May 2023: A Few Field Trips

I’m a little later than usual in putting together my roundup of garden happenings for the month of May. So far in June, John and I have spent one weekend camping at Spring Mill State Park, and I spent the following weekend catching up on a massive amount of work in my garden–hence the lateness of this post.

May had its own assortment of travel. Early in the month I went back to Twin Swamps Nature Preserve, located out past Mount Vernon, Indiana. The description of the preserve from an Indiana DNR information sheet describes it this way: Twin Swamps consists of a swamp cottonwood-bald cypress swamp and an overcup oak swamp, with an area of southern flatwoods between the two. This preserve is one of the few existing remnants of such communities which once occurred over large portions of the Ohio and Wabash River Valleys.

I’d gone there last year and enjoyed the walk, so I went back this year and brought waterproof boots. I really needed them! In one spot the water on the trail was at least 6″ deep. Twin Swamps is near Hastings plant nursery, where I often stop for plants for my garden. I also stopped at Hastings this year.

At the end of the month, John and I traveled to one of our favorite spots, Scratch Brewing, which is located near Carbondale, Illinois. They were offering a plant tour, so we signed up. It was really fun. One of the owners took a group of 15 of us tromping off through the middle of the woods where Scratch is located–seriously, tromping without any trails (the ticks were bad!). It sounds like he’d spent his childhood wandering through that woods and knew where lots of interesting plants grew. He picked a variety of plants then took us to two picnic tables in a clearing where he poured hot water over several of them to make teas that we could sample. He also brought some Scratch beers to sample that had been brewed using some of the plants we saw.

He clearly loved foraging and loved plants. One of his statements to the group was, “It’s just so amazing to me how many very different flavors exist here right next to each other.” There was also a moment when he pointed out a shagbark hickory tree, then paused while looking at it and said, “That tree has made beer.” He described the process of brewing new beers at Scratch that starts with a plant or fungus that they notice has an intriguing scent or an interesting flavor. The brewers at Scratch take that plant or fungus and experiment to figure out how to include some part of that essence in a tasty beer. It sounds like there are plenty of failures, but there are also some interesting successes. We sampled a few with a pizza after the tour.

In between the swamp and the brewery plant tour, there was plenty happening in my garden. I picked up a few more plants at the Master Gardeners’ Plant Sale and at a couple area greenhouses. Some of those plants ended up in a special new garden for Boo Boo. He’s buried under the broken concrete angel beside the rear bottle tree. I added hostas over his grave since he always liked to sleep under big hosta leaves. The new garden also includes some great shade plants. When I finished it, I was inspired to get all my fairies and mushrooms and toad houses out of storage, so it’s also a fairy garden.

Also in May, the last of the “spring-y” things like the irises finished blooming and we moved into solidly early-summer blooms like peonies and baptisia. I also had some nice blooms start on the native prairie plants I have planted in the dry, compacted “hell strip” located between the sidewalk and the street. And even the many leaf combinations among my plants have been beautiful to see. My lettuce sat and sulked for half the month and then took off at about the time that I’d been hoping to have eaten several rounds of it and removed it. I’d had other plans for the space where it was at, but delayed some of my additional planting.

Below, you can take a video tour of my garden and you can also flip through my photo highlights from the month. Each photo is labeled with more information about what’s in it.

April 2023: Greening Again

My garden really began to green up and fill out in April. Plenty of things had already begun to emerge from the ground in March, but the blooms and leaves really started to pop in April. You can get a sense of the progression of things in the photos below.

In April, the redbud ended its blooms and added its ever-lovely heart-shaped leaves. Multiple kinds of ferns sent tendrils out of the ground to unfurl in a multitude of sculptural ways. Epimediums sent their delicate, fairy-flower blooms up above new leaves that later spread to catch raindrops. Astrilbe leaves emerged with delicately-cut, feathery edges. Young wild ginger and hardy begonia leaves shimmered almost glittery when the sunlight hit them. My favorite bright orange tulips exploded across the garden under the maple tree. The irises were began their show. New growth and bright colors were everywhere. The one exception, though, were the azaleas out front that are missing a lot of their leaves after the unusually cold weather at Christmas. Time will tell if the bushes recover. They still managed to put on a nice show of color, but they promise to look very bare once the flowers fall.

Meanwhile in my vegetable gardening, the garlic powered onward in both of my main vegetable beds. I’m hoping I can find ways to fit other vegetables around it before it’s ready to harvest in June. I started some lettuce in a couple other beds, but it grew very slowly, so it’s also still taking up space at a time when I had hoped it would be grown and picked. My sweet potato, tomato, melon, and squash starts are growing nicely indoors and are past ready to go out, but are destined to fit around the garlic and lettuce.

May will bring much more planting and new plants in the spaces that April created.

April 2022: Spring Unfurls like a Fern

It’s amazing to see the changes that took place in my garden during the month of April!

The month began with the earliest blooms, which were mostly crocuses, still happening around my garden. The ground in my garden beds was still predominantly brown with some tufts of new green scattered here and there. By the end of the month, I was enjoying a riot of color and too many shades of green to count. The mid-spring blooms, including most of the daffodils, came and went, and we had moved on to the late spring bloomers like the tulips, tiarellas, and irises. By the end of the month, my garden beds were fully carpeted in lush, rich greens, and it felt like my garden was singing.

To get from the start to the finish, so much needed to unfurl from the earth. It all began small and compact before growing rapidly and expanding to quickly fill the available space. The process is pretty incredible to watch. You can see it happening in the photos below. If you flip through them, you’ll see the same plants getting bigger and broader through the month. You can also see the more short-lived flowers pop up and then disappear. Some of my favorites are the ferns whose tightly curled fronds make beautiful and interesting shapes.

I tend to feel like the end of April through the end of May is the best time in my garden. June brings heat with it, and the plants feel like they begin to shrink back a little in order to conserve their moisture. That, and my vegetables tend to get too big and too messy about then. Till then, everything will stay on the upswing of expansion and bright greens of new growth.

May 2021: Bold Color

All of the colors in my garden got bolder and brighter in May. The greens reached their brightest and fullest. Everywhere things leafed out nicely. The iris bed was full of blooms, including one fancy, purple-edged one that I separated last year from a plant at work that I really liked. The blackberries and raspberries were full of blooms.

I planted the tomatoes that I’d started indoors from seed. They’re an example of what tends to happen in my garden: I have very little space and so much that I want to plant in it. My intention was to maximize the small space in my west raised bed. I planted garlic there in the fall and it will grow until harvest time in June. So, I thought, maybe I could have empty slots between rows of garlic where the tomatoes would grow starting in May. I hoped that maybe the garlic would come out of the ground just as the tomatoes were getting big enough to need supports, and then the tomatoes would fill the empty space where the garlic had been. Well, of course the garlic didn’t come up in the neat rows that I planted it in so there weren’t clear spaces for the tomatoes. And the tomatoes are already expanding rapidly while the garlic still isn’t quite ready to harvest. So I’ve got a pile of plants, but hopefully it will all turn out ok.

My other raised bed will be home to sweet potatoes. Last year I struggled to keep the outdoor cats from using the sandy soil as a litter box, so this year I invested in some big hoops that are supporting bird net. It seems to be working well. In May I planted a couple sweet potatoes that I’d started myself. My shipment of sweet potato slips came at the beginning of June to fill the rest of the bed.

I went to one greenhouse in May to get some annuals for my planters as well as a couple new perennials, because it’s fun shopping for new plants. I went to fewer plant sales and greenhouses than usual this year, but I decided I really don’t need much and I didn’t need the temptation.

Also blooming this month were alums, baptisia, clematis, Virginia irises, and honeysuckles. The hybrid honeysuckle in the front was less-than-spectacular this year. Its blossoms are often plagued by aphids, and the aphids came early this year. I tried to salvage the blooms by spraying them with organic, insecticidal soap, but the aphids just came back. I still got some blooms, but they weren’t as energetic as they can be. The Japanese honeysuckle that makes a green privacy fence around my back yard put on its usual, heavily-perfumed show. I love working in my garden during its bloom time with its sweetness surrounding me, so it’s unfortunate that it’s officially an invasive plant. The native and hybrid honeysuckles I have support the insects and the hummingbirds but do not have the same intense scent as the invasives.

I’m happy to see my Dancing Crane Cobra Lily come back again. It spends most of the summer swamped among the hardy begonias at the side of the house. It’s an interesting plant with an interesting name. Apparently it’s a native of Asia. It looks very similar to the Green Dragons that are a native plant I’ve seen locally. I’d love to get one of those as well but haven’t been able to snag one yet at a native plant sale.

My third and fanciest azalea bloomed later than my other two. I planted it a couple years ago, so it’s still small. The other two weren’t very happy plants this year. I’m not sure what the problem is, but one had really rough looking leaves but good blooms and the other had ok leaves but its blooms were really patchy. Overall, they made a pretty spotty showing. I made sure to give them some fertilizer, and they’re already looking a little better.

Also, I’ve moved my peony around several times through the years in order to find a good spot for it. It’s actually one of the few plants that was here in the garden when I first moved into this house. It’s now landed in the front of the side yard, and I think it may finally be happy and have enough sun. I got several frilly blooms from it this year.

All of this expansion and blooming should set everything up to settle into summertime fruit and seed production during June.

April 2021: The Greening Returns

I’m a little later than I’d like in putting together my review of all the things that happened in my garden in April. Part of the problem was that I had a lot of photos to sort through. All month, plants were growing, expanding, and blooming. I’d catch a great color combination or combination of leaf textures one morning, and then by the evening the colors would have shifted or the shapes would have changed and it was a whole new and beautiful thing to see.

At the start of the month, the green had definitely begun to return to my garden. March had seen the emergence of all kinds of plants and several rounds of early blooms, so April was marked by a lot of expansion among my perennials and the later spring blooms. You’ll see that happening in the set of photos below. As always, you can click on any photo for a caption with more information about what you’re looking at.

The month started with unfurling ferns of all sorts, plus fritillaries, tulips, tiarellas, grape hyacinths, my later daffodils, and epimedium. When everything is so small and delicate, I imagine lots of fairies stopping by. For vegetables, I’d started a few tomato seeds indoors at the end of March and I had some lettuce outdoors that I’d tried to get going last fall. The lettuce didn’t do much until this spring, but I cut at least three rounds of salads off of it before cutting it down in May and starting some fresh greens.

The redbud tree our front put on its usual show all month. I love its progression from buds to full blooms that make the branches look zig-zaggy then the emerging, heart-shaped leaves changing to full-sized hearts. By the end of the month the perennials had expanded to fill their usual spots and the irises and azaleas were blooming.

Like I said before, April is always a very pretty month with many changes and lots to see!

May 2020: The Height of Green

I think May is the best month in my garden. Don’t get me wrong: I love all the seasons and the interesting and wonderful changes that they bring, but I think my garden looks its absolute best in May. All the perennials have reached their full size, everything is new and vibrant, and the sedum that lines the garden beds is in bloom. From here, the plants seem to settle in for the summer. They sit back and toughen up for the hot weather. The irises and sedums die back, shrinking a little. The summer weather takes its toll.

The redbud leaves held their most concentrated color at the start of May, making bright red hearts against the blue sky. By the end of the month, they had fully filled out and were providing full shade beneath the tree. Irises bloomed starting at the beginning of May–white and light purple first, then the special black irises I received from a friend.

My tomatoes, started inside under a couple small grow lights, went outside at the start of May. At first they sheltered under milk-jug covers, which protect from starlings and cool weather. We did, however, get an unexpected blast of polar temperatures soon after the tomatoes went out, so I borrowed some towels to add some extra insulation. The outdoor cats were interested in the process, so I suspect cat body heat also helped the plants make it through a couple cold nights.

Once the tomatoes went outside, I started a new round of seeds under my little grow lights. Eventually, these new plants went outside as well, and I started a third round of seeds.

In May, my sweet potato starts took off in my kitchen window. Only one had sprouted back in April, and soon it stretched all the way through the light fixture above it and reached the ceiling. Others started to sprout mid-May.

In May, all the honeysuckles bloomed, both the pretty, red native varieties that the hummingbirds love and the deliciously perfumed but terribly invasive nonnative variety.

The baptisias bloomed with their masses of bright flowers on spikes. I’m still trying to figure out how to limit the plants’ footprint because they get sprawly for my small garden, but they’re really beautiful so I keep them around.

My clematis bloomed. So did the raspberries and blackberries. The last of the azaleas bloomed. The Louisiana irises made their usual, unexpected appearances with brilliant pops of purple seemingly out of nowhere.

I made several trips to plant nurseries for a few more plants to fill a couple gaps in existing beds, to pick this year’s annuals for my usual annual planters, and to add a new garden space under the magnolia tree. I love plants and there are so many fun and interesting varieties! I’m eager to see how the plants do in the space under the magnolia.

I love May.

March 2020: The Quickening

I just finished reading a book called Botanical Folk Tales of Britain and Ireland by Lisa Schneidau. It’s organized not by seasons but by the turning of the year. Its chapters are: Asleep in the Dark, The Quickening, Struggle and Hope, Joy and Sunshine, The Height of Green, Ripening Time, Harvest and Home, and The Turning Wheel. I like the poetic descriptors for the seasons within the seasons.

This March has definitely seen the quickening. The very first day of March gave me the first little flower surprise of the year. I was spending a little time with the outdoor cats when I happened to glance at the dull, overwintering grass and realized that there were two jewels that had appeared seemingly out of nowhere.

I’d completely forgotten about the bag of iris bulbs that I’d planted last fall. It had been an impulse purchase at Lowe’s and I wasn’t expecting much. But here were some returns on that investment, and they were beautiful.

it was not much farther into March when the magnolias were clearly preparing to burst forth. As they moved from buds to full blooms over a couple weeks, the other flowers in my garden gradually shifted. The snowdrops and crocuses that began blooming in February slowly faded and daffodils and hyacinths took their place.

The magnolia dominated my garden with its usual splendor. Then, more green shoots from my perennials began to emerge. I worried that my raspberries didn’t like the spot I made for them last fall, but then I got another surprise: bright green leaves suddenly fanning out on the canes.

By the end of the month, nearly everything was green. The ferns were curling and twisting their way out of the earth. The early blooming perennials like the tiarella were expanding to make frothy mounds of leaves. The curled shoots of hostas were poking out of the ground and slowly unfurling. Healthy leaves promised tulips in April.

I started some seeds and such in March, too. On March first, I put some sweet potatoes in water, hoping they’d start sprouting. Mid-March, I started some tomatoes and put them under grow lights indoors. They should be nice and big, but not too big, when it’s time to put them outside. I tried not to do too much planting, though, so hopefully nothing will get caught in a final chill should we get one.

One additional point of interest: archaeologists working across the alley from us. There will be a big apartment building going in there and it’s funded with HUD money so they have to complete an archaeological survey. The archaeologists did some test digs and then brought in a backhoe. I thought it was interesting, and (surprisingly) the cats did, too. Lady Morgaine was very intrigued by the backhoe.

The photos below are in chronological order so you can see my garden changing as the month goes by. If you click on any individual photo, you’ll get a slideshow and some basic plant information.

Re-Creation

I never imagined exactly how much a feeling of lightness would come over me during the first weekend after the EPA subcontractors finished their work in my yard. I knew that I’d been feeling a lot of stress and anxiety. I knew that I’d been trying to keep my expectations for my garden low and that I’d decided to stay out of my yard till the work was over. I didn’t buy plants. My gardening activities were limited to removing all my art and digging up plants that would be in harm’s way.

My garden still looked good. The plants came up as usual. The subcontractors didn’t destroy any of my flower beds. Things were good. But, that first Saturday I came out and started working and I felt such joy. I brought the first of my garden art out of storage, and I went to a plant nursery and treated myself to a few new plants. It was a perfect day to garden, and at the end of it my empty planter was filled and some bright bits of artwork were scattered around. I felt like life was finally, truly coming back to my garden. As an added bonus, this first weekend came at the absolute height of the blooming of the honeysuckle along the back fence. The air itself was intoxicatingly sweet.

I’ve had several more weekends to work since then, and things have shaped up more and more during each one. Because there was a time that I feared my entire garden would be dug up and destroyed, I’d pulled out all of the garden art from across my entire yard. I’d also pulled out a variety of plants and had prepared to pull even more. In the end, I would not have needed to move as much as I did, so it’s taken longer than necessary to put everything back.

At this point, I’ve gotten around to every garden bed except for the bare earth where I hope to grow berries and vegetables once more. There was no getting around having this area horribly compacted, since it was the machinery’s only route into my yard, but now it will take work to make it good for plants again. I’m also trying to plan better so I can contain some of the things I had planted there but that had spread beyond my intention. Since this is one of the original parts of my garden, I’m enjoying the prospect of a little bit of redesign.

Meanwhile, CATS! The Ladies are absolutely lovely as ever. It’s so calming to watch them survey the world from their chair at the back door. Perry continues to get daily walks. He continues to enjoy checking out the EPA subcontractors’ heavy equipment. He continues to bite.

Meanwhile, it appears we officially have porch cats. They’ve appeared one by one over the past nine months. It turns out our neighbor has unknown quantities of cats inside her house and when the boys become too big a problem she throws them out (though she still cares about them and feeds them).

The boys had all kept their distance until Captain Scrappy showed up and claimed our side porch. Now he’s always here. He’s incredibly sweet and lovey, but he’s not very bright. He follows me around constantly in the garden and then rolls all over whatever I’m focusing on. He’s flattened my garlic and he’s terrible when I’m trying to put weed killer on the trees of heaven that are sprouting everywhere from tree roots wounded by the EPA-related digging.

Two of Scrappy’s brothers also hang out in my garden a lot of the time. We’ve managed to get all three to the Humane Society to be neutered, which Perry is very happy about. Their presence tends to ruin Perry’s walks. There are other brothers roaming around, though they’re less often in my yard, so this may be an extended project.

Everything Non-Remediation

Throughout all the EPA lead remediation work, things have continued to bloom and grow in the rest of my garden. There has been plenty of beauty, though I haven’t wanted to do much work outside while I waited for the remediation work to be over. In some spots, the blooms happened in spite of all the remediation work. Here’s a look at the rest of my garden:

And here are a batch of cat photos and videos for the cat fans. The Ladies have had plenty of time to sit at their back window and survey their backyard domain. Perry gets to go out for daily walks. We never stray far from home but stay out for at least a half hour. Meanwhile, our neighbor has now ejected three male cats from her home. They hang out in our yard all the time and are generally pests. John and I really hope to get them neutered in the hope that it will make everyone (including our cats) happier. That will be a big project, however.

A Time of Fairies

It’s the most beautiful time of year in my garden! Everything is green and fresh. Some things are newly planted. Some things are newly sprouted. Bright flowers are in bloom. The heat has not had an opportunity to dry things out too much. And, best of all, the honeysuckle is in bloom! It’s a wall of fragrance.

Now I have three varieties. One native variety on the shed (red, below), one unidentified variety in front (orange, below), and the invasive but oh-so-sweet variety on the back fence (white/yellow, below).

The honeysuckle on the back fence and its blossoms add a beautiful and magical backdrop to everything else going on in my garden. It’s a particularly enchanting. Every year at this time I feel like I should look for fairies.

It’s the time of year when it’s hard for me to stop taking pictures of everything. So here is my yard from all (or mostly all) the angles. I’d recommend flipping through them as a slideshow instead of simply looking at the gallery as a whole:

And here are some closer looks at everything in and around my house:

I’ve started on my garden art projects for the year. I’ve got plenty of plans. The first one I tackled was changing an old chandelier into an outdoor solar light. A friend of mine gifted me the perfect light fixture for the project. It was kind of wonky and bent up, so it wasn’t the best for indoor use, but it has a flower theme that’s perfect for a garden. I glued solar lights on in place of light bulbs and voila!

The other project that I’ve started is to invite some actual fairies into my garden. Last summer, I sculpted one of the two apple tree stumps in our side yard, turning it into a bottle tree with a raccoon on top.

This summer I plan to work on the second stump. So far, I’ve added the two apple pickers that came with the house for use in harvesting the trees’ apples. I thought it was fitting to work them into my apple tree trunk sculpture. I started adding bottles (including an apple brandy bottle to add to the theme) and will put plenty more on. Last fall, I’d begun carving a few little niches in the trunk and now I’ve painted the niches and added ceramic fairies created by the children in Patchwork Central’s children’s program. I’ll work on the tree all summer, but I like where it’s gone so far.

I’ve got a few more little fairy vignettes scattered around my garden.