Velcro

Now that our April Fools' Day snowstorm has melted, it's just about warm enough to work outside once the sun gets nice and high.  Or once you work up a sweat raking all the leaves you didn't get to last fall.  


Now, I love oak trees, and our property has a fair amount of them.   But before we moved here, the hill behind our house was seriously overgrown, and the oaks were hard to spot.  Scraggly hemlocks fought with birches for what little light filtered through. The oaks rose above it all, shooting straight for the sky to unobstructed sunlight, but were largely masked by the scrum below.  Removing the underbrush and mutant frustrated birches revealed several beautiful oaks that responded enthusiastically to their new found freedom.  As a result, all through spring and summer, our property is ringed with tall, straight oaks standing like sentinels around the perimeter. We, and the squirrels, feel comforted by their watchfulness and bounty.


There's a downside to all this oak worship.  Leaves.  Thousands of them -- and oak leaves are particularly large.  Usually we can keep up with them in the fall... sort of.  And in the winter it's easy to forget about them.  But once the snow melts... there they all are.  Huddled at the base of the hydrangea, tangled in the stalks of the raspberry patch.  And the cotoneasters.  

Cotoneasters draped over the
stone wall above the herb garden

Cotoneasters are hardy, neglect-tolerant prostrate shrubs that drape beautifully over stone walls and create a nice green carpet studded with bright red berries in the fall.  They grow with abandon, and I usually have to give them a serious haircut at least twice a season or they totally obscure the stone walls they're meant to accent.  But when they behave, they soften the stonework and are a great transition between various other surfaces and textures.


Regarding oak leaves, however, they are the vegetative equivalent of velcro.  

Click to see velcro-like properties

 

 

They get covered with leaves, as does everything else in the fall, but they don't stop there.  They collect huge wads of leaves, clutching them tightly under the maze of stems and their own leaves -- which never fall off.  Raking works only superficially, but for every leaf yielded easily, there are at least a dozen playing hide and seek where the tines can't reach. There's no solution other than picking them out by hand.  The worst of it is, that even when you're done -- or as done as Mr. Mulch will let you be -- you can still see more leaves hiding under the foliage.  Sure, it looks like they're clean, but YOU know there still there.


And we have not one, not two, but three separate stands of these bad boys for me to clean up -- along the driveway, behind the herb garden, and just below the vegetable garden.  I know how I'll spend the rest of this Sunday afternoon.


But before I go do battle with the velcro again, there are some more enjoyable things going on in the garden this weekend.  In no particular order:

The crocuses are blooming!

The peas are going in...

... to their freshly made bed

And it's time to wonder at nature, in the form of a budding Chinese Tree Peony.  This is a close-up of it coming to life for the Spring.  But it may as well have been imagined by Georgia O'Keefe -- as crazy and lush as this looks.  And the flowers that will eventually follow are every bit as sensuous.  A truly amazing plant.  As magical as it is to see what this becomes, it's just as wondrous to contemplate today.  Enjoy!

Chinese Tree Peony