Garden Basics - P - U

"P" is for Perennials
Plants that will live through our crazy freeze thaw cycle like this lovely Hellebore

"P" is also for Photo

Sometimes we are sucked in by an awesome photo and then realize the camera was an inch away from the bloom. This is Thalictrum aquilifolium. A similar photo had me order this plant immediately but it took a few years of patience (and a good macro lens) before I saw this.

"Q" is for Questions. Questions are important, like how the heck did they get that bicycle on the tree? (Quickly followed by the most popular phrase of "I want that!")


"R" is for Roots - The good, the bad and the downright ugly!

"R" is also for rocks. Here on Long Island we need to import our rocks. With today's fuel costs, they are going to cost quite a bit more bringing us back to "M" for money.


"S" is for Sun - Be honest with yourself about the amount of sunlight a garden gets.

"S" is also for Shade and Semi-shade. Don't fight the shade, there are a host of amazing plants that will grow in your shade beds. (Anybody need some purple Perilla?)

"S" is for Shrubs
Whew, there are many S words! A lovely Hydrangea here, I picked it up at the end of a flower show, it was going in the garbage. It was one of those Hydrangeas that had been forced into bloom for Easter, it was day glow pink when I brought it home. Two years after growing in my acidic soil it is the most glowing white imaginable.

"T" is for Trees (now that was an easy one!) This is the breathtaking blooms and foliage on my Cornus Kousa 'Gold Star'.

"U" is for Under story plants. What an amazing array of plants there are that will gladly grow under taller specimens.

That's it for this part of the alphabet, stay tuned once again as I finish things up tomorrow.

Hopefully everybody enjoyed last night's first gardening class and maybe we'll have some new visitors here :-)

Till later,
Melanie

Garden Basics - G - O

"G" is for Ground cover - (Beware, check under "I" for more information)

"H" is for Herb - Not all are Edible (Ruta graveolens - Rue)

"I" is for Invasive (sometimes called ground covers)

"J" is for Journal - something a gardener should always have.
(These are for my students tonight, I have 15 in total, hope it's enough!)

"J" is also for Junk in the garden
(this planted toaster was spotted in New York Botanical Gardens)

"K" is for Knowledge - Did you know that I wrote chapter 6 in "The Daylily - A Guide for Gardeners" and took the photos in that chapter plus the front cover photo?)

"L" is for Lawn (no more words needed)

"M" is for Money or Moolah (or what ever you call it when you make a budget that you never seem to stick to.)

"N" is for Native or Natural (Rhododendrons are native to our area but covering them with sparkles like these folks did at a flower show is NOT natural)

"N" is also for Nursery - A place where you spend your "M"

"O" is for Organic - Great things like compost tea made from this beautiful pink Symphytum (Comfrey) are organic.

That's it for today folks, I've got to run, and be in 3 places at one time. Will be back tomorrow with more of the alphabet.

Gardening Basics A-F

"A" is for Annual (Cleome)

Tomorrow night I begin teaching an Adult Education program at our local High School. Naturally, the topic is gardening. So far 15 people have signed up for the program, with the possibility for another one or two to walk in tomorrow. That's an excellent turn out for a single program in our district.
"B" is for Birdhouse

Since my new students will have various levels of garden expertise, our first program will be "Gardening Basics". The program I've prepared uses images to explain gardening terms in an ABC format. Yes it's very simple but I hope that by making sure the basics are covered, we can move quickly into some hard core gardening.

"B" is for Biennial (Digitalis)

Tag along and let me know if you thing of a term or word I've missed. I'll continue the alphabet tomorrow and hope to be finished by the weekend. Some letters have more than one applicable word. One note, I did not use the names of plants for any of the letters but I'd love to have more gardening "concepts" to add.

"B" is also for Bulbs

"C" is for Compost


"C" is also for Container

"D" is for Dirt (but in class we'll call it "soil")

"E" is for Edging (this example is "high maintenance)

"E" is for Edging (this example is low maintenance)

"F" is for Foliage

And that's all for today, stay tuned tomorrow for more...

My cup runneth over...

In the hour before I went to bed last night and the hour since I've awoke, I've been riding on the roller-coaster of life. My life will quickly become more hectic than ever once the weather allows me to be working in the garden. So I've been trying to put some meat on the bones here, in other words, get lots of blogging work done.

Three things happened to me in these last few hours. The first was I achieved my first milestone with Blotanical. I hit my first goal of 500 user points which catapulted me to the next level, a "Patron Blotanist". Hooray, I know it sounds silly here but it allows me more freedom to reach people through this wonderful gardening bloggers community.

The next event came only minutes later. I was moderating some comments and I had been Flamed! Yes, I was flamed. I tell you, it took my breath away. Just to think about it, somebody had such strong feelings for me that they actually made the effort to flame me. I was shocked and flattered at the same time. Flattered? Well, nobody flames a nobody, so by flaming me, this flamer assured me that I am a somebody. Thanks anonymous poster for making my day! Sorry though that you can't seem to contain your jealousy a bit better, I'd send you a cheery photo to brighten up your life but you didn't leave me your name or address.

You too can share the heat of their ire by scrolling down to my "Take Back the Shed" post.


The third happening was waiting for me this morning. My message light at Blotanical was lit up and low and behold, I now have a red friendship star on my blog! Another Hooray, this means more exposure for me. And just think of it, now my secret flamer can get even more people to read their less-than-creative comment. Nothing like sharing the joy :-)

Crazy schedule today, I'll be back this evening with something new.

Cheers!

PS: I case you haven't figured it out yet, I don't believe in sulking and hiding in the corner when being bullied.

The Camera Doesn't Lie (but we can lend a hand)

Take a look through the lens, tell me what you see?

This simple phrase has been the number one, best advice given to me when it comes to photo taking. I am not a photographer. Many of you have left flattering remarks about my photos and I truly appreciate that. Those of you who are professional photographers will realize the truth in my statement, I am not a photographer.

My art is gardening. Photography is a tool for me, a tool that I have grown comfortable with after much use but still a tool. Photographs are ways for me to share the beauty I see in the garden, a photographer would see the the beauty in the photograph itself.

My husband Don is a much better photographer than I will ever be. When I first tried to take photographs in the garden he explained all kinds of things to me. Words I had never heard before and had no interest in retaining minutes after our conversation. One thing stuck though, when he asked me to look into the lens and tell him what I saw.

Of course I saw the pretty flower I was looking at, what else should I see? It took time before I saw more, there was a dead leaf in the corner, the label was half sticking out at the bottom, somebody had forgotten to dead head yesterday's bloom and so on. As I learned to really look into the lens, make my eye follow all four sides and see what else is in the photo, that's when the compliments started to come.

The photo above is one I like very much. Today I can sit here though and point out that if I had seen that weed bucket in the left bottom corner and the silver bird house pole, I could have moved the camera just a nudge to the right or zoomed in just a tiny bit more.

The webmaster for the American Hemerocallis Society, Tim Fehr is an awesome photographer. I was incredibly lucky to sit through one or two of his lectures on garden photography. Better yet, I got to follow along with him on a tour at Planting Fields Arboretum here on Long Island. He too gave me more tips than I wanted to retain, such as using a gray board and bouncing light and... well, that stuff flew right out of my head.

The tip Tim shared with me that stuck for all these years is the rule of thirds (I might have the words wrong but I'm sure of the concept). Split your photo into thirds. Three lines across and three lines down. Instead of always centering your photo right in the middle, try to compose it so your focus falls along one of those third lines. I really like this concept and find those photos much more relaxing, not so "in your face".

Above you can see my idea of the rule of thirds with the incredibly photogenic Iris cristata 'Alba'.

Of course, some plants just scream for that "in your face shot" as this Echinops did for me. I like to call it "Horton, are you in there?" Listen to your plant material if it talks to you.

Here you can see an example again of the rule of thirds. My subject was the delicious daylily 'Jeanne Fitton'. One of my all time favorite perennials, Stachys monieri was glad to help along as a backdrop.

For years I shot all my photos with our trusty Nikon N2020 but it was the Micro Nikkor 55 mm 1:2.8 lens that did the magic. I held out as long as I could but slide film was getting harder to come by and so was the processing. Finally we went digital, our first camera didn't last long and I'm several years into my simple Olympus camedia (chosen for it's powerful zoom).

I have never gotten the same feel from these digital images. Oh yes, there are some benefits. The incredible blues in the above photo of a Columbine were never possible with that slide film.

Besides capturing the blues, I can now crop, edit, blur, clarify and manipulate my photos in ways that were previously unimaginable. (Nepeta siberica above is another favorite perennial here).

Although I'm not a photographer, I do have to thank my camera. It was while looking through that lens that I fell in love with so many things. I was blinded for so many years, only focused on daylilies and yet the photos that captured the feeling I was looking for always seemed to have companion plants mixed in. My heart was trying to tell my head something, it just took a while before I listened. For you folks in warmer climates, the daylily above, 'Kathryn June Woods' is as etheral as daylilies come.


Just to be fair, I'll finish with not one but two tips. First comes the photography tip. If at all possible, don't shoot your photos in full sun. If you have no choice, try to stay away from the hottest hours of the day, 11:00 - 3:00. In fact if it's raining too hard to work in the garden, throw on a slicker, bare your feet and get out there with a big golf umbrella and your camera.

The last tip, is for those northerners looking for rock solid hardy daylilies that are fantastically beautiful too, check out Karol Emmerich's cultivars at Springwood Gardens, located in rural Minnesota, these beauties (like 'Cast Your Net' above) are top notch.

Imagine that, me giving photography lessons. Instead of "photography for dummies" I should have called this post "photography by dummies".

Take back the Shed!

This photo is one of the oldest slides of our garden. It was the inspiration for our name, "Old Country Gardens".

When we moved here, I was already bitten by the gardening bug but I knew nothing about garden design. I saw all this land out back and thought the only way it could be planted was like a farm, everything in rows. Our yard no longer looks anything like this but I'm so glad I have this old photo to remind me of back then.


When we first moved here, I stored my gardening tools in our two car garage. We never had one of those before but somehow managed it fill it immediately on move-in day. To this day we can only squeeze one car in there.

It wasn't long before I knew we needed a shed. I was wasting precious time every day running back and forth from the gardens out back to the garage every time I needed a tool. When Don agreed that we needed a shed, I drove him crazy looking for the perfect one. It had to have windows, window-boxes for me to plant and I insisted on the door being centered.


The color of the shed alone was a whole project, I drove around town looking at other sheds and comparing different colored wood stains. My darling shed had curtains on it's windows before my daughters bedrooms had curtains, how could I resist those lace valences with picket fences on them.

The inside was another project. We bought flooring from the remnant section, cabinets and a counter top too. We didn't get to choose colors but I was so happy with what we got. Little did I know what a light colored floor would look like after a rainy day in the garden.


This is what the interior looked like the first few years. My daughters were children then and they'd spend days inside playing board games or house. I couldn't get them to make their bed but they'd sweep the shed in an instant.

Recently I tried to find a new photo of my shed. If you've read my recent posts you'll know how upset I was when our neighbor ruined the wooden fence and installed this hideous white vinyl elephant. Maybe that was the beginning of the problem. Maybe it was the day my mom was giving the shed a spring cleaning and let out a shriek when she found a mouse.


What ever it was, I started to avoid my shed. It became a place where I opened the doors, threw something inside and ran off again as fast as possible. The plant material around the shed has filled in so beautifully yet the only recent photos I found were two taken in July of 2006 during a garden tour here. My youngest daughter Emily took photos of people in the garden and the shed was captured at the same time. You can see here that the window boxes had rotted off by then. I miss them!


This last photo shows the shed out back. By the summer of 2006 the interior was totally ignored, the only enjoyment I was getting was working on the landscape around that shed. This brings me to the title of my post. It's time to "take back the shed"!

As soon as our snow melts, I'm going to get in there and empty out all those mouse filled birdhouses. The mice must think it's mouse condominium heaven in there..."ooh look honey, which house would you like? The one with the peaked roof or the one that looks like an old mans face...".

Really, I am!