Last Autumn Colors - Part II

Last week it was too cold for a walk down to the pond. Yesterday, although windy, was probably one of our last nice days for a while. From here on freezing weather or thereabout is in our future.

Reeds in the Wind.

Under the Big Tree

 

Empty Chairs at the Pond

Blazing November



Nag ou grote.

Last Autumn Colors

It was a bleak and frosty landscape that greeted us upon our return on Saturday from an over-exposure of our senses in France. But we seemed to have brought Paris’s cold, wintry weather with us to Kentucky.

While the peasants played bourgeoisie for a fortnight and autumn only starting to take a grip on France, in our absence our maison campagne was transformed to the simpler beauty of nature in late autumn. Sunday I went for a short walk.

The stands of White Ash trees surrounding the house turned bald and it now looks like Gulliver bombarded Lilliput land with wooden darts with spiky feathers. Their grey bark against a grey sky made them ghostly. But the twisted road to the house still looked welcoming and inviting with thick layers of leaves leading the eye and islands of autumn in an ocean of green and brown.

 

This could be some of the last autumn colors for the year because possible strong winds from Hurricane Sandy might reach us the next few days and clean the trees of leaves in preparation for winter. Luckily we came back 2 days before the mess that Sandy is creating with all the airports on the eastern side of the country closed. Paris airport was already a mess on Saturday morning due to striking airport workers.   

The road to the pond looked inviting but the breeze was cold and my hands were freezing. With more than 20 species of trees around the pond it probably would have been very colorful, but that’s for another day, another time.

But by just walking around the house there were enough splashes of color against the bleak sky to appreciate autumn.

And it felt good to stand on top of the hill again overlooking a freshly cut and baled field and my neighbors cows in the pasture. France was excellent, it will stay with us, but it’s also good to be back home again.

Tiny splashes of summer's colors still exist at the front porch. What’s up with David’s bust in the garden soil? It’s there by design. He stepped down. He is tired of being put on a pedestal all the time.

The Summer of 2010

While last week’s snow has been melted by a few sunshiny and slightly warmer days what better way to remember there are brighter, sunnier and much warmer days ahead than to look back at photos of the garden during 2010. This must be the snowiest winter in the last 10 years and if you consider that I missed nearly a month of it while in South Africa, I can only imagine how long this winter would have felt. And looking at bright and colorful photos of summer is so much nicer than experiencing the supposedly “sprokieswereld” of frozen car windows and slip-sliding driving on icy roads outside.

Strawberries

After the hard work of 2008 and 2009 of redesigning and replanting nearly the whole backyard, 2010 was a relative quiet year in the garden for me. With so many other work-related projects on my plate the 3rd year of a 3 year plan did not materialized as planned. Although I did a bit of work, as things stand now I will hopefully complete the rest of the garden plans this year. But why put a date on the completion at all? It could be n open project. In 2011 I would like to complete the stonework edging of all the beds, recreate the vegetable garden in a sunnier location and do all the transplanting that goes with than, and build a small “deck” or cozy sitting area in the shade of some big trees in the very back of the yard for picnics or just to go and sit for quiet moments in the backyard.

Visitors to the backyard

Also, because we felled a huge white pine tree, which became a real gluey pest, I now have an added section of garden available near the woodlands area that can be used for plants that like morning sun. I still need to remove the stump and then prepare the soil for something special. Probably a few specimen low shrubs because the removal of the pine will allow the Weeping Snow Fountain Cherry tree next door to expand and truly blossom (excuse the pun) into a show piece in spring with its clusters of white flowers. Up to the felling of the pine the cherry tree was rather boxed in and her spring exhibition was limited.

Lastly, in the front garden I transplanted some roses and add more, while M had some Korean boxwoods removed and replaced them with various kinds of hydrangeas. It will eventually be more colorful than the monotonous green of the boxwoods

A flowery fence
Slowly but surely all available open spaces are being filled.

Preserves from the garden.

From left: Marinara with garden vegetables, Pickled cherry tomatoes, Curried green beans, Marinara with red wine and basil

Windowbox and hydrangea

A Fiery Begonia boliviensis 'Bonfire', a tropical plant that loves full sun 

Yellow is the color...

From my favorite rocking chair on the back porch

Spring's Here!!!

Well, the Narcissus think so!

Stonewalled

In a previous post I wrote about Kentucky’s famous stonewalls. At the back of my property I also have an old stonewall, which run for a large part all around our subdivision. My portion, dividing the backyard from a community park, which was in a previous lifetime a farm, hence the stonewall fence, was covered by many creepers and honeysuckle shrubs and a rusted barbed wire fence mangled between the creepers. For several years I have been toying with the idea to remove the foliage and at the end of the past summer and into early autumn I tackled the ‘issue’ head on.

The decision to remove the shrubs was not an easy one because it gives us a lot of privacy in summer and to some extent in the winter too, even without leaves. But I removed just the layer of shrubs inside my property. There is still another 5 – 8 meters of shrubs and trees between the stone wall and the start of the park.

A portion of the wall after it was cleared from shrubs and creepers.

I still have to clear about 40 feet of wall. After I removed about three quarters of the bushes I stopped. Cooler weather was coming on fast and I still had to fix the wall in some places where it caved in from age or where the sandstone has simply been eroded by rain and nature. The clearing of the bushes was a tiresome and slow-going job, especially removing the barbed wire and the old iron posts.

A large portion where the wall eroded or was damaged by humans

 

The damaged portion after repairs. I had to fix several other lesser damage areas too.

 

Leveled and repaired. The photo shows only about 50% of the wall that was cleared and repaired. The other 50% is behind my right shoulder. The dark green at the end of the wall is still to be cleared.

 

This is the portion still to be cleared. I am still in doubt about it. The wall behind it does not look well preserved. Also, it is now one ‘wall’ of a secluded portion of the garden. Removing the foliage may destroy the feeling of being secluded and surrounded by garden.

Leaf Season

Outside a distinct bite is in the air.

Autumn is here.

Edged against a waxy gray sky

the foliage in their yellows, reds, browns, and oranges

makes it color-abundantly clear.

The burning bushes can always be relied upon to provide brilliant color.

The garden does not have many perennials that bloom in autumn. 

Asters (above) and mums (below) make the most of the cooler weather.

Autumn glory at the end of October

A little more than a month later and the same scene is leafless, white with snow and the only color available is the reflection of Christmas lights in the window.

 The backyard last Saturday morning. Thank goodness we painted the shed red otherwise the yard would have been devoid of any color but white and gray.

Now it is winter and the gardener and his plants can take a well deserved rest.
Hibernate. I can dig that. (No pun intended.)
I don’t mind the winter’s cold (well sometimes I do),
just as long as the sky stays blue, deep blue,
and the sun shines.

The Year in Gardening

Just the other day spring arrived and then summer flashed by. Autumn burst on the scene in all its normal colorful glory, but it was short lived as usual. The past few weeks winter has arrived and unfortunately it will stay far longer than the other seasons, or so it feels. The year just went by in a flash.

After January’s ice storm I thought I would have major issues, many dead plants, but the garden was the best ever. Last year’s hard work of redesigning the garden layout and transplanting most of the plants worked very well.

This year I spent about 20 % less time in the garden than previous years. That left me with more time to enjoy the scenery instead of working at creating the scenery. The garden is now smaller and more compact. I planted the plants closer to each other, which resulted in a concentrated flower show. With the redesign I grouped flowers and shrubs together that bloom at the same time. The result was waves of flowers throughout the garden at various times of the season.

During the sunny months we removed a long rotten fence that ran all along the one side of the backyard and replaced it with a new 6 feet high fence and painted it. What a job! M did a lot of the scraping and painting while I with a little help from my son did the heavy work of securing the fence pieces to the cross beams and posts. I also cleared and extended the path through the ‘woodlands’ to the entrance to the park at the back of my property.

A springtime collage of how the island on the left of the background image, planted with Asian lilies changed from deep green foilage to a bouquet of flowers.

 

The end result during late June 2009. A 'cacophony' of colors in an explosion of white, burgundy, apricot, pink, and yellow against the Viburnun background, screaming at one to take a closer look. 

 

In a bed on the sunny side of the backyard more Asian lilies, mainly in yellow and burgundy red, created a wave of color.

 

By mid-summer, once the lilies ended their show the Shasta daisies, hardy hibuscus and purple cone flowers towered over the lamb's ears.

 

A bug on the yellow top flowers of the golden-rods.

 

In a quiet corner the daylilies, hydrangeas and annabells provide a colorful alternative to barren ground. This area gets only limited filtered sunlight and many plants have struggled here in the past. These 1 year olds seem to like it here though.

 

The Black-eyed Susans have naturalized and are surrounding the bird feeder.

Late Spring Flowers

A collage of late spring flowers from the garden.

The Big Garden Makeover (Year 2...)

The big garden makeover continues this year, the 2nd year of a 3 year plan. Well I hope it’s only 3 years. But one thing is already clear: Much less work is required on the mundane tasks of weeding, mulching, etc. And that’s great. That was one of the major objectives of the makeover.

The original plan to have the garden well-planted without seeing much soil is coming on really well. I still have a few open spots, but they will be covered this year as some of the smaller plants grow bigger and where needed, I will plant new ones, but that will only be a handful of cases. I have already identified a few plants that should be moved to more “friendlier” locations and one or two I want to remove completely.

M wou nog altyd 'n bankie onder 'n boom he.

Two weeks ago we created two small vegetable gardens. The one close to the house is mainly for herbs (Italian and sweet basil, German, French and lime/lemon thyme, Greek oregano, Italian and curly parley and some garlic and also chives), one tomato and two sweet pepper plants. In the second vegetable area we planted leeks, Swiss chard, leaf lettuce, green beans, cucumbers, pattypan and crooked neck squash, and also some typical South African green squash (skorsies). Although the area is rather smallish we are going to try our hand at vertical gardening for the vine type veggies.

During the Memorial Day weekend we dressed the backyard beds with 2 and a half truckloads of mulch, and created a rest area or, what I rather want to call an appreciate-the-garden area under the silver leaf maple tree where we laid garden cloth down and then pine bark nuggets on top. The grass never grew well on that path in any case. And we then installed an around-the-tree bench.

In general the garden is looking much better than in previous years. Just about all the plants transplanted last year survived. I was a bit worried that the January ice storm would have damaged many plants, but it seems only the trees suffered. I lost a few perennials, but I don’t think I can contribute that to the ice storm, just normal harsh winter “wear-and-tear”.

For the rest of the summer we have several projects planned, but I will write more about them as time goes on.

Along the path through the "Woodlands" area of the yard the hostas, columbines, coral bells and astilbes are doing really well. These were just baby plants last year.

Dual Flights.
Two Sundays ago while lazily strolling through the garden I heard a loud sound of air being forces out of a container. Looking up I see a huge air balloon above me. I quickly went to grab the camera, which is never far away, and was very fortunate that at that very moment that I took the picture of the balloon a starlet flew past and into the picture.

But it is not all work and no rest. We do make some time to enjoy the sunset too.