The Enchanted Garden

This is a post I wrote in August, before a lot of other stuff happened. I stuffed it away and saved it for a time when I wouldn't feel like writing. Which turns out to be now. I keep checking: still got nothing.

I took the enchanted basil forest down in early August. 

Best basil I've ever grown. I had little to do with it. It was the rain that made the leaves big and tender. Wow, what beautiful basil. And for once I harvested it in the height of its growth, not in October when most of the leaves have fallen off and the rest are yellowing. Beautiful!!

After the cutting. The plants are still there, and may well send up just that much growth again before frost. Yikes!

All that basil reduced down to this many leaves, which Liam helped me strip off the stems.

And all these leaves, with some pine nuts and parmesan and a lot of olive oil, made 13 jars of delicious pesto. Just finished my dinner, 3 cheese ravioli drenched in fresh pesto. Mmmmm! Good thing I ran today, and am going to rake the yard again.

Amazingly, the manure-fed rhubarb is still going pretty strong, and I've made some bitchin' cobblers lately. Oh I love that stuff sooo  much. Just looking at this photo makes me feel thankful.

I so vastly prefer shopping in my garden to shopping in the produce aisle. I love summer cooking. It's so easy and fast, with all this organic produce flowing into the kitchen.

Speaking of happy, here's the first big crop of golden raspberries we've had. Yes, that's young asparagus curling around, from the seeds I planted in the greenhouse two springs ago. It'll probably be five more years before I can harvest any, but that's OK. I'm waiting anyway.

My dear friend Connie Toops has given me a couple of batches of raspberry plants from her amazing mountainside garden in North Carolina over the last five years or so. Cutting all the trees that were shading them, liberal applications of cow manure, and a rainy summer were apparently what they required to really take off, spread and give us enough to carry some in from the garden. I.E. enough so that they aren't all gut-picked right there in the patch. Ahhhh!! sooo good.

Best of all, there have were still some on the plants for Phoebe. It's been lovely for Phoebe to have a little time here rolling around with me in August's glorious bounty.  She had a beautiful two weeks with Chet Baker. She went back to school August 26, and, goodbye kisses given and received, he very quickly got on with the business of leaving this world. Bless his little soul. A gentleman to the end. As I think about it, it was best that way, a perfect visit, with him feeling pretty good, even able to go on hikes, and Phoebe able to remember him that way. I brought him to her arms when she woke up each morning. 

Sweet puppy kisses and golden raspberries. Life was good for Phoebs. Right next to them, the last naked lady finishes her bloom.

They're softly fragrant and so divine with that ethereal cerulean-violet on their petal ends. Ahhhh. 

Once again, there's South Africa to credit for this wonderful plant, Lycoris squamigera, often called the Surprise Lily for the way its broad strappy leaves come up in spring, wither away by June, and then boom! there are multiple tall spikes of fabulous pink "naked ladies," i.e. without any leaves, popping up as a surprise in August! I'm thrilled that these transplants from an old home site down Dean's Fork have taken hold in my heirloom garden, right in front of the peony I harvested there. Home again. The naked ladies don't bloom in the woods. I should get serious, take a shovel and dig some more of them next spring. 

Buddleia is adding its sweet perfume to the powerful scent of tuberose come evening.

I'm really pleased with this combo, more thought out than most of mine, on the corner of the old garage. I'm breaking the rules by planting 4'  tuberoses in front of shorter things, but they're there to smell! No stepping over other plants to get to them. This is a hedon's garden, after all.

And the tuberoses are almost as tall as I am this year. I don't even have to lean over to bury my nose in them. I made a sweet little bundle this spring selling off most of my tuberose bulbs at two gardening talks I gave here in Ohio. I had too darn many to plant, and no place to put them. Sold a bunch of Achimenes rhizomes, too, which took a little more salesmanship. The tuberoses were snapped up immediately. They were beautiful--enormous bulb clusters, manure-fed, and I sold them for $4 apiece. I hope to rebuild my stocks and offer them in coming years. What I sold was about a decade's worth of propagation. Man, I love being able to produce something people really want and sell it in person (as opposed to online). No postage, no hassle, just grab, gimme some cash, and go. 

I've put in a bed of annuals--Salvia farinosa "Victoria," Angelonia and zinnias--behind the tuberoses. I tried to keep it all purple, pink and white. Succeeded. Sometimes it works out.

Butterfly Crazy!

I knew it was going to be a good butterfly day when I couldn't get a dang thing done at the drawing/writing table. 

I kept seeing swallowtails. 

Eastern tiger swallowtail on crocosmia

This was interesting to me because I couldn't remember having seen swallowtails fighting over the crocosmia my friend Bonnie gave me years ago. I was astounded when she told me I wouldn't have to pull the bulbs over the winter, that it was hardy right in the ground. I had to believe her because she's from Erie PA and it's a LOT colder up there than it is here in southeast Ohio. 

I planted them and they sat and thought about it for a year and then decided they liked Ohio and took off running all over my hummingbird bed.

I've seen crocosmia just like this growing naturalized on roadside banks in Costa Rica. I wrote that sentence before I Googled "Crocosmia native to" and found out it's native to grasslands in southern and eastern Africa! Zowie! 

Had a feeling it wasn't native to Costa Rica. Kind of amazing that something from East Africa overwinters in Erie PA, huh? Amazing and a wee bit scary.

The hummingbirds love it, as do the spicebush (left) and tiger swallowtails. And so do I. I love anything that multiplies enough so I can give some to friends, but not so much that I have to pull the plug and go all zero-tolerance on it. Like lavatera and loosestrife. Got some crocosmia earmarked for Shila's newly revived and humming front garden. Paying it forward--for me that's what gardening's all about. I've got enough cardinal flower seedlings that I can give some to Shila, too!

Pipevine swallowtail says YEAH! 

I went to the kitchen to fix a little something to eat right after taking these shots through my studio window and stared slack-jawed as a very large brilliant lemon-yellow butterfly fluttered at Pelargonium "Happy Thought Red."  Duh? Whazzat??

It took about 20 seconds to sink in on me that I was looking at a giant cloudless sulfur! 

From there, it went to the Million Bells petunia (GCSU's love pink!)

and then zooped right over to the Naked Ladies which you may remember I dug up down on Dean's Fork and brought home in a paper cup because I wanted to know what kind of bulb made those funny straplike leaves in early spring. You can see that they, too, like living here. Who wouldn't? Heapin' helpin's of cow manure!

For a hoot, see "Digging the Mystery Daffodil," from March 2015. It tells the story of finding the mystery leaves, digging the bulbs, and figuring out what they were. 

The sulfur muscled its way into this flower and I was astonished to see it shoulder another giant cloudless sulfur out of the same blossom! I should stop here to say that giant cloudless sulfurs are a bit of an event in Whipple, Ohio. They are a southern species that makes a reverse migration in the late summer, flying far north of their breeding range for reasons unknown. Fun? Profit? 

For a dizzy and probably unrepeatable moment, I had two GCSU's in the same frame, on the Naked Ladies I'd dug, not knowing what they even were, years ago, who were now doing their spectacular thing in my heirloom bed. Hm. That sounds a little odd, but I'm too lazy to rewrite it. I kind of like the way it came out anyway. Heh. It's a terrible sentence, but this is a blog, not a book. 

LOOKIT THAT!!!!! The green leaves behind? Dean's Fork peony!!


I love this shot of a GCSU rising straight up, its abdomen above its hard-beating wings. It must need to get that little bod out of the way of the rotating wings when it's helicoptering straight up.

On the next stalk, that same tattered pipevine swallowtail I shot on the cardinal flower was having its way with the ladies. 

And peeking down beneath, I found a Peck's skipper sipping nectar from between the petals. Too small to go into the flower for nectar like the big boys, it still makes its way and finds sweetness.

I came back in the house and Jemima paid me a visit through the studio window.  She likes to check up on me.

I can't even tell you how I love this bird, love that she still visits her ma and takes handouts of pecans and chicken breast, rice and sweet corn, sunflower hearts and peanuts from her window feeder.

As of July 31, she was easy to tell from the other four jays in the yard by her molty wings; she'd lost her big white-tipped tertials and was still growing replacements. The two deck feathers of her tail were about 3/4 grown in, too.  She changes every day, and she looks so different now (August 6)! I worry that I won't be able to pick her out from the other jays very soon, when her first alternate plumage is finally in.

I had a feeling, based on what I was seeing in the yard, that the Monarch Meadow would be hoppin', so I betook myself out there to meet Shila, who drove out after work to shoot butterflies with me. 

We were not disappointed. Another late summer/autumn reverse migrant from the Deep South is the giant swallowtail, sometimes called the Orange Dog for its depredations on orange trees. The broodplant for GISW is citrus! Since my Ruby Red grapefruit "tree" croaked, not much of that is growing in Appalachian Ohio. So these big boys have to come from afar.

Giants are just beeeyoootiful. I love the underwing!!

Can you believe this is the same bug?? Yep. Upperwing, with that fabulous stripe of gold across the middle.

Really it's hard to believe it's the same butterfly. Like giant cloudless sulfurs, giant swallowtails like pink.

This summer has been so very beautiful. Cool and rainy, lush and green. There's not a blade of grass wanting for water anywhere. I haven't had to water since June. Divine!! And all these butterflies, coming out just when I need them most, in the most perfect milkweed monarch meadow on the planet.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.