97 Things I’ve Learned By Gardening
January 19, 2024
99 Nursery Hop, Skip & Jump
April 12, 2024
It’s Coming: Spring!
L et me count my WAYS!
1. My Client Work Goes Turbo
My phone has been ringing since January—homeowners wanting consults, designs, installs. But so soon after the holidays and during the winter doldrums? Unheard of!
I usually have until March to unwind from the holidays and recoup my health and sanity from last year’s client work.
Nope. January 2, in freezing weather and rain, I began a 4-week install—both front and backyard.
I didn’t mind too much though. That’s one more beautiful landscape in the world. And it’s ready for spring!
2. Sowing of Seeds and More Seeds
In February I sowed all the flowering annual seeds I had left from last season…
Which forced me (haha) to buy more from Select Seeds. I can’t wait for them to arrive so I can sow another round of flowers for myself, clients and the Annual Garden at the Sherwood Demonstration Garden.
3. Plant Order Thrills
I just received my order from Donahue’s Clematis located in cold Minnesota, and I must say they arrived beautifully packed. The roots are amazing—the best I have seen in years from a mail order catalog.
I ordered 7 varieties: Candy Stripe, Kitty EVIPO097, Parisienne EVIPO019, Sapphire Indigo, Silver Moon, Vicki EVIPO114, and Vit Venosa Violacea.
Two of them for a client, 3 go to the Perennial Garden at the Sherwood Demonstration Garden, and the other 2 are mine because when shopping for clients, my motto is “One for you, one for me.”
When I placed my order online, I wrote in the customer comment section, “I know what I am doing, so it would be greatly appreciated if you would ship my order the first date you are open for shipments as two of these clematis are for a client. if you ship them first thing and they die from cold, I will not hold you responsible for death.”
I meant it, too. I not only know what I’m doing, I’m also nothing but honest!!
A lovely lady emailed me the very next day to inform me that my clematis order would definitely go out on the first day of shipping. And it did!
Asking for the earliest possible shipping is one of my ways to hurry spring along.
4. Bloomin’ Hellebores: Prelude to Spring
You remember that I love love love Hellebores. If not, you should revisit my Hellebores Blog! Double the love when in bloom, which is right now.
You can go to your local nurseries but you’ll only see a very small assortment of Hellebores in bloom. If you want more variety go online to Plant Delights , Woodlanders , Gossler Farms or Annie’s Annuals & Perennials.
Currently, I have 25-ish Hellebores. But who’s counting?!
For years, AP and I have been dying to visit Northwest Garden Nursery in Eugene, Oregon, for their Hellebore bloom.
They have an annual open house where you can catch 2,400 varieties of Hellebores in bloom! It’s always in February but we’ve never been able to go because, for 8 years now, damn winter storms (didn’t they get the memo about spring coming!) have forced us to cancel our trips.
Starting this year, you can see their Hellebore gardens in bloom by appointment but they’ve stopped producing them for sale.
Happily, Gossler Farms in Springfield, Oregon has taken over growing and selling the Hellebores from Northwest and is open Wednesdays through Saturdays.
Gossler offers a Hellebore Open House too during peak bloom. But Springfield is not that far from Eugene and the damn storm decided to hit both cities this year. AP and I were definitely bummed.
5. My Rare Orange Paper Bush Blossoms
Besides Hellebores, another plant that blooms beautifully prior to spring is this gorgeous orange-flowering Paper Bush which is very rare…
Edgeworthia chrysantha ‘Akebono’
Full bloom.
I bought it locally 5 years ago from El Dorado Nursery which tends to bring in rare plants.
Back in my stupid years I had the more common yellow-flowering Paper Bush. It lasted a few years before I killed it by transplanting it from a pot to the ground. Much like my Daphnes, it did not like this at all and just up and died on me. But ohhh was it gorgeous.
6. The Annual Reshuffling of The Pots
Before spring comes, I am always moving pots, shuffling them here and there and back again. Then on repeat.
This annoys my husband to no end as he has to help me with the big heavy ones.
(For some reason, ever since I bought my work van, my purchases have become larger and larger. Hmmm…)
Recently I bought a very large, very heavy pewter pot at my local Green Acres. I’d had my eye on it for more than a year and could never understand why nobody snatched it up.
Could it have something to do with its size and weight?!
One day I was standing next to the pot, hugging it like I do most pots I want but can’t decide if I should pay the asking price.
I didn’t know it, but the man who buys pots for Green Acres saw me hugging this pot.
So he comes up and startles me. “It needs a home. You should buy it,” he says.
“Not at this price,” I tell him.
“It’s been here for two years,” (which I already knew), “and I really want to get rid of it.”
“How bad do you want to get rid of it?” I say. “Give me a good deal and I might take it—but it has to be better than my usual discount.”
“Oh…I can’t go lower than that,” he says.
“Well, I guess you really don’t want to get rid of it.” And I take my arm off the pot.
He says, “I could ask upper management for approval to lower the discount for you.”
“Ok,” I say. “You try that, but I have to leave now. Just in case….here’s my card. Call you have any luck.”
My next stop was Home Depot, and while there, the pot buyer called to say he could lower the price from $500 to $400.
I had purchased similar sized pots from other vendors for $400, so I knew how low Green Acres could go.
“Deal,” I said and went back for the pot.
Well the thing is huge and it took some effort by staff to get it safely into my van.
I took a picture of it which I sent to my lovely husband. “Get the backhoe ready,” I told him. “‘Cuz here I come.”
At home Mike got the pot onto a pallet and placed out of the way until I could figure out where I wanted to put the thing.
After a month of thinking—because these things do take time—I knew where I wanted the pot to go.
When I told Mike, he asked how I was going to move it there.
“Roll it!” I said, trying to look confident that I could tip it on its side by myself and go the distance with a controlled roll.
That didn’t go over well. What, did he think I was serious or just stupid? Maybe he was concerned for the safety of the pot! Probably not for my own.
He had a better plan and agreed to help me, but I would need to help him locate all of the straps he had strewn all over the property and find 3 of the same length. This took us half an hour to do.
Mike brought the backhoe over, attached the straps to it and then spent 15 minutes trying to loop them around the pot so they’d stay put long enough for him to jump in the backhoe and lift to tighten them. He kept telling me “hold them, hold them!” And when he got the pot off the ground, it was “Hold it! Don’t let it sway!” as he drove it to its new location.
Readers, do you notice a pattern here—that when Mike does a chore for me, I am usually the one put in danger?!
And, per usual, start to finish there were choice words bouncing back and forth. If anything, my husband knows how to do stuff contrary to me telling him it won’t work and to do it my way—which might save time and aggravation. But time and aggravation are his way and my husband has built a successful business in spite of me.
And, ta-da, here’s the pot in place…
I used to have a different black pot there…
But it was out of scale next to the granite boulders and granite sculptures. I don’t like things out of scale which is how I eventually knew where the new giant pot had to go.
But now I have to figure out where to put other black pot.
Gawd. It just never ends.
7. Thinking, Breathing, Reading Flowers
While we wait for spring to arrive, I suggest you curl up in your favorite chair and read “The Language of Flowers” by Vanessa Diffenbaugh.
It’s about a girl who grows up in the foster care system. One of her foster mom’s teaches her about flowers and their meanings. At the end of the book is an index of flowers and their meanings.
My favorite flower…you should know by now: Pansy (Viola).
Which means “Think of Me.”
