Need Joy? Come on Over!

Not that anyone needs color and light and joy right now...I thought I'd offer up a little virtual stroll through the greenhouse, just to stick our noses into a few flowers. This is what greets me when I open the greenhouse door. Needless to say I find excuses to go down there about five times a day. Hooked on it. It was a rough winter, all rain and no sun, but now that the plants are getting some sun and heat, they're exploding into blossom. 

I find this interesting. When my big hibs froze on Jan. 30, 2019 (heating failure due to frozen gas line), there were a few tiny shoots around the base of The Path's trunk that didn't die back. They have grown a little and are blooming like crazy now. I don't know if it's because they're so close to the fertilizer, but they are much the best blossoms this plant has put out. It's dopey looking but I LOVE IT.

Creole Lady is still bewitching, but she's decided to lay back to let The Path, with her dress around her ankles, take center stage. She'll kick it up a few notches when she finally gets outside in May. 

And there's a Lady in Waiting. Look at this tiny baby Creole Lady that I got in the summer of 2019! She's finally coming into her own. More flower than leaf...

Two blossoms at once is very unusual for a little cutting like this. But so gratifying. My huge Lady slumbers behind her. I absolutely love having an understudy that's small enough to carry into the house should the need arise. Like, drastically plunging temperatures, foretelling another disastrous greenhouse freeze.

This plant...I live for its blossoms.

The Thai Giant crown of thorns is just ridiculous, 3' tall and loaded with peppermint-striped flowers.

Started from a 2" long cutting taken in 2016. I have tried to take cuttings of this one but none have rooted for me. Sometimes it just works. Sometimes it doesn't. 

This little Gartenmeister was a tiny shoot that sulked all winter long, then sprang to life when it got sunny. I like to carry this plant over because I'm never sure if I'll be able to find it in the spring. 

Same for Trandshen Bonstet. That one, far as I know, you can't get anywhere but The Glasshouse Works in Stuart, Ohio. Mine is 4' tall now! Roots really well in plain water!

A volunteer impatiens peeking out from under the foliage of my willow-leaved fig. This is the magnificent tropical bonsai that froze last year, and has somehow come back. It looks like a hairy sea urchin right now, but I have faith it will make some decent branches in time.

The geraniums are just spectacular now.

Black Knight is a volcano of the darkest possible foliage and gleaming coals. 

Can't wait for Happy Thought to open its scarlet tanager-red single flowers.

Due to its interesting start in life, this Happy Thought plant has a ridiculous number of individual trunks. 

Both Happy Thought and Vancouver Centennial (shown below) have a really interesting habit of making baby plants amongst their flower heads, way up there on the end of a long stem. It's so weird. I have observed this for years and always wondered what's going on with it. Two years ago I started experimenting with trying to propagate more plants from these funny little leaf clusters. Vancouver's plantlets always got mildew and rotted away in my rooting chambers (just a clear plastic cup inverted over a pot of damp soil).  But two years ago I managed to root a tiny leaf cluster of Happy Thought, and that's the plant in the photo above. It grew painfully slowly, but it grew, and it's a fine, fine plant now.

Of course, I will keep trying because plant propagation is one of my vices.

The Colorful Time

It was such a hot and weird October. Until it wasn't. I've never seen an autumn like this one. I had to get out before it was light to get my run in before it got too hot. The flowers loved it, blooming there was no tomorrow.

 

86 degrees on October 8. The wind was like a blast furnace, the sun’s hand heavy. Yet it was oddly cool in the shade. Meadows and trees go about their business of coloring up, as the shortening days demand. I weary of the sweat that rolls down my back. Nothing seems right in a hot October. It’s grabbing a cold glass of Coke and getting hot coffee. And then this meadow at dusk, with the crickets and katydids going full bore, a screech-owl quavering, the sound of ripe pears clunking to earth.

It's all been so beautiful, so odd, so overwhelming. 

 

  If only we could take a bit of this color and spread it out through the gray months. There's ever so much out there right now. More than anyone needs.

The fuchsias are ringing their coral and pink bells.

Fuchsia Gartenmeister Bonstadt

Fuchsia Trandshen Bonnstadt

  I managed to get a few cuttings rooted of this pink beauty. I'll have it in the greenhouse over the winter. This plant stands 4' high in the garden, and the hummingbirds were all over it until they left October 9.

 The red Knockout rose squeaks a few flowers past the Japanese beetles. I love this rose, and the shell-pink zinnia behind it. Who says pink and red don't work well together?

 The zinnias are almost never without monarchs as the insects feed frantically before flying south.
My Garden Way cart is in constant use this time of year, hauling potted plants to the greenhouse, pots to the garage.

 I go around the yard, seeing things. Morning, Mrs. Neoscona. Is your husband available? Or is he tied up at the moment?

It's a banner year for Neoscona crucifera, the arboreal orbweaver. There are so many of them their webs overlap, and then things like this happen.

I mentioned color. Pineapple sage has been giving up its leaves for my cooling iced tea all summer long. It never blooms until it's sure all the hummingbirds have left. And then it bursts forth with this. Well, joke's on you, sage, because I saw a very late hummingbird sipping from your flowers on October 9.

 

 I love this plant. I just wish it'd get its act together before mid-October. Clearly, it's on Mexico time.

 

Everywhere I turn, I think of my kids lately. I saw something in the back of the mailbox, covered with dust. It was an ancient little foam letter that had been Phoebe's. Who knows how many years it's been in there.

 

  

I walked back to the house thinking about my 5'9" redhead. This zinnia is exactly that tall.

 

 And totally by chance, the next zinnia over is a blonde. And it's wicked tall, too. Phoebe and Liam, growing right in the front garden bed.

 

Wonderfully enough, there are still three stalks of tuberoses sending their perfume out into the bedroom each night. It was a fabulous year for them. They love rain. 

 

 I had to do one more cleaning of the pond before winter, and I had to do it soon, because the Sheffield Pink mums are in bud. Now why would that be? Well, once they start opening, there will be so many honey and bumble bees on those flowers, I won't be able to sprawl around on the rocks as I shovel up the muck. I'll get stang. So I had to clean it now!

Just look at all those buds!

Me, wearing a bell hat, looking at a mountain of glory.

 

My old iPhone 6 captured the blue a lot better than this one. This new 6 makes it too red. It's weird how individual the cameras are on these little miracles. Ah well, it's closer than my film camera ever came.

 Morning shadows.

Strangled by its own ambition.

 And the ungodly thick and strong underpinning of it all, the morning glory vines I started in the greenhouse in early April, and had to protect from the rabbits. These were the only ones that made it. Rabbits got all the others. I fought hard for every one of these flowers. And by gum I'm enjoying the heck out of them now.

 This never happens. Question marks aren't flower fans. They're looking for fermented fruit or coon poop. Total fluke to have one land on any flower, much less a morning glory. Maybe she thought it was beautiful.

In back, my path past the pond to the morning glory altar is completely blocked by flowers. What are you gonna do? Whack blooming crape myrtle back? And what's it doing, blooming now? Isn't it supposed to bloom in July? I'm not arguing with any of it. Y'all can just do what you do. Everything is beautiful. When I tried to right some of the zinnias that had flopped over across the sidewalk, whole sections of them just broke off at the main stem. Don't mess with us! they screeched. And so I haven't. And I can't use the sidewalk at all now. But I  love it, this having too many flowers. This is a wet year. Everything just went haywire.

 Beautifully, crazily, perfectly haywire. Just like I like it.

 Impatiens lava flows in slow motion down the steps, seeding itself all the way. All the seed babies seem to be orange. How does that work, I wonder? I like orange. It's nice to have abundance like this. Soon enough the frost will get it all and I'll wish it back even as the flowers collapse. That's what the greenhouse is all about.

 In a delicious bit of irony, the morning glory is smothering the hardy kiwi to the left of it. Under all that biomass used to be a raised deck. I haven't seen it in some months.

 

The plants are in charge here. I'm just their servant.

 

 

I doted on this standard gardenia since I bought it half-price in August. It bloomed like mad, and then it made a bunch more fat buds that looked like Christmas tree lights, and dropped all of them but one. This one. 

 

 

It was as if that plant wanted to make the perfect flower, and kept throwing away the prototypes. Well, it did. And I thanked it by bringing it into the greenhouse yesterday, where it is perfuming the whole space. There are no more buds on it after this. I just gave it a big load of manure and acid stuff. We'll see what happens. Probably good things.

Thank you for walking around the yard with me. Wish you could see it in person, but this will have to do.

xo jz

Reader Rendezvous at Our House

I'd been preparing for them all summer, the Bird Watcher's Digest Reader Rendezvous' that would take place on two consecutive weekends only ten days after the American Birding Expo, also hosted by Bird Watcher's Digest.  Why, you ask, were there two in a row? Because more people wanted to come than they could accomodate in one. 

There's something about knowing that 75 subscribers are going to be walking through your yard and house and using your bathrooms that ignites a special sort of...preparedness... in a houseproud person. After the ACKing, I got busy. Coughed up a few grand to renovate that crumbling ca. 1978 upstairs bathroom this summer. The one I'd tried and failed to dress up with sponge painting. Not that it was time...

Bill bought deadly chemicals to try to take the lime scale off the glass in the downstairs bath. I threw out approximately 2.5 tons of unneeded paper in my studio.  Again, wasn't really necessary, but a good thing to have an excuse to do. 

Bill replaced some boards, and painted the rest of the skeezy deck boards with a rubbery brown paint that made them look like new-ish. 

He fixed this and that and got all the cobwebs out of the corners, mowed paths in the meadow...

We finally made a crop netting cover for the deadly kitchen window, and the day before the second Rendezvous, Liam and I put a ladder up and climbed on the roof to apply American Bird Conservancy reflective tape to the little clerestory windows that the cardinals loved to kill themselves on. All those things that we'd been trying to get to, and now had a deadline for. It was good.

I weeded the gardens as if 75 subscribers were going to be tut-tutting over my slothfulness should they spot crabgrass. Which they wouldn't, but still.

I planted flowers that would still, I prayed, be colorful in October. Lots in large planters so I could keep them out of the rabbits' jaws.

Got bold and planted some Trandshen Bonstedt fuchsias in the ground, and the bunnies left them alone! Amazing! I had gone a little crazy propagating them in the greenhouse over the winter, and had some to spare.

I know they made it because the rabbits don't like them, as they mowed my geraniums and lobelias planted right beside the fuchsias down to stubs. Filing that away for future reference...Trandshen Bonstedt fuchsia works! and it makes a 4' tower of pendant pink blossoms all summer long. Hummingbirds like it. They prefer Fuchsia Gartenmeister Bonstedt, however.  (see top photo).

I watered the gardens with slow hoses every few days through the terrible drought of September. 

Imagine if someone said, "We're going to have a garden tour at your house in the second week of October!" Yeah. That. Whose garden looks fantastic in October? 

OK.  Let's do some late-blooming annuals... zinnias and salvia and my fabulous fuchsias...begonias and Achimenes and calendulas and morning glories...we can do this. We got this! It was fun, planning for October bloom. I got to grow a bunch of colorful tropical annuals, and the hummingbirds loved it. 

Oh, and I forgot the main ingredient: three Subaru loads of rotted cow manure. Hee hee hee!

The bonsais were beginning to color up and looked very beautiful.  This one is loving its new planter; it finally grew out of the shallow pot.

They are getting so big (waist high to me) that they're a real challenge to keep watered. I think I'll bump the two in the foreground up to planters for next spring. They're telling me they're feeling crowded and stressed. Mmmhmm. I hear you, dear maples. You look awesome in your little flat pots, but if you're unhappy, it's time to make a change.

So thrilled to have Callicarpa (Beautyberry) fruiting in the yard, thanks to my friend Jen! This native shrub makes the most fabulous purple bluebird bait.

The birches lost almost all their leaves in the drought, so we won't have golden birchlight this year. Nothing I can do about that. Hibiscus "The Path" tries to make up for it.

Geraniums "Happy Thought Red" and "Vesuvius" doin' their thing. These are e-nor-mous plants, and I'm afraid they're not going to be coming in the greenhouse again. 

Nope. I have made understudies. Though I did adore having this huge Happy Thought inside all last winter.  Who doesn't need a huge happy thought? 

Durn Salvia guaranitica "Black and Blue" waited until now to bloom. Why. Why. 

The light this time of year...oh my. See that tent in the front yard? That reminds me that I was writing about Reader Rendezvous'.

Our dear friend Ann from North Dakota came to participate, and to help. As she and I were working in the kitchen, I asked her what percentage of her came to participate, and what percentage came to help. And in my head, I'd come up with 60% help, 40% participate. 

"Oh, about 60% help," she answered, and I gave her a giant hug.

Because that's what dear friends do. They help. We are modeling our Heart and Hand pendants from Scattered Light Jewelry. It is not a coinkydink that we both have one. :) They're really cool. The little heart swings with the hand just above it, moving in concert. Intelligent jewelry. Click the link, check it out.

I would need my sweet friend near this weekend. This is the Saturday night crowd. I provided entertainment in the form of a Keynote talk, and Bill and I played some Rain Crows songs too. Wonderful people!! so warm and engaged. An honor to know them.

 I got up to take this photo of everyone enjoying a delicious catered meal, because I was inwardly freaking out that I would be serving lunch to them the very next day. 

It's probably just as well that I went through the summer cleaning the house, throwing stuff out, and preening and watering the gardens, all the while gaily assuming that a caterer had been engaged for the 59 people gathering at our house on October 2, and 32 coming for lunch on October 9. Five days before the first event, I asked who was catering the midday meal on Sunday, and found out otherwise. By then, it was too late to hire anyone in. The BWD staff was completely tied up with field trips and guiding. I was reeling, fresh off showing my art at the American Birding Expo, which I did fresh off returning from South Africa, but at the same time I couldn't bear the thought that anyone would leave our place hungry on the last day of the four day event. It was time to get to work. 

I picked the garden absolutely clean of Sungold tomatoes, tomatillos, sweet peppers and herbs. Sauteed them up with onions, and made the summer-soaked flavor stuffings for ten Summer Quiches. Made two vats of curried butternut/acorn squash soup. Made four enormous vats of chili, with a total of 15 pounds of ground hamburger and Italian sausage in 'em. I was still worried I wouldn't have enough. I'd never cooked for 59 at once before. As it turned out, the food simply vanished as soon as we put it out, but everyone got enough.  And I was very proud to know it had been wholesome and good.

Something my staunch Iowa aunts wouldn't think twice of doing turned out to be an enormously big deal for me. As I cooked, while scrounging up every piece of silverware and glassware in the house and basement, I thought about them, my aunts Melba and Donna and Marjorie and my grandmothers Frieda and Elnora. I thought about the fact that such gatherings turn out to be almost all about the food for them, and for everyone else, too. Food is life. Food is love, food is necessary and it is front and center. It is the table on which everything else is set. I was filled with gratitude for all the meals they'd served when the Zickefooses and Ruighs would get together in the summers, often in honor of we outliers, we East Coasters coming out to Iowa for our yearly visit, and I felt very small and insignificant as I finally, viscerally understood the service they'd provided. And all without batting an eye. 

 My beautiful friend Harma from Sarasota reconnects with little Chet Baker.

Sofia remembers my necklace from the Expo, and pops it into her little gob again.

I get a much-needed squeeze from my friend Dick from Colorado, in my studio. Imagine that! We're both delighted he's here. He's been to the New River Birding and Nature Festival a couple times; to the Reader Rendezvous ("Birding Valhalla with JZ") at North Bend. We go back.

A couple walks through our meadow, glowing with goldenrod, the sumac just kindling.

Hugs in front of the tent (which is full of happy grazers)

Relaxing in the sunshine.

A big HALOO to the photographers in the tower!

And Zick homecooking in every belly. I'm proud of that. I have never aspired to be a caterer, but it's nice to know what can be done when push comes to shove.

And the frost held off, and the flowers bloomed on

and the next weekend, we'd do it all over again.