Fourth of July In My Garden

Welcome. I am so glad that you stopped by. My garden gate is always open for you to come in, sit and relax and have a cold glass of lemonade. Can you believe that the Fourth of July is almost here? Seems like I just finished my Spring planting and now I am in my garden adding festive touches to celebrate our Nation's Birth Day!

Let's join my helpful studio assistant, Bentley, and I will share with you some of my festive touches and a few more new flea market and "thrifty" finds.

The large red tray cost $2.00 and set on top of the old red wagon makes a great little serving table

Another old tool box in my favorite color - blue - makes a darling little planter.

The old wooden flag is the perfect addition for Fourth of July.

The flag looks like it was made to go with the adorable little blue bird house with painted flags and it was another flea market find. Anything old and weathered has a special place in my heart and in my garden.

I bought the paper umbrellas last year at the end of the season for a few dollars - opps - turns out the were on sale for a reason as they do not open all the way. They were so cute I opened them as much as I could and used them anyway.

I thought the funny one that did not open looked like the perfect fit for the little girl to sit under - the shape reminds me of a fairy house.

I bought the red, white and blue bucket from Wallmart for $9.95 and it is just the right size to fill with ice and cold drinks or beer. The red and white check chair covers ( I showed them to you a few posts back) were 2 for $10.00 and they are made from outdoor fabric The are also from Wallmart.

The white wicker vase is actually a candle holder and is perfect for flowers when not being used for a candle.

The vintage picnic basket was a "free to you" find.

Thank you for visiting my blog. I love hearing from you and sincerely appreciate your visits, comments and those who are following my blog. Please let me know if you have any questions or would like to see me paint something special.

Sending you and your family Blessings and Best Wishes for a lovely Fourth of July.

Thank you to our Service Men and Women and their Families on this special holiday for giving up so much to protect our freedoms both here and abroad. God Bless you.

I am off to the Farmers Market to pick out the perfect painterly bouquet of flowers to paint and share with you next week. Blessings, Erin

What a Difference a Vacation Makes

If you have an awesome neighbor who takes great care of your plants while you're away, then going away for a week can be an amazing experience. When you see your garden every day it can be hard to appreciate just how much is going on. The above image is of the garden when we left for Texas ten days before this next image.

The corn literally exploded while we were gone, going from about shin high to waist high. Having never grown corn before the growth is unreal for me to behold.

Here is another view of the corn from before...

...and after. I pulled back a little on this image to show how the tomatoes are also taking off. The hot weather has really been what the garden was waiting for. While I still haven't put the Solar Pod to any use aside from killing things, the Solar Cones did a great job of accelerating the various melon plants.

I've tried watermelon half-heartedly before and failed miserably at it. These three watermelon plants are already doing way better than anything I've grown before and it isn't even July yet. The early melon varieties are already flowering, though I failed to get a good picture of them. All in all I'm very pleased with how the cones helped them along through. the cool spring weather

I really like interplanting, but it occasionally goes horribly wrong when you're planting new varieties. I'll have to wait for fruit set to tell you which variety of squash I planted with my pole beans, but they are out of control. The saving grace is one of the vines can train through the corn, another through the garlic, and another through some empty space left by the failed parsnip bed. With the length of the vines already I have doubts as to my ability to keep them free of vine borers. I've killed two adults already that were tanking up on the nearby milk-weed flowers, but I know if I've killed two there are many many more laying eggs, which are damned hard to find.


The Earth Box tomatoes continue to do very well. The black cherries are taller than me now with the help of the box, and about as tall if you take the box away. I'm 6'5" so they're doing great for New England. Though I'm not sure how I'm going to support any additional growth. I'm holdining a harvest of snap peas. Oregon Sugar Pod II to be exact. I can't say enough good things about this variety of pea. They taste great even when you harvest them late, as I did since we were away. They're incredibly prolific, compact, and heat tolerant. While I'll keep trying new varieties this is a staple for me.

Here I am tucked in amongst the corn, with the Oregon Sugar Pod II Pea plants in the foreground.

The happy gardener has many peas!

Audubon and Cape Wind

Hey, this is good news! As of last Friday, the Massachusetts Audubon society supports the Cape Wind energy project. If I am not mistaken, the last real environmental hurdle the project faced was in demonstrating that it posed no significant hazard to birds. If the Audubon Society is happy, then wow, this project is a winner!

(And the rich folks who don't want their views spoiled by windmills can go stuff themselves. I'll gladly take one of those colossi in my backyard.)

We're back!

Sorry we vanished. Chris, Gabe, and I were down on the Gulf Coast of Texas at a family reunion. I had some vague thoughts about photographing gardens or wild spaces down there for the blog, but a tummy virus put a crimp in that plan. Bleah.

Otherwise, though, it was a wonderful trip. I have never seen so many pelicans. Neither had any of the other family members. We wonder if perhaps their numbers have been on the rise over the recent decades.

A floating mat of something out in the water initially struck terror into various family members, who mistook it for oil. I think we were all appreciating Galveston's wild spaces more with the threat of its destruction looming. But in this case, what we saw floating by was seaweed, teeming with shrimp and crabs. A construction machine drove along the beach early each morning, scooping up the seaweed and a little sand to build new dunes and clean the sand for tourists. I found that to be a nice compromise between environmental and human-use issues.

Since I have no photo to post, here, instead, is a link to an article about a woman who was arrested for clearing brush on the side of a highway. She meant well, but she was messing with property that wasn't her own, and was repeatedly told by a park maintenance supervisor to cease her unsanctioned volunteer work. Being a lawyer, she should be aware that you don't have to know the laws in order to violate them.

It's just another example of people failing to recognize the value or beauty of wild spaces and wanting to impose their own aesthetics as an "improvement", and a sad case of a misdirected desire to volunteer.

A brief hop across the ditch

    I haven’t been to France for 7 or 8 years (I’m rather embarrassed to admit), but am on the way back from a visit to the Chaumont garden festival, where I took part in a conference on naturalistic planting design. Back in the mid-1990s there was a flurry of such events with a loose group called ‘Perennial Perspectives’ – with an event organised at Kew by Brita von Schoenaich in 1994 a notable watershed, as it introduced British gardeners to the astonishing virtuosity and technical skill of planting designers in Germany. The half-dozen or so PP get-togethers involved Brits, Scandinavians, German-speakers and Dutch. No-one from Latin Europe ever showed up, which on one level was a puzzle, as we all new that there were some individuals in France who were very keen on wild-style gardening, including of course the incredibly gifted Giles Clement; but on another level confirmed our prejudices about Gallic landscape dirigisme, and the very different garden traditions of Latin Europe …. yes it does involve a lot of straight lines, and a strangely obsessive desire to separate the garden from nature.

    So, an invitation to speak in France, alongside James Hitchmough from Sheffield University and Cassian Schmidt from Heremannshof in Germany was very welcome. But to us it felt like we were in a timewarp, with speaker number  one (president of the French landscape association) pompously describing a park project which supposedly involved nature – nature being confined to an inaccessible wilderness area and a few bits of unmown grass. What is it about French landscape culture which seems unhappy with any public space which looks empty with less than 5,000 people in it? Tired by endless slides of vast mown grass spaces and thrusting walkways, speaker number two (a garden journalist) addressed us with the kind of “love your weeds” hippy ramble which we last heard about 20 years ago. He did however end up with a spirited critique of ‘natives-only’ planting, reminding us of its fascistic history. Then it was over to me, and then James and Cassian.
      We all agreed that the Chaumont garden show this year was more planty than in previous years, although only one garden made us go “wow”. In previous years the boundary between ‘garden’ and ‘installation art’ was a pretty fluid one, with many of the gardens combining art-school abstruseness with a use of materials which bore little relationship to what anyone could achieve in a permanent garden. One of the show mottoes is ‘ideas to steal’, but whilst there was some good planting to inspire visitors, so much of the non-planted elements simply don’t have permanence : willow, willow, willow, and plastic, and while Corten steel is pretty damn permanent it is beyond most people’s pockets and (yawn) we have just seen so much of the stuff in show gardens of late.
   The Chaumont site however is fantastic, kicking any British garden show into the compost heap, as the show gardens are shoehorned into the landscape by hedges, and blocks of permanent perennial planting. The whole event is a delightful experience, and surprisingly intimate. All terribly tasteful and stylish and so very French.

       The whole thing though does reinforce my feeling  of many years that French garden style is very good at the cosmetic - the stylish but not necessarily durable, whereas what Dutch and German garden style is more about combining style with technical proficiency and practical longevity. I suppose we are in the latter camp, but scoring lower on all counts. The bedding schemes which French munipalities invest in may belong to the cosmetic camp, but oh, they are so good, very high quality, and there is clearly no problem with funding them; that any British town council would stump up such funds is sadly unthinkable.

This was jolly clever, on the edge of the parkland to the south east of the Chateau de Chaumont,  bedded out plants in ribbons so that when you see them sideways or diagonally on, there appears to be a field of planting.

       On to a night at a grotty hotel in Paris, and a meal in a pavement café with James in which we go into raptures about French food culture, and vengefully remind myself that escargots are merely a cover for butter and garlic. Dutifully set off for Parc la Villette, one of the most important parks made in the latter years of the 20th century. Trudged around, admiring the red steel ‘folies’ but cursing the grey gigantism of everything else, more spaces which needed 5,000+. Yes, there are some wonderful little corners too, and a fantastic variety of spaces, but not a perennial or a flower to be seen anywhere. The whole place feels oddly sterile. Came back to grumbling, I hope not too xenophobically, about French landscape culture: form over all else, a fixation with hard materials and straight lines, a general lack of softness. Lets hope the little signs of interest in wilder styles take root. I’d love to see a real French take on naturalistic planting.

Gianna's Garden

If there's anybody on this planet that's more talented then my friend Gianna at designing container arrangements, I have yet to meet them. Gianna is the Queen, hands down, best container designer ever.

Anybody who lives on Long Island is lucky, you can go to Main Street Nursery in Huntington village and pick her brain any time.

I'm even luckier, Gianna (and her equally talented husband Rich) live up the street from me.

These first two shots are a patio garden on the roof of their garage. You can't imagine how delightful it is to sit up here with a cool drink and just soak in the amazing colors and forms all around you.

Today I stopped up there to congratulate their daughter on her graduation from High School. Like an idiot I forgot my camera so had to resort to my phone camera. On a recent trip to Chicago I raved about my phone camera and I still love it but I've decided I still prefer my point and shoot (press "here" dummy) camera better. The big difference is I can manipulate the point and shoot photos better.

While I'm familiar with most of the plant material (I'm just more of a perennial gardener), I'm not going to reference the various plants here. The composition of colors, textures and massed containers are all so amazing to me.

This container is my utmost favorite and I can't believe how lousy the photos came out. I will most definitely get back there with my other camera. Hopefully we have an overcast day real soon.

The amount of stunning pots filled with tropicals is mind boggling!

There's even a little fish barrel complete with fish. If I remember correctly from last year, the driftwood is to protect the fish from local predatory birds or raccoons.


Last shot for today. I took quite a few more and will post some different ones on my other blog Melanie's Perennials so if you like what you see, stop there for yet more!

Red roses and a new Beach Cottage Painting

Welcome. My garden gate is always open for you to come in ,sit and relax and enjoy a cup of tea while I share with you the inspirations behind my art. Bentley, my helpful studio assistant, is ready to show you around.

I love to paint outside where I can smell the roses and find inspiration from my own vintage white wicker furniture. I wanted to paint climbing red roses with a flag blowing in the gentle summer breeze.

Let's go outside into the garden and look for inspiration.

Finding Inspiration . . . . .

Sunflowers in a blue and white vase.

Here . . . . .

There . . . . .

Everywhere . . . . .

A garden hat, pots of flowers and white wicker were my initial inspirations for the painting.

The finished painting with climbing red roses, a flag, garden hat, white wicker, pots of flowers and a blue and white vase with sunflowers.

Thank you for stopping by. I love hearing from you and sincerely appreciate you visit, comments and those who are following my blog. Please let me know if you have any questions or would like to see me paint something special.

Have a lovely week. Blessings, Erin