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

September's Silent Parade

 As I write, Sept. 21, the ruby-throated hummingbirds are still here, just a couple juveniles still hanging around and bickering. I love them so. And through the birches and flower gardens, fall warblers are sifting through in earnest. I must glance up from my drafting board 200 times a day, and I'm nearly always rewarded by the trembling leaves that mean a warbler is plucking aphids off their undersurfaces.

My birches are loaded with little green aphids, candy to migrant warblers and hummingbirds, too. Of course, I'm glued to the windows, my big lens slishing away.

 

The magnolia warbler has a pretty yellow rump in all plumages. 

We're firmly on the fall migration route for Cape May warblers, but they're rare as hen's teeth in spring. Go figure.  This is a nice adult male, still showing his golden side neck and strong tiger stripes.

Who's that?

One of my favorite fall migrants (and breeders) is the ovenbird, a warbler that looks like a thrush. That shoe-button eye, with the surprised ring around it; those heavy droozly stripes down the belly--I just love these neat little forest dwellers.

All that would be great, but the burnt orange crown stripe is too much.

And the ovenbird walks. One shell-pink foot is placed daintily in front of the other. They walk along long branches, mincing delicately. The head bobs slightly, like a chicken's. I love everything about ovenbirds, except their tendency to crash into glass windows in fall. For them, and for so many others, I put netting over my windows.

 The resident rubythroats, making the rounds of my flowers. They won't be here much longer.  I said when I put the oversized geranium "Happy Thought Red" out in May that it would never be so beautiful again. Boy, was that the truth. The gray squirrels have chewed the crap out of it; the sun has baked its beautiful chartreuse leaves, but it gamely throws out scarlet flowers for the hummingbirds to sip. No worries. I have two tiny babies to go in the greenhouse, and they'll be big and beautiful by next spring.

Salvia guaranitica "Black and Blue" is a favorite. As often as not, the dainty flowers will drop when they're probed.

Most of my out-the-studio window photos feature sweet birds on the colorful tomato cages I use to support my taller flowers.
This is a juvenile song sparrow, impersonating a Lincoln's sparrow, with its finely penciled breast streaking.

A young Tennessee warbler briefly got itself trapped behind the netting that keeps my huge studio windows safe for migrant birds. It was a thrill to see it so close.  Birds are never trapped for long, since the netting is stretched on a PVC frame that stands almost a foot out from the window, and they have only to go up, down or sideways to get out. To learn more about this miraculous life-saver, go read my article, "A Solution to Window Strikes,"  here.

I just never know what I'm going to see, so I keep looking. Who's that on the hanging basket hook? I knew right away, because there isn't another species that has yellow (instead of white) tail spots. It's a yellow warbler!

and a very, very beautiful one. An immature yellow warbler in September is such a lovely bird, the bright yellow washed with grass-green. Yellow suffuses everything: its eye ring, tail spots, legs, feet, even its bill. It's like it drank sunshine.

 

 Fuchsia "Trandshen Bonnstadt" is the flower that it's inspecting.  I really think the spelling is wrong, if it's German, but that's how it was spelled on the Glasshouse Works label when I bought my tiny plant years ago.  Probably ought to be spelled Trandschen Bonstedt, but I can't find any other source for it than Glasshouse Works, and that's how they spell it. Still available from Glasshouse works, too!

Needless to say, I take cuttings of this miraculous tropical plant and carry it over in the greenhouse all winter. I'm petrified of losing it; it's such a cheery, free blooming soul and it roots from cuttings in water! Hummingbirds love it and they look fabulous prospecting those clusters of pink.  I have four-foot tall plants blooming their heads off, planted right in the garden soil, right now. The rabbits leave it mostly alone. Miracle. Anything the nipping, chomping, chewing animals allow to live is a pure miracle to me.

 

As a bonus, you can see the bird screen with its gray PVC frame over my studio windows. It's nicely unobtrusive, but highly effective. Those windows are doing a great job of pretending to be limitless sky. They need a screen, and they have one.

The warbler was pretty sure there should be something edible in that pretty flower. So it diddled with it for awhile, trying to see if it would produce something nice.

What a breathtakingly beautiful little bird.  Every feather is unworn and new, immaculately fringed and bordered, since this bird, who was born this spring, has just molted into a fresh suit of feathers for the long trip south.

The yellow warbler is just a part of the silent parade going on outside, all through September. Get out there! The trees are dripping with warblers. Blackburnians running into bay-breasts; black-throated blues and Cape Mays; yellows and yellowthroats and Tennessees, blackpolls and hoodeds, all coming through now in southeast Ohio. It's the greatest show on earth, and it's perfectly silent.

Keep looking up.

Winter: Survival Strategies

Days grow short. Many winter days are covered in unbroken gray, as is typical in the mid-Ohio Valley. Coming from New England, where I spent most of my post-college years, this was a huge adjustment for me. The greenhouse is an excellent antidote for the sluggish drug cocktail of short days and heavy clouds. 

I start each day by looking at the weather radar, trying to figure out when I might dart out to find some blue sky. If I see fronts coming from the west, that brief interval might be first thing in the morning. Lately, though, we've been socked in early, and the clouds sometimes break in late afternoon. At least that's the hope today.

I try to meet the sun whenever it shows itself. If you saw only my Instagram or Facebook feed, you'd think it was beautiful all the time here. Nope. The good days are overrepresented.

I just looked at Intellicast. Temperatures in the 50's and 60's for the next ten days in December! Amazing. Almost unprecedented. A Carolina winter, in Ohio. I'll take it! Because there's been no snow to mash it down, the little bluestem is standing tall in the fields. I love to see this native prairie grass take over, just as much as the hay farmers hate it. Cows don't like it because it's sharp and cuts their mouths. I see it as an assertion of what belongs over what we are forever bringing to the land. 

Cows aren't the only ones who don't like little bluestem. Chet Baker will follow me anywhere, but he has a problem navigating through it. I've noticed lately that I keep losing him when I tromp the orange-russet hills. He'll go off in a straight line on a weird tangent and I have to call and call to find him, because I can't see him through the grass tops.

I just figured out why. He runs through it with his eyes screwed shut.

I only figured this out by wondering why he was disappearing on me, then calling him to me and blowing up my photos. Then I put two and two together. He's worried about his eyes; he knows instinctively that they need to be protected. So he navigates by hearing. Here, I've called him to me and he's running blind. 

When I looked at these photos I laughed out loud, and part of me sighed at the tenacity and intelligence of this dear little dog, who will do anything to stay by my side, even run with his eyes shut. He's about to be gathered into my arms for a big brisket gnawing here.

I just sent in his license registration. $16 each year, for the 11 years now that I've loved him.  I get the tags that certify he's up on his rabies shots, and any more I don't even bother to put them on a collar, because the only time he wears one is when he goes to the veterinarian, or when we take a night run. I may start putting one on him when I'm planning to hike the hayfields, though, because I need jingles to tell me where he winds up after a long tangent run with his eyes squeezed tight. What a little goofball. 

He accompanies me to the greenhouse several times each day, waiting patiently until I'm done communing with the plants. 

Fuchsia "Trandshen Bonnstadt" roots readily from cuttings, and I love it, so I have a bunch of great big plants blooming now. If something roots well, and I love it, I make too many.

Plus a couple of the more traditional dwarf types, and good ol' Gartenmeister Bonstedt.

Delicate lobelia, volunteered from seed dropped this summer into the poet's jasmine pot.

Creole Lady continues to delight me with blossom after blossom. They're at their best just after they spring open, around dawn. Absolutely surreally lovely, and they go through a hue change from this to yellow and lavender by the sed

On a sunny day, it's a powerful tonic, an antidote to the dulling drug cocktail of clouds. The Path is throwing out an amazing number of blossoms, probably due to my having cut her back last winter.

Young Rex begonias are coming along very nicely! I start little pieces taken from the big mother plants in late summer, so I don't have to haul the huge plants inside. When these get too big for the shelf, I'll display them in the master bathroom. By then, it'll be time to start some peppers and tomatoes, and I'll need some shelf space!

And so the little Zick-made rhythms and rituals around my plants pull me on through the winter.  As soon as it's light, go out and fill the bird feeders, then warm up in the greenhouse, see who's blooming. 

I couldn't let this brave "Orange Flash" petunia die at frost. It bloomed hard all summer, flopped over its pot, then sent up a bunch of fresh shoots, re-inventing itself for the winter. I had to reward that with the humid warm hug of the greenhouse, so I took it in in mid-November. Behind it is Pelargonium "Happy Thought Red." Hold that thought. And look at that green December grass! I'll take it, I'll take it.

The greenhouse is a saving grace, a little cauldron of summer I can get into, up to my neck.  I can poke around in damp soil, kiss the wide-open face of a hibiscus, and sometimes bury my nose in jasmine flowers. But nothing fixes me like a long lope and hike through field and hill with my best friend. If something's wrong, and you don't know how to fix it or even how to think about it, get out and change your channel. Just get out, move your body and breathe deeply. Get your heart going again, and be thankful for the places you have to go.

Onward, Bacon! Eyes screwed shut. I'm right behind you.