Let's Say Good-Bye to the First Lawn

Let's hope President-Elect Obama adds this to his First Hundred Days To-Do List:


This Lawn is Your Lawn from roger doiron on Vimeo.

Another Change of Season

Today's the day when when we have the chance to change the season with no help at all from nature. The calendar may say it's autumn, but it feels more like the end of a long, dark winter. Be your own equinox. Please, vote.

Here Comes the Rain

We're having the first real storm in quite a while, and while I'm happy to be relieved of watering duties for the next few days, all I can think about is all the gardening tasks I haven't finished.

In the front yard, I still have quite a bit of weeding left to do, as well as laying down new mulch. The huge camellia at the side of the house still badly needs pruning. I was hoping to wimp out and hire someone to do that, but now I feel the need to be a frugal gardener, so I'll have to tackle that myself.

In the back yard, well ... oh ... my ... god! Where to start? More weeding, more mulch-laying. I need to move a rosa rugosa and a Mexican Limelights salvia, and I still need to get a few other plants I bought a while back in the ground. I've got bulbs to put in as well. Plus pruning the passion flower and jasmine vines, and relocating the clematis.

Unlike in other regions, in my Zone 9/10 garden there is no such thing as putting the garden to bed for the winter. Gardening is a year-round thing here, but I confess that I don't much enjoy it in the cold and wet. So I need to at least get things cleaned up and prepped for a bit of gardener goof-off time so that I don't have to face an even bigger mess in the spring.

From the way I'm grousing about my to-do list, you'd think I had a manor estate to look after instead of just a tiny city lot. But it's feeling a bit daunting right now because I never seem to be able to get my vision of what my garden could be to match what I'm actually able to accomplish. As small as my garden is, it could look terrific if I can ever get the vision to be borne out in leaf and flower. Eventually, I think I will. But the waiting is terrible and humbling and frustrating.

So while I wait out the rain, I make more plans and perfect the vision. The grunt work will have to happen another day.

Photo credit: FreeFoto.com

The White House Garden: A History (of Sorts)

Fuchsia Madness

I hate to be asked what my favorite flower is, something I think is almost as bad as asking a parent which is their favorite child. But if forced, one of the top contenders on my list would have to be fuchsias. I can't say they are trouble-free. Some of mine have had issues when they've been transplanted, or they've been intolerant on the rare (but seemingly increasing) occasions when we have frost here. But for the most part, once they've settled comfortably into their pots, they bloom exuberantly and repeatedly, stay mostly pest-free, and seldom complain about much of anything. I currently have seven pots of fuchsias on my deck and expect to add many more over time.

One in particular has kept me in suspense, however. A year and a half ago I bought three small fuchsias in two-inch pots at the SF Flower & Garden Show. Two of them did great right away, filling out nicely and producing petite pink and white flowers on one, and purple and red flowers on the other. But the third, called Blue Satin, went code blue on me a couple of times and has had to be nursed back to health. In the last few months, it's finally seemed to gain a bit of vigor and I've waited almost patiently to see what its blooms would look like. The tag said that the sepals would be a bright white and the corolla would be indigo blue--but would it really be blue, or just another shade of purple as so often turns out to be the case with flowers that are advertised as blue? Today I got my answer:


It's gorgeous, totally worth the wait--but not blue! Ah, well. The quest continues.

And not to play favorites, here's a glimpse of a few of my other fuchsias that are presently in bloom:

And Now For Something Completely Different...

Confession

My garden (actually both gardens--front and back) look like crap right now. That's all. I just felt the need to get that off my chest.

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