gaude, gaude

Well, today the quilt "Serendipity" is renamed to "Gaude, Gaude". I just cannot resist a pun, and whenever I describe the border to someone that's what I call it. May as well make it official! The border, btw, is colorwash, mostly red - orange - yellow - tan - cobalt - magenta - pink - mint. Actually much more attractive than the color list makes it sound. The darkest of the 28 fabrics curve in a vertical wave from edge to edge, and at the extremes I've inserted half-stars, fussy-cut. 8 2" squares will make a 12" border. I'll have some plain slabs outside the colorwash to frame it.

The butter daisies are drama queens: every day it's either "I'm dieing of thirst!" or "I'm drowning!" I'm going to plant lantanas in their place. This is a major change for me: I first saw lantana growing as the perennial it is in Sta. Barbara, CA, and ever since I left hardiness zones 8+ it has just seared my soul that they're too tender in the colder areas. Well. Now it's also seared my pocketbook. I may have to dig them up and try to overwinter them indoors.

Meanwhile, my first daylily has popped a bud; today there were two blossoms glowing a pastel terracotta and yellow. I have others, all different colors, but the first one is magic -- as all the first blossoms are. My tomatoes have laboriously squeezed out a single button that may become a fruit if the squirrels leave it alone. I've already eaten some of my chard, the victims of the first thinning. In addition to the lantanas I have baggies full of daylilies and irises, from the garden of a friend who wanted to thin out her plants a little. If it weren't so dang hot I'd transplant them tonight. But they'll keep for a little while. The rabbits and squirrels have gotten out of the habit of munching on the baby Cladrastis, so unless it gets buried in ice this winter it looks like it'll live. Gaude, gaude indeed.

with butter daisies all in a row

Front flower bed stretches across the front of the house from the front step to the carport. It's bounded by the step & driveway, and the house itself, and the brick paver walkway I laid by putting the pavers right down on top of the grass. Don't scold. I'm 54 and not about to dig up the sod, even things out, pour sand, tamp it, grunge up some concrete, lay the pavers, sweep more sand into the crevices, and then curse the whole mess because 2 pavers are in wrong way round and immoveable. Nor can I pay for someone else to do it -- the school salary isn't that much more than the church salary was!

Two weekends ago I dug out the irises and most of the weeds in the flower bed -- quite enough digging without laying the pavers! -- including the sod in the notches created when I laid the pavers diagonally. (It looks fantastic, btw, much nicer than laying them normal to the house would have been. And I had a purpose for those notches, too. Read on!) There had been two problems with the irises. First, they had grown together so tightly they were hardly blooming. Second, when they did, the flowers were white, which just disappears against the white siding. Rather than paint the house I decided to replace the old irises with younger, more widely spaced, and more colorful irises.

It wasn't just irises and weeds, either. A previous owner had edged this bed with limestone posts set on their sides, 10 1/2 of them, each one about 4" square by, what? 15" long? Something like that. A bear to pry up out of the ground, and then they left a trench. I filled it with what I had at hand: cotton burr compost for part of it, and composted manure for the rest. They're now on my useless sidewalk, getting the dirt washed off in the rain when we have rain. They're good for keeping pots off the concrete, so they can drain properly.

One evening we had a rain shadow -- cool air blowing westward from thunderstorms traveling east -- and I was able to get out there and dig out the last 15 square feet of wild violets, dandelions, bindweed, and grass. So the following Saturday, that would be last Saturday, I went to a nursery and got plants. I hadn't been to a real nursery in a while: there's one in Independence but they're odd -- they go through spasms of not wanting to sell me stuff. So I went to one in Liberty. I was shocked at the prices -- they seemed so high! But later I went to the local hardware store and their prices were almost as much and the plants were in wretched condition -- so I'm glad I paid the dollar more for a trunkload of healthy, robust plants.

I did get what was on sale, mostly: portulaca, thyme, potentilla, and melampodium. The potentilla is a low-growing version with the standard buttercup-yellow flowers, and they popped into those walkway notches very nicely. I got 4 varieties of thyme: T. serpyllum, T. praecox, wooly thyme, and silver thyme. The first 3 are also very low-growing, and also went into the notches beautifully. The silver thyme is a variety of T. vulgaris, so it grows taller, but it is so lovely, and very strong-scented, I just went ahead. Some of it is in the notches, some in a row behind the first.

A previous owner had sedum, a very large, compacted plant of large blue leaves, in a corner of the bed, and I had kept it as other things left -- a white rose, the irises, volunteer oak, maple, and redbud trees, and those weeds. Now that all the grunge was out, I also dug up the sedum, but instead of throwing it away I split it into 8 pieces and planted them, some in the notches and some behind, between the notches. Aside from one section which the mail carrier has a hard time not kicking, they've settled in well and look like they may be growing, too!

Behind the notches, up the middle of the bed, I planted 38 portulaca (I'd bought 40 on sale, but one cell was innocent of all plant life and I broke a 2nd when I stopped mid-planting to pull a violet and pulled the portulaca off its root instead). Doubled flowers, a soft yellow, a variable peach pink to rose, and a good strong reddish orange. They didn't like life in their cells and flopped around a lot during the planting ordeal, but we had 3 hours of a good, gentle rain and they couldn't be more pleased now.

A couple clumps of melampodium, common name butter daisies, add a little higher punctuation of yellow, and I'm promised that they will seed all over so they will join the wild violets as something I'll never be able to get rid of. Today this is a good thing! Ask me again in 5 years. All these annuals and crawly perennials join a witch hazel which I put in the bed next to the front step a few weeks ago, and 3 daylilies which were refugees last spring from a bed around the corner of the house, which would have a long row of them except I hit bricks where the last 3 would have gone. So they're out front. Add a layer of cedar mulch (and it needs another one, to cover the bare spots I missed because it was getting dark as I finished up) and you'll see a warm-colored nice little flower bed with lots of potential and a bunch of rather happy plants.

The irises are ordered, also daffs and tulips. The irises will add some blue and pink to all this yellow & orange, although I'm thinking of putting the pink irises & daffs off to one side, where there are currently pheasant-eye daffodils in sore need of thinning out, and dark irises. (Now, where's the sense in planting dark irises in the shade and white irises in front of white siding?) I wish to order some more daffs, and there's space in that bed for 3 roses. Oh, so many lovely plants! So little time, space, money, and energy.

Irises: www.suttoniris.com
Daffs, tulips, crocus, grape hyacinth, squill: www.brentandbeckysbulbs.com
Very special daffs: www.web-ster.com/havensr/mitsch/index.html
Roses: www.pickeringnurseries.com