While I continued watching and living out the autumn in my inherited garden, the exterior of our house came down around us. Nearly 170 years old, she needed a *little* work, and only a fraction of it could be accomplished before Thanksgiving. I amended the soil in a three foot wide stretch along the west fence, which uncovered a ton, literally, of beautiful but heavy fieldstones. Broke one spade in the process and did my best to remove all gravel, tree foundlings, aggressive periwinkle and a whole manner of other wild things from the new bed.
Pulled as many of the daylillies in this swath as I could stand, worrying the whole time about 'wasting' a flower and planning to transplant them somewhere. This was before I realized that these little firecrackers were nearly impossible to wholly remove from their birthplaces--any little piece of a root will produce a new plant. I later learned that some people consider them weeds. Perfect, I thought, for the bed on the east side of the house that gets completely ignored. I put them in the wheelbarrow and forgot about them until January. Frozen, flooded, and left for dead, they would magically send up new shoots when the weather warmed. I tucked them under rocks and clay in the unamended east bed, with due respect.
The fence bed now cleared, in went 14 Endless Summer and Penny Mac hydrangeas in a line to the barn along with some compost and granulated sulfur. They immediately drooped under the strain of terrible powdery mildew. One 'organic' home brewed baking soda concoction later, I had succeeded in completely defoliating all of them. Thinking that I had killed them. I left them to overwinter and planned to cry about it in the spring.
In the interim I planted 80 triumph daffodils in between their dead bodies and a few hundred darwin hybrid tulips in the rear. I wanted something to look at in when warmer weather came besides these 14 dead sticks.
I tried to tuck some bulbs in the front too, but quickly realized that they had little chance of
survival with all the commotion out there. I saved what I could, moved the azaleas and roses and a few other things to the rear and left the rest to the mercy of the sand-blaster and heavy boots.
