Ducks, redux

It appears that we've been adopted by Mr. and Mrs. Mallard.

We have a series of steps that zigzag down between the terraces in the back.  Just below the midpoint we have a prostrate Juniper that we've named "Cousin Itt" in honor of the hirsute recurring character of the same name in the Addams Family.  Over the years, Cousin Itt has been through alot and attracted more than his fair share of attention.  He survived several years of being continually anointed by our late male boxer, Guinness, who had evidently decided it was his personal urinal. I survived the summer Cousin Itt sheltered a world class nest of hornets, making an evening stroll down the path a precursor to a Benadryl night.  And just this past winter, Chip and Dale took up housekeeping in the cave provided by Cousin Itt under the snow.  

Today, as I made my way down the steps and drew even with Cousin Itt, a whir of feathers erupted from the bush, accompanied by several indignant squawks.  At first, I thought I had spooked a pheasant, but then I saw the blur resolve itself into a discernible shape clacking reprovingly on the kitchen roof.  It was clearly the female mallard, mate to the male I had seen only a day earlier.  She was not happy with me.  At all. I can certainly understand -- the roof is nowhere near as cozy as Cousin Itt.

As I watched her clomp around the roof anxiously, I realized a second voice had joined her irritated chorus.  Mr. Mallard was here, too -- watching alertly from the very peak of the main roof and sending a constant stream of low clicks, clucks, and "I told you sos."  He reminded me of the spotters used by street vendors, posted at the corner of the block, ready to sound the alarm if the police show up.  Judging from the scolding he was getting from the Missus, it was clear she didn't think he had brought his A game today.

After a few minutes, Mrs. Mallard abandoned the roof, and flew the couple of yards directly across the hill to the vegetable garden.  She did the full tour, checking out all the raised beds, while I held my breath.  Mallards' diet consists primarily of plants -- with the occasional mollusk thrown in.  They prefer to forage in shallow water, but as I learned through intensive research (all right, one quick online search), "The mallard sometimes forages on farmland for grains like rice, corn, oats, wheat, and barley."  Now, we've done our best to deer-proof the garden; do we have to duck-proof it too?!

To my relief, she evidently found nothing to her liking, so she settled down in the cotoneasters bordering that part of the garden.  And sat.  And sat, and sat.  All the while Mr. Mallard was chattering -- what?  Encouragement? Warning? LaMaze breathing instructions?  

I may never know.  I do know that they both left after about another half hour.  I immediately ran down to see if she had left anything behind -- an egg or two perhaps.  Nothing there -- just a small duck-shaped indentation where she had made herself at home.  This is the third duck sighting; my second, and Mr. Mulch has another. Clearly, they're looking at real estate in the neighborhood and seem to like ours.

One more visit and I think I'll need to officially add Mr. and Mrs. Mallard to our household count.

Thar' she blows!

It's been gray and cold and damp for way too long, and it's put a serious damper on signs of life everywhere in the garden. You can almost feel the tension while they plants restrain themselves, refusing to get exuberant until the weather truly commits to Spring.  

Lo and behold, today it seemed that we finally had that commitment.  The sun came out at about 8:30 this morning, the mercury zoomed up to 81, and I swear you could literally hear the plants issue a collective sigh of release as they sprang into action.  If the garden were a cartoon, there would probably be little thought balloons over most plants, containing sound effect words like "sproing, bloop, pop, splurt, and whoosh" among others.  Here's some of the activity that would be narrated...

Ferns started unfurling

The Weeping Cherry Tree looks anything but sad

Solomon Seal continues its upwards march

Hyacinths are a couple of days ahead of
almost-blooming tulips

Dwarf rhododendron are about to explode in purple

The peas sprouted

Forsythia put on their sunny display

Daffodils FINALLY open -- yes, they're very late,
but we'll have them after everyone else's are spent!

We were inspired by this enthusiastic growth spurt and decided to seize the sun-drenched opportunity to get the oakleaf hydrangea in the ground.  That meant... yep, more holes. And yep, more stones.  

We remove so much solid matter each time we tap virgin territory on the hill, that we often don't have enough soil to refill the hole around the plant.  So I took it upon myself to volunteer to make the run to the nursery to get the 6 bags of compost we'd need to complete the hydrangeas' new homes.  A difficult dirty assignment, critically important, but someone had to do it. The fact that it also meant that I was leaving the hole-digging and rock-heaving to Mr. Mulch had nothing to do with it.  

I got back in the nick of time -- that time being the exact moment the last hole was completed.  Without further ceremony, we ushered the new plants into their beds, watered them in, and beat a hasty retreat as the skies darkened and it got ready to rain again.  

So much for Spring sunshine.

Hydrangea ready to be tucked in

Not much to look at now, but we'll check back in
6 weeks -- should be much impressive by then

What the duck?!

This qualifies as a fauna interlude.


For the record, we do not have a pond on our property.  Our neighbors across the street do have a pond, visible from our living room windows, from which we have been visited by a variety of disoriented critters over the years.

View from the living room window

The first year we moved in we were besieged by frogs.  We had not yet landscaped, and our front lawn sloped uninterrupted all the way down to the road across from the pond -- just an easy hop away from their recent emergence into four-legged maturity. They covered the lawn and driveway, copulating madly and driving the two dogs we had back then into a frenzy.  Then there were the turtles -- big mean snappers -- who methodically dug nests under the shrubs and plodded back across the road in a death defying slow march, daring the teens who hot rod down our hill to reduce them to a smear.


Then all the local fauna seemed to adjust to our new topography, and we've largely been left to our own devices for the last three years.  Sure we have plenty of resident rodents -- squirrels, chipmunks, and the odd field mouse.  But we seem to have reached a point of equilibrium where everyone knows their place.


Until today.


I woke up this morning, and as I always do first thing, I checked the weather and general ambiance by opening the slider in our bedroom that faces the hill in the back.  And saw him:

I believe this is a male mallard.  He spent several minutes waddling around, and then settled down behind the dicentra for a spell, just checking things out.  It was raining rather hard -- the kind of weather that is, as they say, "fine if you're a duck."  So I suppose it shouldn't be so surprising to actually find a real duck in one's backyard.  Except, as I mentioned, you don't generally see them this far away from a body of water.  I've actually never seen them in our neighbor's pond, either, though on the other side of our neighbor's property is Lake Waccabuc -- one mile long and about half a mile wide.  The name actually means "Long Pond" in the Native American dialect of this area's original inhabitants.  And that's where you often see ducks parading with their brood.


Mr. Mulch also said he had seen this fellow, along with what appeared to be his mate, visiting the front yard a couple of days ago.  Hmmm... . Either they're looking for a little private time and space -- the Greta Garbo version of ducks -- "I just want to be alone..."
Or we may wind up with our very own little family of fluffy ducklings somewhere up on the hill.


I'll keep you posted.

You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!

No more bare root.  Ever.

Last weekend I received the 12 Lavender Astilbe plants I had ordered in a moment of weakness -- or perhaps excessive cheapness.  I foreswore bare root plants last year -- because a) it's always a crapshoot whether they'll really survive the indignities of shipping and b) I may have mentioned that I'm a bit impatient, and prefer plants that did their bare root thing a year or two ago. But I just couldn't resist a "buy 6, get 6 free" offer which brought the price down to where they were basically paying me to take the plants.  So I caved, thinking about all that empty space at the top of the hill to the right of the last seating area which would be the ideal location for a flock of feathery purple plumes.

There were two things wrong with this vision.

First, when the plants arrived, they looked like a collection of hairy twigs.  The instructions said to bury them to the level of the crown.  There was no discernible crown -- no tiara, no beret, no headgear of any sort.  Nor was there any hint that there was an "up" or "down."  They simply looked as though an axe murderer had uprooted a mature plant and dismembered it's nether parts.  And then let them grow beards. 

Small stones litter the surface, looking innocent
enough -- and not too daunting

Second, the empty space at the top of the hill may have been empty of plants, but it was not empty of stones.  Our hill was probably carved by the ice age; it's all glacial rock with a couple hundred years of topsoil deposits covering the stone.  Digging anywhere on the hill requires a pickaxe and a crowbar.  Each time I stab a shovel into the unyielding ground, the vibrations travel seismically up my arms and out my scalp.  I suppose I should find it stimulating to have my bell rung over and over and over.  Alas, I do not.

Here's what lies beneath!

And every so often the shovel hits one of these big nasties --
 a crowbar and herniated disk number

Two hours of chain gang work, many swear words, and several fervent wishes that I had only bought 6 plants later, and I had 12 holes dug, filled with compost and fertilized.  If you've ever gardened at all, you know that the hard part is preparing to plant.  The actual planting itself is a breeze.  

Unless.  

Unless you're not entirely sure which is the top, and which is the bottom, of whatever fauna you're planting.  In this case, twigs with hair sprouting every which way, with no apparent crown.  Sure would have been nice if they had itty bitty labels indicating "this way up."  After studying on this dilemma for a bit -- plus uttering a few more choice invectives -- I decided that I would leave this up to the forces of nature.  Plants are, after all, remarkably determined -- taking root in cracks and crevices where nothing should grow, splitting the still-frozen ground with shoots so fragile they shouldn't be able to pierce fog.  If these astilbe have the will to grow, then as long as the roots can get a grip, they'll fuel the plants' drive to reach for the sun.  I'll do what I can, but really, it seems to me that they need to take some responsibility for themselves, don't you agree?

So I tucked them all into their hard-won, well composted holes, covered them up, left markers so I could distinguish them from the mulch, and left them to their fate.  I must confess, I wasn't entirely optimistic about their prospects. Five days and two rainstorms later, I ventured up the hill with extremely low expectations.  

To my great surprise, relief, and reward for all those damned holes, all of them were showing signs of life!  In almost every case, the beginnings of the bushy fronds that form the backdrop for astilbes'  feathery blooms were pushing up through the soil, wiggling past whatever small stones were left behind.  Maybe all that rain really sped the process up, because I've never seen bare roots come this far back from apparent rigor mortis so quickly.  I know it doesn't look like much yet, but trust me -- anything coming to life in soil this rocky REALLY wants to grow!

Despite this triumph for Mother Nature, I have indeed learned my lesson about bare root plants.  There's a saying that you should "... Dig a $50 hole for a $5 plant."  And I'm all for that.  But if I'm going to herniate a disk preparing new beds around the top of the hill, then I want the instant gratification of plants large enough to be seen without setting my camera to "macro" mode.  Only potted plants from now on.

It's a good thing I was feeling good about dedicating myself to that approach as I made my way down from the top of the hill.  Because when I reached the bottom, I saw that the FedEx man had made a delivery while I was out of sight above. 

I opened the carton to find a  partial shipment -- about half of those 27 hummingbird magnet plants I ordered in a fit of horticultural delusion.  All carefully packaged for the journey, clearly labeled, and begging to be planted...

Guess I'll go uproot some more stones and dig me some holes...




PS: For those wondering, the title of this post is taken from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene I.

Myths and Legends

This may seem totally irrelevant, but go with me on it...


In Greek mythology, Jason and his Argonauts had a long challenge-filled quest to find the Golden Fleece.  He needed the gilded coat to lay claim to the kingship he rightfully deserved.  After many trials, when Jason at last arrived at Colchis to claim the Fleece from King Aeetes, he faced three daunting final tasks.  First, he had to plow a field with fire breathing oxen, then sow the field with the teeth of a dragon, and finally wrest the Fleece from the living dragon that guarded it.  As a role model for the much later but no less evilly challenged Harry Potter, he dispatched all three.  Then, a little less Harry-like, he fled with both the Fleece and Aeete's daughter Medea, leaving a trail of gore and heroic legend behind.


Now most of Jason's tasks carry pretty obvious dangers -- burning, drowning, being eaten, etc.  However, planting dragon's teeth is clearly a set-up; sounds pretty harmless, but you just know nothing good will come of it.  Sure enough, no sooner had he done his gardening chore than the teeth emerged from the ground as fully armed soldiers -- their helmets leading the charge upward to burst through the ground.


Now, for the connection.


Every year, when the Solomon's Seal sprouts, I am reminded of this particular myth. Their sprouts emerge from the mulch like an army of miniature helmets , infiltrating the alium, tulips, hyacinths and campanula.  They multiply each year, swelling their battalions and increasing the density of their attack.   Here is this year's march.

Just as Jason's sprouts surprised him with their shape-shifting ability, so too, will these. But in a much more benign sense.  As they continue their upward journey , these pink helmets will unfurl into variegated green and white leaves, held like standards on long arching stems. They'll carry their blooms all along the stems, swinging below the leaves like small white bells dangling from a clothesline.


In case you're wondering how Jason outwitted his enemy crop, they apparently had an IQ similar to my Solomon's Seal.  Legend has it that he tossed a stone into their middle, and they, not being able to figure out who was attacking them, fell upon one another and annihilated themselves.  


I wonder if that tactic will work on weeds.


In other, less legendary news, here's what else is happening in the garden:

The lettuce is in.

The radishes are up

We can start harvesting the scallions

So we'll eat these tonight!

Dicentra, CSI

Two of my Dicentra Spectabilis have gone missing.

These were among the very first plants I put in when I started the garden 5 years ago, and they've been among the most resilient and cooperative denizens of the yard ever since.  They're among the very first plants to emerge, their feathery leaves looking far too delicate to break through the winter's detritus.  And they're also among the quickest to grow, speedily covering up bare foundation, dressing the front of the house with pink and white candy hearts.  



They hang around a long time, too. And by the time they're fully spent in July, their stems are as thick and hollow and yellowed as bamboo.  I wait as long as possible to take them down (usually so long that Mr. Mulch not-so-delicately inquires whether I'm waiting for a hungry panda family to appear).  And despite the fact that I have 5 years of experience seeing the gaping hole they leave behind, it always takes my by surprise.  You'd think that by now I'd have figured out what to plant beneath the bleeding hearts that would be ready to take the stage when the curtain falls on them. 

You can see the lone emerging dicentra in the
left center of the photo, just above the hellebore

But this year, long before we've gotten to the gaping hole part, something is clearly amiss.  Here, on the left, you can see that one of the pink ones is behaving normally, having cleared the mulch and sending forth the beginnings of its feathery boughs.  But where are Thing 2 and Thing 3?!  No sign of either the middle white one or the second pink one.  They all get the same lack of sunlight, and they've all had the same chilly damp early spring, so what gives?

Maybe I'm just being impatient.  Maybe it's the three inches of mulch we've smothered this bed with.  Maybe they succumbed to the particularly harsh winter that seems finally to have departed. The real problem is that I want to know. Now.  And I just have to wait.

I hate when that happens.



PS -- The hellebores are just lovely.  I just wish they weren't so shy... they hang their heads timidly and you pretty much have to lie spider-wise, like Camilo Villegas lining up a putt, to get a good look at them.  I'll spare you the awkwardness...

Anatomy Lesson

With the season about to explode, it occurs to me that things could get very confusing if I don't provide some explanation of the various planting, harvesting, sitting, and drinking areas on the property.  And while there's not much in the way of things blooming (and there's an awful lot of mulch covering the emerging shoots), it's probably the best time to see the garden's bones. 

Here's a tour of the early spring garden, with 360 degree views of the front mound and gardens, and a quick tour of the hill and vegetable garden rising behind the house.  The very top of the hill is this season's project -- a new seating area with several stone outcroppings.  And enough planting opportunities to keep me occupied all summer.  I'll reprise this tour once a month throughout the season to document how that project is going, along with the progress in all other locations.

One thing I can promise... by mid May this drab brown color palette will be gone.  In the next version of this tour, green will be the dominant color.  I can't wait!

Garden Geek Chic

I bought myself a present.  

In did it in honor of my commitment to this blog and the public acknowledgement that I am as likely to bore you to tears with tales of greenery as a new mom is to cause eyes to glaze over with tales of poo.

Also, because I've been cheap for far too long.  It's odd, because back when I worked in the theatre (no, not as an actress -- I was a propmistress for a regional repertory company, making dead bodies, painting fake food, and building the occasional piece of scenery) I knew that one's work was only as good as the tools one used to produce it.  And woe to anyone who pinched my favorite sable paintbrush.

But in the garden, I've always bought the cheapest tools. I have an impressive collection of rusty, inoperable pruning shears.  Of course, they'd probably have made it through an entire season if I didn't routinely leave them outside in the rain, but still they were pretty shoddy tools.  The blades dulled so quickly I could hear the raspberry stalks squeal in pain as I got them ready for the season -- and I didn't entirely imagine the butterfly bush cringing as I approached.  At least I had the compassion to buy cheap bypass pruners, instead of the much crueler anvil variety, which squishes the defenseless limb until it separates.  

But with all the raking I've been doing these past couple of weeks, it finally occured to me that I should turn over a new leaf.  I pitched all the dead shears and decided I would treat gardening with the professionalism it deserves -- even though I'm still a rank amateur.  So I did my web homework and settled on the brand I've coveted for the last five years -- the brand that's located in an area in the serious garden supply stores that you can't enter unless you know the secret handshake.  Thank goodness for online shopping, since I don't know that handshake.  But no thanks to my incredible susceptibility to algorithmic upsell, because I bought not one, but two of these very expensive shears because of course people who bought one, bought the other, and who am I to let those pikers outdo me in the professionalism race?

And I also paid for expedited shipping.  Well, I tossed all my other shears; what if I had to prune something on an emergency basis and the new ones hadn't arrived yet?  What then?

They came the next day.  And they are beautiful!  Oh, I neglected to mention that I totally geeked out and also got a leather holster for one of them.  Excessive, you say?  Well, I usually just keep them in my back pocket, but if I put them both there, I'm likely to fall over backwards from the weight, so you might say a holster was a necessity.

So here I am, in full tool regalia.  Not sure this look will catch on, but it works for me!

Ain't Misbehavin'

After placing our very restrained seed order for the vegetable garden, I had been successfully ignoring the low hum of the plant, shrub, and flower catalogs' siren songs.  After all, I've seen the same catalogs for years, and have developed some immunity, largely due to my well developed desire for immediate gratification.  


You see, when you order plants from catalogs, they usually come in 3" pots, and it takes a year or two for them to get to the scale of the gorgeous specimen pictured in the catalog that sucked you in.  The alternative is hoping the nursery has something similar and more impressive.  In a great big pot.  So you can buy lots of them, plant them too close to one another, get the effect immediately, but then have to divide and relocate them before they choke one another to death.


There must be a happy medium somewhere in the middle.  Alas, I have yet to find it.


So, I was in my "wait-to-see-what-the-nursery-gets-in" mode when this appeared in the mail for the first time.

That's playing dirty.

Not only is this a catalog I have NEVER seen before, but the cover image is as alluring to me as Donald Trump's own image is to him.  I don't know much about birds beyond being able to make some basic identification of the most obvious varieties -- robins, crows, bluejays, etc.  I can't even name the bird that eats our raspberries and deposits them, post-digestion, on the roofs of our cars.  But I do know a hummingbird when I see one.  And they fascinate me. 

Click to see up close

I hadn't seen one close up until about two years ago when I planted some Monarda, which turns out to be one of their favorite repasts -- even though the common name is Bee Balm, and they're obviously not bees.  Monarda has these crazy jester hat-like blossoms that are evidently a collection of slipper shaped flasks full of hummingbird elixir so intoxicating that it summoned a vivid neon green hummingbird to the garden out of nowhere two summers ago. As long as the Monarda is blooming, he can be seen suspended, sipping and darting, sipping and darting, yanked by invisible temptation from bloom to bloom, presumably humming with delight the whole time.  Likewise, I can be seen mesmerized, watching him defy gravity for as long as I can get away with.


But we've only been visited by this lone magical bird. 


Imagine how enchanting it would be to have not one but many hummingbirds visiting, and not just during Monarda time, but throughout the entire gardening season, and not to an isolated patch of greenery, but to multiple locations, so one could discover these glittering aviators in just about any corner of the garden.  Such was the fantasy that sprang to my lunatic mind.


Which is all a longwinded way of saying I was totally sucked in.  Lost all resolve, all restraint and set upon the catalog as if the future of all hummingbirds depended on me and me alone.  And I did, indeed, misbehave, ordering (Click to see any image larger...)   




1 Weeping Cotoneaster

 




This one's upright, on a trunk, so it won't act as velcro and collect massive amounts of oak leaves (she said hopefully) 

 

5 Ruby Slippers Oakleaf Hydrangea





6 Creme Belle Foxglove

 

 

 

6 Goldcrest Foxglove



3 Solidarity Clematis

 



6 Salmon Rose Columbine

  

No partridges, no pear trees, just 27 plants.  And I'm afraid I'm just getting started.

I certainly hope these plant magnets work only on adult hummingbirds, otherwise the bird police might arrest me for corrupting minors.  Or at least for stalking them, since come June, I'll be lurking near all these plants with my camera, hoping to capture a little of their magic to share on this blog.

 

Full disclosure: these are shots from the catalog above which so thoroughly seduced me.  My versions will arrive at the end of the month, bare of root and small of pot -- and hopefully they'll look like this in another season or two.  We'll check back in on them sometime in June to mark their progress.









Quick Update

The Chionodoxa is in full bloom now.  The earlier photos were more anticipatory than representative.  Here's what they really look like when they're in their glory.  Click on the photo to get a closer look...