history-March 2009

It was evident that spring was coming early this year by John's birthday in the first days of March. The weather broke from the 30s and 40s to a balmy 60 on that weekend and we were able to actually sit and eat outside on the patio when his family came over the celebrate. Wes and Anna built a fairy house on the table out of pine cones and sticks and several of the yellow crocuses that had just opened up that week.



My mom stopped in on her way back from a trip to Maryland on March 14 and helped me dig a new bed for spring greens. We amended it with two wheelbarrows of compost and plugged the dug up grass into the area that the tomatoes had overgrown and killed last fall. I also dug under the patch of winter rye that I planted at the end of last October and let it decompose--readying the bed for the beets and cucumbers I'll plant in it this year. In the potting room under lights I started a tray of tomatoes--brandywine, striped german and an F-1 cherry hybrid early this month along with a tray of several different kinds of beets--forono, yellow tall, red early.
On a trip to Nantucket to surprise Jareb on his 30th, we took a quick walk on the cliff and I checked in on my inspiration roses.


This row of boxwoods and climbing roses on the front of a Siasconset reminded me of England--although a bit more modern and crisp.

Jareb, Vika and baby Fiona at Sanford Farm.

Around Ritik's birthday toward the end of the month he and John and I flew out to San Francisco to surprise our ex-Brooklyn crowd. It snowed the day we left home, but in the Bay area the jasmine was blooming and the weather was so warm that people were in bathing suits in Dolores Park. The end of winter was always the greenest time out there. I was struck by some grass growing on a boulder under the Golden Gate bridge.

history-January 2009

Christmas and New Year's were such a whirlwind this year I hardly took any pictures of anything. We split time between John's family and my sister's houses, then to Nantucket and then to D.C. on New Year's day. Home for a day, we then were off on a planned trip to England to see friends and to Italy for a workshop sponsored by the fellowship group I'm working under this year. The garden was happily ignored under a blanket of snow and ice that seemed to have lasted on the ground the entire time we were gone.

Our friends Jerome and Nicki live in the English countryside near Bath. They have the most beautiful little garden--truly England itself has the most stunning cottage gardens I've ever seen, even in January. Their boxwoods and standards seem always neatly trimmed, and the hills are always lush and green. They even have government subsidized vegetable gardens (which they call "allotments") that provide ordinary citizens their own little plot of dirt to dig in, if they wish. Jerome just acquired a share around the corner from his house this season, and I'm looking forward to visiting next time to see how it is progressing.

On to London to visit Robin and Maria. There the weather was decidedly colder and right after we left they even had several inches of snow. The natural parts of the city landscape looked similar to NYC at this time of year--mostly dormant deciduous trees. At the Tate Modern, a post-apocolyptic sculpture garden of sorts was growing in the atrium, complete with empty metal bunk beds, giant cat skeletons and other structures. I was impressed by a display of smashed silverware hanging knee-height from threads in a gallery upstairs.


On to Italy at the end of the month, where cypress and olive trees mingled with antique statuary in the gardens of NYU's villa in the foothills of Florence where we were gracefully put up. We visited Harvard's Villa i Tatti while we were there one day, and were given tea and a wonderful tour of the lemonaria and beautfully landscaped grounds. I studied in Florence nearly 10 years ago and hadn't been back since, so this was a wonderful respite in the middle of winter.


The grounds at the Villa i Tatti.

Forsythia being trained in an arch over two graves at the old English cemetery in the middle of Florence where Elizabeth Barrett Browning is buried. The grounds sit on a mound of earth in the middle of a giant traffic circle and are tended by a nun who was once married and finishing a dissertation on EBB at Berkeley. She was really an amazing character, living in a little shed i the middle of the cemetery in the middle of a traffic circle along with a family of Roma people she had taken in and taught to read in exchange for their work on the grounds.


We finally returned from our travels at the end of the month with the promise of ice and cold and perhaps a few more fires (and most importantly own bed) waiting for us. It was nearly February, and the Hudson had completely frozen over in our absence. I snapped a few photos on my phone before it all melted away.

history-November 2008

In early July, I planted the three Nantucket rose starts that had come through the rooting ordeal along with two "Super Dorothy" ramblers that I got from an heirloom propagator. One of each went on either side of the cedar arch John had built this spring (super D to the left, Nantucket to the right in this photo). I planted the others in front, hoping they would climb downspouts and someday overtake the house. By November, as Obama's numbers were climbing so were they.

The Norway maple over the barn began to turn yellow, signaling the end of the season. My tomatoes were still producing plenty of fruit, even now as the weather turned cool. Striped zebras and sungolds filled bags and bags. Next year I'll plant less, and perhaps different varieties since the CSA farm we have a share in harvests these same kinds.
Storm King mountain across the river from us slowly acquired burnished hues as well, as winter was fast approaching. I left the leaves where they fell in the beds as mulch, raked the ones on the grass into the compost pile and began looking for wood for our first fires of the season.

history-October 2008

The leaves began to change and some to fall this month, but the yellow roses were still blooming around the front stoop. In the rear the montauk daisy I had planted in the summer finally bloomed and promptly fell over--a reminder to pinch it back next season. I had deadheaded the hydrangeas a little too late this year and they were only just now racing to form new buds which, judging for the chill in the air, were ill fated.





Also this month, we were in Chicago for my friend Jessica's wedding ceremony to her longtime girlfriend Michele. They rented a beautiful loft space in the city and filled it with great music and food. I put together their flowers for them along with the help of my dear husband and my other good friend Vanessa and her husband Sean. They wanted a fall modern theme so we did short, compact arrangements in rusts and violets and browns and some tall branches with orchids tied to them. It really turned out wonderfully, the whole event.

history-August 2008

In August, a hot month, the rudbeckia (black-eyed susans) were in full bloom and in the rear beds they were joined by an explosion of heliopsis, which mostly overwhelmed their poorly cited foxgloves neighbors. These would later in the season , along with the guara, become covered in aphids and require hosing, cutting and eventually spraying with a "safe" neem oil solution that didn't seem to do much good. I will keep my eye out for some way to import more ladybugs next season I suppose.

Equally loving the heat, my crowded tomatoes completely overwhelmed all my peppers and threatened to shade out the cucumber plants as well. I let them go, as I could hardly keep up with the number of cucumbers from these two little plants. One I didn't get to until it was nearly 18 inches long. Not great eating, but fun to pick and give away as an oddity.

history-July 2008

The middle of summer is truly the time of plenty. This month, the previously sparse front bed began to really come alive. Guara, junior dance phlox, catmint, hot pink dianthus, lemon coral sedum, yellow roses, blue lobelia and he few magic fountain delphinium that I added as an afterthought all began to bloom.





In the rear, the shasta daisies were doing their best against an army of slugs as the first false sunflowers began to open.



My seven tomato plants had very quickly become massive and by the end of the month I could clearly see that I'd planted them way to close to eachother and to other plants. But the first fruits began to form regardless of my mistakes.




Away on Nantucket for some of the month, I snapped a few photos of the rambling roses that grow everywhere there. These below grow on the cottages in Siasconset near one of my favorite hidden public walks. The little cuttings I took from this same kind of rose in May were rooted in pots back home and I dreamed of the day that they would grow to look like these massive forms.

history-June 2008

By early June I finally got some of the perennials into the new front garden: a few Penny Mac hydrangea, three Garden Sun climing roses, french lavender, sedum and a smattering of other things.

The grass was coming up on the driveway through the burlap John and I laid last month so I removed it and delighted in the first green to grace that area for a long long time.
In the back, the hydrangea along the fence were blooming--amazingly I had only killed 4 out of the 13 the fall before with the homemade baking soda concoction. So I replaced those with new Endless Summers and enjoyed the blue blooms that would probably only last for this season. I tried a sulfur mixture to acidify the soil but the year-old transplants came up pink this year anyway. John's dad suggested I bury copper wire or rusty nails to blue them, which I might try sometime.
I also planted several flats of pink impatiens by the back steps, which did well last season there in mostly shade.


In the one corner of the back that gets a smattering of sun I laid out plans for an herb garden backed with clematis, and I planted seven tomatoes, all started from seed by my neighbors and given to me last month, some bell peppers, a mystery pepper and a cucumber plant in the vegetable patch.


At the end of the month, the Shasta daisies were starting to bloom. On a nice morning I was clearing weeds from around some Kansas-grown hostas that I had transplanted from my Mom's yard when I was startled by a baby deer (who seemed just as startled by me). Deer are common garden guests in this part of the Hudson Highlands but I live in the middle of town on a small fenced lot near a busy road so I don't ever see them. It was unclear how long this little guy had been there or where he came from. He apparently had been separated from his mother and was clearly scared. As he tried several times unsuccessfully to jump the 4 foot fence in the rear and then ran in circles around the patio, I tried, just as unsuccessfully, to get a hold of animal rescue. But by the time I returned outside, he had disappeared. No dead body in the street, no clues about his point of exit. He was just gone.