Doesn't it seem like most people who blog about gardening describe it as a restorative activity? They commune with nature, they soak up the sunshine, they spot a fairy or two lurking under the leaves of their innominata obscura.
I, on the other hand, hack grimly at weeds and peer grimly at dead things and stomp grimly inside to blog about it in between swipes at my itchy legs.
So cheerful! I know!
I think I like garden-blogging more than I like gardening. At least it lets Future Jamie sort her garden ideas into Okay vs. High-Octane Improbable.
When we moved in there were some landscaping features that I knew I wanted to change. There were these hideous broadleaf hosta variants under the dining room window that had to go, and these little yews in the beds at the front of the house that also attracted my ire. One of the yews was destroyed in a 2005 ice storm and I dug up the other, but then I was left facing the sad reality that not much would grow in the spot where they had lived: it's sheltered from both sun and rain. (Oh! Except this excrescent vine with which I have been waging a perennial battle. I'm winning this year.) I've been slowly adding hostas to those spaces, here a hosta, there a hosta, everywhere a hosta, like a surprisingly quiet Old McDonald's farm. It might be nice to have something there with a little more height, but when I asked about that at the garden store they recommended -- wait for it -- a nice yew.
I also dug up the ugly giant broadleaf hostas under the dining room window and put in tiger lilies. They have been fine for the first half of the season, but they are done blooming in mid-July and then the weeds take over the joint. This year I thought I'd fight back: I'd cut them down to the ground and put in some pretty annuals. Except! It turns out that if you cut back the tiger lily foliage it will get indignant. It will say, "Hey, this is MY bed (despite my letting it go to the dogs for every one of the past...hm...8 years, could it be?) and these newcomers are NOT welcome." They grew back vigorously, crowding the pretty new annuals. I'm wondering if I should have predicted this, but...no. If you cut back daffodil or tulip foliage it does not regrow itself like a petulant starfish flinging out new limbs willy-nilly. I whacked them all down to the ground again today and we shall see if this is the final word on the topic. I do not intend to lose an argument with a PLANT, dernit.
The little herb garden I planted three years ago (the picture is from 2013) is doing well. Since I claimed the space from a zone that had been entirely grass, I still have to deal with grass encroachments. Tonight as I was telling the grass to get back to its own side of the bricks, I noticed a lovely little swallowtail caterpillar and a suspiciously denuded parsley plant. I put in four parsley plants and I have yet to make chimichurri, so I will not begrudge the caterpillar his parsley.
I love chimichurri but it is one of those words that lurks coyly in a hidden recess of my brain. I always have to work my way up to the actual word: you know, that sauce, it's green, with parsley, South American, goes nicely with meat, starts with a "ch." Do you have words like that too? Perhaps the act of typing it repeatedly for this post will serve to cement it in a spot whence I can snatch it up more readily for all those future conversations about chimichurri that doubtless await me. But given the state of my brain lately, I sort of doubt it.
(Ending on a grim note, natch.
Yours in bleak garden-blogging,
Jamie)
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