Digging the Mystery Daffodil

A fine spring day. The temperature hit 70 in the afternoon. Chet and I had to get out and see what was up on Dean's Fork, put a few more miles on the chassis. Just the sky alone would have been enough, but the warmth was intoxicating. To run in a tank and shorts, feel the warm wind on my skin.

A couple days later, it plunged to 18, and we got an inch of snow. Such is spring. 

This is why it's good to live in the moment, and grab it when it comes.

When there's almost nothing green yet growing, green catches the eye. I fixed my binoculars on these clumps across Dean's Fork. They look like daffodils, but there's no explanatory tumbledown homestead near. Odd. Could they have been washed out and deposited here by a flood? I don't know. Mystery abounds.

I picked my way across the stream. These are worth examining.

They're plucking at my memory. It's a daffodil, I think, but I can't recall what kind has such broad, round-tipped leaves.

You know what I'm going to do here. I'm going to go all Stone Age.

I search the stream bank for a trowel, and find a stone that's bladelike but cupped. 

Those bulbs are really in there, with long strong roots going down about 8". I have to dig for quite awhile to encompass them. Finally I can dig no deeper and am forced to pull the bulbs as gently as I can. Luckily, the roots come with them.

This takes awhile, and Chet settles down to bask and stand guard.

 She does this from time to time. Hunkers down and digs and mutters for a long time. I just wait it out. I have nothing else I have to be doing. This is what I do.

 Voila! I have my specimens. I take only three, and leave dozens of others in the two clumps to grow in peace.  Another cool thing about plants...you can take a little piece, and if you're patient, it'll replicate the original plant in time. You don't have to pillage the whole thing.

 I bundle them in wet leaves and leave them in a puddle, because I have several more miles to run. Well, traverse.

On down the road I come on the Peony House, the tumbledown structure where I found my beloved Dean's Fork heirloom peony years ago.

Here's how it looked in situ on May 15, 2014. This unexpected shot of white in front of a barely discernible structure. Once a proud part of someone's garden, now just persisting there because that's what peonies do best. Everything else has been subsumed by ragweed and ironweed and star chickweed, but the peony stands strong.

It makes me happy to see it prosper, even if no one but me ever sees it or kneels to smell its heavenly bouquet.

 Four years ago, in the fall, I dug two small eyes, planted them in my asparagus/rhubarb bed, and waited three years for them to make flowers. They finally bloomed in 2014. They should be wonderful this spring. 

P.S. It smells like roses in heaven.

Near the tumbledown house I see a small bulb sending up shoots. I crush a leaf, note its oniony scent and find it's an allium, decide to leave it grow. It's probably a little yellow one I already have. These are the places you find heirloom plants.

I pick up my bulbs on the way back up the road, bundle them in wet leaves and sandwich them between a couple of slabs of bark. I know if I root around Harold's weekend mancabin, I'll find a cup that will work better as a transport system. 

C'est voila!

I bring them home and plant them immediately in one of my terraced beds. I can't wait to see what they'll be. If these small bulbs don't bloom this year, I can still find out.

Because the next morning, I pull up at my financial advisor's office in town and find the same plant growing in a clump by the parking lot.  Ah! I knew it looked familiar. It may not turn out to be anything special. But then again it may.

Of course, there's always the chance mine are different. That's the fun of plants, and the mystery of finding them, digging them out and spreading them around. Someone years ago planted them at a homestead now long rotted and gone. And there they are, still fixing to bloom in the middle of the woods. Whatever they are, they've probably lived there a hundred years, winter after dry summer after winter.

The shadows grow long and we turn for home, thinking about spring and clouds, daffodils and dinner,  the enduring wonder of plants that persist. 

**So before evenfall, fellow gardeners on blog and Facebook have all decided that what I have here are NAKED LADIES! I'm so excited! This perennial amaryllis makes leaves in spring that die down by June. And in August, it sends up a surprise stalk of pink fabulous.  Hence the name. Surprise Lily is another common name.

This photo takes me back to a lovely time in 2011 when Nina and Tim came to roll around in August on Indigo Hill, and Chet was only six.

Thanks, everyone, for chipping in on the ID. I hope mine have a dusting of blue on the end of their pink petals. Divine!

Making It Through the Winter

That cold snap that blew in the night of January 5, that was a thing. The afternoon before, it was raining and almost 50 degrees, and I knew it was time to act. I was sure I couldn't heat the greenhouse adequately through temperatures in the teens, much less the negative single digits. So out it all came, carried in relays into the downstairs bathroom and my studio. Because I wound up losing about two-thirds of my plants in the big freeze of November 24, it wasn't all that much trouble. Well, nothing is too much trouble where me and the plants I love are concerned. I sometimes catch myself working like a draft horse to keep these plants alive and wonder why I bother. Yes, I felt pretty ridiculous evacuating the greenhouse, but what was my choice?

So there they are (about half of them) luxuriating in the bathroom while it's zero degrees and below outside. You can just see the back side of the greenhouse through the window. Good news is the gas line didn't freeze this time. Bad news is the heater I have isn't big enough to keep the greenhouse warm in those conditions. It's a work in progress, this new greenhouse, and Mr. Murphy and his cruel law keeps close watch over all proceedings. A new leak in the roof rained down on my hundred-dollar freeze alert unit that I was so proud of, which ruined it and put our phones out for a week until I figured out what had happened. Nice. Hi-tech is great, until a raindrop hits it.

I kept them inside for a week, until the coldest weather blew through, which made the bathroom a pretty nice place to be. That gave me a chance to clean out the greenhouse, throw out all the dead plants and take the soil from their pots for recycling. It was time to get rid of the Shelves of Death, lined with row upon row of pots studded with stems that I finally admitted were not going to send out shoots. I became expert at checking for life in root and stem. I didn't find much. What lived, lived, and a lot of what lived wound up dying anyway.

So here, I'm focusing on what I do have. 

"Grossersorten," a rangy single pink geranium, lost a few leaves but never batted an eye. It's blooming now.

Next to it, an amaryllis that was a Christmas present from Elsa and Laura.

It wasted no time getting big and beautiful in the unaccustomed confines of the greenhouse. Usually amaryllis have to do their thing on kitchen tables. Clearly, it's getting just what it needed.

Another grand survivor, my 24-year-old Mammilaria cactus. It seemed to take the freeze as a challenge to throw out bigger and more beautiful blooms.

I lost my old Wonderboom fig bonsai, but this new recruit is doing beautifully and I've become quite fond of it.

Lots of new healthy growth, and no scale as yet.

This gardenia is taking its own sweet time, tantalizing me, dropping buds here and there just before they open, then making more. Arrggggh.

But two have finally opened and there is no better scent. 

What a grand plant. I hope I can keep her in the manner to which she'd become accustomed.

Acid, acid, acid, that's the soil they love. This one is f-f-f-fusssssy.

The jasmine is going nuts. Not fussy, and perfuming its space as specified in its job description. 

The fresh green leaves are so much more beautiful than the ones they had before the freeze. Jasmines hate getting very cold, and their leaves go yellow. These leaves have never felt the sting of cold.

I didn't see this little pot of Bellis perennis, or English daisy, on the floor of the greenhouse when I evacuated, and it froze solid in the cold snap. Only days later its dark-green translucent leaves had come back to life, and it was throwing out flowers! I dug these plants on the lawn of the Fayetteville WV courthouse a year and a half ago. Bellis perennis is a longtime European invader that establishes itself in some lawns. I haven't quite been able to figure out why it does well in some places and not others. As far as I can see, it does no harm, and I find it very beautiful.  I've been trying to establish it in our lawn for years. These are the best plants I've had yet. The beat goes on.

The same thing happened to these Buttercrunch lettuces. Froze translucent, then bounced back.

The dwarf pomegranate continues to delight me. I downsized its pot from the gallon container it was in, and once it's established will downsize it again as I train it as a tropical bonsai. Its flowers are opening, throwing out crepey petals and stamens, and I hope it will choose to form fruit. Gotta get in there and pollinate them, probably...

Speaking of pollination, I noticed that my grapefruit's flowers were falling off without forming fruit. So I schnoodled around in them with my pinky and played bee.

It worked--I probably have a dozen fruits now on a "tree" that's not even a foot tall. Whoops. Brood reduction is in order. That's it in the left-hand blue pot, below. Imagine it with a dozen full-sized grapefruit. Where's that Tilapia in Grapefruit sauce recipe, anyway? I might need it in a year or so.

Yep, things are happening in the greenhouse. It's got an aura of life again. I like going in. I find myself singing, "Hello Ladies!" when I do. I haven't yet taken to spending evenings down there. I still have a little PTSD about that, I think. Make that a lot.

I was most thrilled to see the first bud open on one of my stellar Graffiti geraniums that lived through the freeze. I was absolutely sure I'd lost the red one. I figured the pink one, which I wasn't all that crazy about, was the one that made it.  I got that plant on May 1, 2006, and I sure hated to lose it. I had a tiny cutting that I thought was the red one, and a big plant that somehow survived which I was sure was the pink. The tiny cutting died yesterday without rooting. And the same day, the big plant opened its flower.

When the bud opened, it was just the color of a scarlet tanager. I can't even describe how happy I was to know it had survived. It's such a good red, a brilliant, clear, happy, firepink red.

I always plant it out in a pot next to the Bird Spa, hoping to one day see this again. 

It happened June 22, 2009.

 It could happen again.

That's become a mantra this winter. It happened once. It could happen again. I won't say the mantra has gotten me through. Mantras may work for some people, but I need living things. The plants that lived through it all and came back, the new plants who've come to live and flourish here, my family (which includes Chet) and friends and love and running and the very occasional sunny day and that little church on the hilltop, that's what's gotten me through.