display. |
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| Calendula and visitor |
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| Two-spotted ladybug (no, really, that's its name!) on caterpillar-nibbled leaf |
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| These birds, sent to me by my friend W. after my father's death, appear both smug and snug about their little house with its sedum-planted front yard. |
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| Of course, they have their own bookshop. Otherwise how else would they be able to get "Peeple" magazine? They don't have a Twitter account, so they can only tweet, not Tweet. |
Cute! You should see my deer ravaged garden, it would make you feel a whole lot better!
ReplyDeleteAh, yes, deer...my mom has contended with them for years, definitely a love-hate relationship going on there! She loves to see them with their fawns, but hates to see the twigs they leave on the trees...one year a doe came and ate all the petals off all the daisies, leaving just the middles. It was like finding that some kid had slurped all the icing off the cupcakes and left just the cakey part behind.
ReplyDeleteYour yard looks beautiful, Chris, but I know what you mean about a work-in-progress. I cringe every day I walk past the mess I've made of the front yard, with its tufts of straw spreading into the pathway and the meager looking garlic! But the garden is my therapist -- I dig and haul, tear things out, move things around -- and slowly my mood lifts. I fear, that with this kind of relationship, my yard will always look half-done!
ReplyDeleteAh, I'm sure somebody wiser than me has said something quotable and pithy about half-done-looking gardens and works-in-progress and "a gardener's reach should exceed her grasp' and dreams and stuff...Before I started gardening I kind of thought it would be like sticking furniture in a room and then just needing to dust now and then. Can't believe I ever thought that. But I do love pottering about in it.
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