Rocks in the Snow

This is our snake-habitat rock wall at the edge of the woods.

Snowflakes

As a child, I never lived anywhere colder than Virginia. It snows in Virginia, occasionally, but the snowflakes usually came down in melted-together clumps. So, I didn't know until recently that the pretty six-sided snowflakes could actually be seen by the naked eye.

These accumulated on a snow-shovel while I took a break from clearing the driveway.

Evergreens in the Snow

Deciduous Plants in the Snow

Witchhazel blossom remnants.



Sedum, "Autumn Joy".



Evening Primrose seed pods, chewed open by birds.



Bee balm seed pod.



This photo was taken on January 1, of mustard growing in the cracks right in front of the garage. The micro-climate in that spot kept it growing long after the other mustard volunteers had died off. It was the last deciduous plant in the yard to stay green. Now it is beneath a layer of ice.

Perhaps in the future we can use the location to our advantage.

Poinsettia Guilt

Poinsettia. Nothing says Christmas like the Poinsettia.

The new colors available are amazing but even the old stand-bye red will warm your heart.

Poinsettia's are so easy to grow, that's the problem with them. You see, after Christmas, after New Year's, after all the holiday decorations are packed back in the attic, you find yourself left with a bright red plant.

Now don't get me wrong, I like the color red, my kitchen has lots of deep red accents. But a red plant that screams CHRISTMAS? Nope, this just doesn't fit into my decorating scheme. Ha! That sounds like my house is a showcase out of Better Homes and Gardens but it isn't. I just can't seem to get used to this plant being in my house right now.

So here comes the guilt part. You can stop watering it and let it die a slow, painful death. You can imagine it needs more sunshine and put it out on the breezeway and forget the fact that it's the frozen tundra out there. Instant death sounds so much better than a slow death but I just can't make myself do it.

The other day I posted to a daylily listserve I belong to and posed this same question. What do you do with your Poinsettias? The reply I liked best came from a woman who suggested watering it and ignoring it until spring. Then take it outside and plant it in the garden where you need to fill in a hole (or in a container with other foliage plants). The leaves won't be red then, but it will grow big and lush and fill in a spot that was barren. Come fall when a heavy frost settles down, it will die but it will have lived on for one more glorious season.

Now I only need to find blinders to wear every time I walk through my living room. Or better yet, maybe I'll move it to my daughter Lauren's room since she is away at college. Hmmm, I think I'll do just that!

Just "me"

Here we are, the end of January with the dull dreary days of February barreling down upon us.

So where have I been? I've been here, not on my computer but here, in my house and up at the school.

What's new you ask? Well, it appears our desktop computer has finally passed out for good. I have my photos saved on an external hard-drive but haven't moved them yet to this laptop. Since I'm known to be technologically challenged, it might still be awhile before I get photos back up here. At least I'm not chomping at the bit to take lots of photos these days, right now everything is white or dirty gray outside.

My first inclination was to title this post "the new me". You see, there have been some big changes in our lives and more changes yet to come. People around here who know me personally have noticed one of the changes. Over the last year I lost a total of 40 pounds. I really didn't have 40 pounds to lose though so I find myself with the unusual task of having to put 5 pounds back on again! So when it comes to the physical me, maybe there is a new me but I find the old me is still right there, under my skin.

This June will be our 25th wedding anniversary. It will also be our last wedding anniversary. Read between the lines if you will. The biggest change yet to come? Chances are this coming growing season will be the last one here in this garden. So here's another "me", not "us", just "me". The garden is something I just can't really think about, it just seems to be hiding in a corner of my mind, waiting for spring before it begins to set down roots and grow again.

Being a gardener, I think I'm an eternal optimist. While I know that any house I can afford in this town will be a tiny cottage, I have dreams of a magazine-like cottage garden with white picket fences and lots and lots of cutting flowers just cascading over rough walkways. Hmmm, maybe I can think of gardening after all.

Hopefully this tentative sticking of my big toe in the water's of the world wide web will lead me to jump back in. I've put up all the comments many of you left me on my blog but will only begin answering new comments for now.

Hugs to everybody,
Just "me", Melanie

COUNTRY LIFE IS NOT NECESSARILY QUIET

Weeks go  by and nothing notable happens up here in Herefordshire, then it all happens at once. On Thursday we had three people working here: our new WRAG trainee, Advolly, Andrew the hedging guy and Will, our occasional creative-handman. Will was laying herringbone paths in the salad/cutting garden, so we can walk and kneel and generally fiddle about with lettuce seedlings and suchlike, without getting covered in mud.

Andrew’s hedging was mostly just cutting back to get some more light on the bottom of the wildflower (not)meadow, some hedge-laying but also selective cutting back which is a technique I just invented. Problem is with mixed country hedges is that if you don’t cut or lay them they turn into trees/shrubs – they make great windbreaks but they develop gaps lower down, so folks on the public footpath can peer into our garden and basically cease being  a hedge. But…. if you cut or lay the lot, the wind will come howling into our garden (we are near the top of a hill), so I thought , why not cut out about 20% of the contents and let them regenerate, and then repeat next year, and start a rolling programme of cutting back and regenerating.

Then Advolly the WRAG. Stands for Women Returning to Amenity Gardening – I think it grew out of the wartime landgirl thing, a trainee scheme for women making midlife career changes. Advolly is serious mud-stained glam, Zimbabwean-heritage, and hair in African cornbraids but otherwise as English as you can get, especially her incredible enthusiasm for plants and garden history. It’s a great thing having such an enthusiastic and high-powered trainee, makes you sharpen up about why you do things and how you explain them.

Oh, the guys from Southern Solar were fixing the solar-thermal hot water system which gives us fee hot H2O from April to October. Then a guy turns up we have never seen before, with weird tattoos all over his face, and an in-yer-face style which alternates with the synaptic gaps of someone who has over-indulged in LSD at some stage in what looks like a very colourful career, announcing that he is going to build a shed in the woods which overlook us (he owns a strip, but that is another story), and possibly a recording studio (will this be the world’s first wood-powered recording studio?) The only way he can get his kit up there is by hiring a local agricultural contractor who drives it up there in the bucket of a Manitou (a huge 4x4 ag . vehicle , for those of you who think that farming is all about organic lambs bouncing about in fields of bright green grass). In doing so the public footpath is turned into the most horrific quagmire.

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Exciting News to Share!

For me part of the joy of receiving good news is sharing the news with my wonderful new friends in Blog Land. So here goes - my garden and art will be in The March issue of Country Sampler Home Tours edition. Franscoise O'Neill ( Fabulous Fifi) and Sunday Hendrickson (devine art director) scouted my home and garden in August 2007 and a year later Sunday called me with the exciting news that the Home Tour Issue of Country Sampler wanted to shoot my garden. Needless to say, I was excited beyond words. Sunday and fabulous photographer Mark Lohman arrived at my home in August 2008 at 6:00 AM to shoot my garden.


When I met Sunday and Fifi I thought "blogs" were something that only Politicians and Newspaper writers used to promote themselves. LOL - I visited Fifi's fabulous blog, http://fabulousfifi.typepad.com/ and was immediately hooked on the world of blogging. Fast forward a year and a half later and I am sharing my joy and excitement with you on my own blog.



Now for the fun part. . .Elizabeth Preston, Associated Editor of country Sampler Magazine, asked me if I would be interested in donating a painting which the magazine would give a way to their readers. Of course I said yes and donated one of the paintings that was photographed for the magazine. I do not have all of the details yet as to how the give a way works, but will let you know as soon I have more information. The painting is the one of "The Garden Shop" which I use on my blog banner.




"Give-A-Way Painting"

Yes, Bentley will be in the magazine article - Sunday was able to get him to "pose" for only one shot as most of the day he spent running around in and among the cameras and camera cords.

Bentley, My Studio Assistant

Have a lovely week.

Deep Winter

Softly I drift down
To lie in velvety beds
Pure tranquility
The calm after a snow storm is amazing. The world is so bright that you have to squint. The air smells pure and sound is deadened to the point where you can hear the wind in ways you'd normally miss. Then you hear a snow-blower start up and the scrape of a shovel on cement and the moment is gone. Still, it was nice for a moment.


Michelle sent me on a guerrilla mission to quickly snap some pictures before we headed off to work this morning. It was a welcome change of pace from all the shoveling we both had to do to clear out the driveway and mailbox. The piles of snow are getting pretty big as you can see by the entrapped mailbox.

It is amazing to see something you remember as so green turn into a giant mound of snow.

The reason the front of the mound is so flat is we have to dig out our mailbox after each snow so the mailman can get to it from his truck. The plow always dumps a block of snow in front of it, so we're always carving it back out.

The garden beds are sitting pretty under their blanket of snow. The work I did to raise them showing clearly with each row a nice bump.

Since we shovel half the driveway onto the raspberry and strawberry bed they are just barely poking through the top now. While I worry a little about the weight of the snow compacting the soil, I also know it will act as an insulator against the below zero weather we have from time to time in January/February.

The house covered in snow. With all the snow on the roof we can't quite tell if the sky-light in our room is leaking slowly or if the humidifier I've been running every night has been causing condensation to make everything wet. I've stopped the humidifier for now to see if it dries out. My fingers are crossed.

Gabe is going to have so much fun playing in the huge pile of snow that ends up on our lawn thanks to the snow plow. It is taller than I am at this point and will continue to grow if we don't get some hot weather soon. I can only imagine a nor'easter giving us another 2 to 3 feet on top of this base. I love winter for the contrast it gives and for its unique qualities. The spring will be so sweet when it comes this year.

Meet Bentley, My Studio Assistant

Bentley

I thought it would be fun to introduce you to Bentley, My faithful Studio Assistant, since so many of you have e-mailed me asking about Bentley. He is a 3 year old Soft Coated Wheaten Terrier - an Irish breed sharing its ancestry with the Kerry Blue and Irish Terrier. The breed is affectionate and loving and are people dogs. Wheatens are a single coated breed and do not shed.



I adopted Bentley from the Soft Coated Wheaten Terrier Club of Southern California almost two years ago and he has been a joy from the moment I met him. The Wheaten club puts a lot of effort in matching the dog to the perspective owner or family and in educating the new owner. His owners put their Wheatens up for adoption since they were retiring to the desert and felt it would be too hot for them to be comfortable. I was fortunate to meet his owner who shared lots of helpful information about Bentley - the most important was that Bentley would rather sniff around and explore than play with his toys - hence his nickname - "Inspector Bentley".



The following photos were taken as I was setting up my blue and white china for a photo shoot for the "Tea In The Rose Garden" painting shown in my previous post.

Hmm, wonder what that is - looks like something to eat!

I will just act like I am looking at the birds and no one will notice!

The coast looks clear, think I will make my move!

I will just take a quick sniff and no one will know!

Sniff - sniff !

That was disappointing - just some strawberries and not a treat for me!

Oh well , there are lots of other things to inspect!

Toxicodendron Vernix, a.k.a. Poison Sumac

In posting about poison sumac elsewhere, I realized that I had some photos of our sumac on my hard drive which I had never posted here.

These photos were taken in the summer.

Blue and White Inspirations

I find constant inspiration to paint from the things I love the most - soft blue skies, blue and white china, flowers in my garden, antiquing and flea markets, faded blue denim and sharing the joy of my inspirations and creations.

Finding inspiration

Here . . . . . . .

There . . . . . . .

Everywhere . . . . . . .

The blue sky, red roses, garden hat and blue and white china were the inspirations that inspired my "Tea In The Rose Garden" painting

What are your inspirations?

Winter is for Planning

Okay, so planting bamboo in the front yard was a bad idea. It had the potential to go terribly wrong in a highly visible way, and the damage would have been very difficult to reverse. So, no bamboo.

Which leaves me with a big hole in the front yard.



But in afrghtenly timely manner, I stumbled across this site: a playground blog!

It would make so much more sense to build a play-space for Gabe!

The plan so far is to make a ring of mulched, open space, surrounded by beds of kid-safe plants.

Here is the current layout of our front yard:



And here is roughly what I would like to do:



More later! Gabe is in my lap and is getting impatient with me. Little does he know!

A Forum for Us Crazy Gardeners

Out of the blue I recieved an invitation to join the Wildlife Gardeners forums. The forum's emphasis is on (of course) wildlife, but also organic and native gardeneing. There is even a section on permaculture, and another on nature photography!

There isn't much traffic there yet, but it has great potential. And it beats the pants off of the previous gardening forums I had spent some time in. The biggest difference? The folks at Wildlife Gardeners actually do research. What a nice change from old-lady gardening, where you get wonderful assumptions such as "it grew in my yard, so it must be native!"

For giggles, I drew up a diagram of how to braid onions to share in their "Preserving the Harvest" section.

Cold, innit?

Pardon me for sounding middle-aged but a whole generation of gardeners have grown up in Britain who have never experienced a ‘proper’ winter since they started gardening. Anyone younger than me basically. I had started a nursery business in 1986 and that was a jolly cold winter – it wiped out 75% of the exotic plantlife on Tresco in the Scillies, good news for me as it turned out, as I was selling them replacement South African and Australian exotica for years after.

So many gardeners under the age of fifty simply have not gardened at a time when there would be a frost night after night, and a mild spell would be a thankful break rather than the norm. This winter, when there seems to have been a frost every morning for more than a month now, seems exceptional – in fact it is quite normal, pre-global warming. The weather will now come as a nasty shock to the growers of ‘hardy’ bananas, agaves and acacias. But most of them at least know the risks of the game and will take appropriate measures to protect their treasures. More worrying is the whole generation of garden professionals who have no memory of a hard winter, the designers who plant their clients’ gardens with tender species, the wholesalers who sell truckloads of untrialled new Lavendula stoechas varieties or the garden centre managers who sell Cyclamen persicum as bedding plants.

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Return of the Ugly Bucket!

I love my new macro lens!