This morning I got up feeling like a gardener again. This past year has been hard on me. I have been still grieving my Aunt Mary's passing from last September. She was more a mother to me than my own mother and I miss her. I also think that driving up to Jtown and visiting her grave for the first time was very good for me, very cathartic. It's like I stood there and wept and then it was like "OK, it's time to move ahead. It's what Mary would want." (Mary was definitely NOT a gardener; she had a potted plant on her back porch and that was it. I used to give her potted hyacinths for Easter because I KNEW I'd get them back once they were done flowering!)
At any rate, yesterday I got a lot of weeding and tidying down along the Driveway Bed and a bit of the Front Bed. This morning I decided to tackle the Pond Circle area. What a mess. The brick path needed weeding (that wasn't too bad; I'm so glad that I lifted and relaid those paths last summer), and the beds needed a good tidying...mostly deadheading and cutting back stuff that was finished for the year; very few weeds. The worst section was the little Not-Yet-Named area to the north of the main Pond Circle where a few years ago I set in a brick and gravel circle (about 5 feet diameter) where I want to put a sundial, and where I also put in some small shrubs to make a bit of a topiary garden. Yikes. Couldn't even see the brick circle, the sort of cobbled together sundial and pedestal were laying on the ground, weeds everywhere. Topiary shrubs almost invisible. So really tore into that and got most of the area cleared off. Fortunately, R dumped all of the hedge trimmings down there and spread them around so mostly it was a few tall/branching weeds, not mats of smaller weeds. A few good yanks here and there and it looked much better. Ran into some poison ivy under the trees so had to stop to spray that. Then realized there was an enormous maple branch down, pretty well hidden in the yews and dogwoods. I couldn't tug it loose and realized the butt end was wedged into the maple tree, so had to get the ladder out and heave ho until it popped out. When I went to set up the pedestal and sundial, I saw that not only was the pedestal cracked in half, but it was half buried...in a big hill of black ants. Used the hoe to pry everything out of the ant hill....they were not happy. I'll need to buy a bag of fresh mortar and see what I can do to get the pedestal not just repaired, but fitted with some sort of disc on top where the sundial can sit. That was what held me back when I originally dragged everything out and set it down there.
So now I'm faced with a pretty big area that I need to do something nice with. I thought about covering the ground with mini-comfrey, but vetoed that idea because the North Long Border and the Pond Circle Beds back up onto this space and that mini-comfrey is just a bit too vigorous. I've already had to dig it out of the Pond Circle beds and relocate it. It's absolutely GREAT groundcover in the Woodland garden/Glade area. In the spring it's utterly charming, with tiny bellshaped comfrey flowers in pale creamy white/yellow. But it has its downsides: It is very vigorous and will cover ground thick and fast (in its favor, it's easy to rip out); the mature leaves are very coarse and tend to get dark dark green as the summer wears on, the older leaves turn black as they die off. Fine in a big mass under the trees off a woodland path, but a little depressing in a sunny garden spot. At any rate, no. I think I will go with a flower lawn of violets (purple and white, I've got tons of them), thread in a little lily of the valley (got lots of that too), and spot in a lot of tiny spring bulbs like crocus, scilla, etc. ( got to order some of those). If I can get more of the aconites from along the road, they would do well there too (there's already a small patch growing in there). Since there's no lawn grass and not much else in the way of weeds (I dug out the perennial sunflowers and a couple clumps of orchard grass), I think I should not have too much trouble getting violets started in there, especially if I wait until the weather cools down in the fall and we get rain.
I'm very pleased with the topiary. The dwarf alberta spruce is thriving, the two hollies that I got for free at the dump and the one bicolor euonymous are also doing very well, which is a relief because the hollies got off to a very rocky start last summer. I lost two of the three "lollipop" shaped junipers that I got from E. but the survivor is doing pretty well. Just needs a bit of extra TLC.
So, that settles the plans/work agenda for the North area. The South area is another story altogether...that's wilderness. But I got plans...big plans...
***
Finally, as I was doing all this tidying and cleaning and making things look fresh and nice it occurred to me to wonder why I hadn't done all this LAST week, in anticipation of my nephew's visit. And I realized that I think subconsciously I was sort of hoping he'd see all this and say "I could come up some time and give you a hand..." So naughty. *LOL* Well, that idle dream came to nothing. All he said was "I"m scared of chain saws." So much for humming the lumberjack song as we work shoulder to shoulder clearing those dead pines.
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