Tangled Brush

You may think I'm joking, but I'm not. There really is such a thing as snake plant! Well, 'snake's head fritillaria', to be precise. I had only ever seen them in photos - and on a ceramic mug at someone's house (not joking!) so I was really curious to see what they looked like in person. I  ordered 10, but only three came up. Two were little, but look at this one!   And then look at it a week later!  It looks like an accordion and the blooms look like they are all connected. Neat! I am so happy it did well! Next year I will try even more!

Spring came slowly, in Ottawa, as it is won't to do. After the snowdrops came delightful little iris reticulata, winter aconite, then crocuses. I put in more iris last year, as they come up so early and are such a welcome pop of colour. Spring was a long time coming! Pretty puschkinia! 

It's spring at long last! Snowdrops sprang up first, submerged in six inches of snow. I spotted them on a dreary day in early April. What a delight! These are the snowdrops two weeks later - they last a long time! I did not plant them - they are a gift left by one of the previous owners! Note the yellow winter aconite beside it - this came in a packet of "early bloomers" that I planted in autumn 2017. I had never seen them before and am not sure I love them, but they do give a welcome glimmer of yellow in the early spring. In the packet of early bloomers there were also some "iris reticulata" - tiny purple irises that grow from a bulb, not a rhizome. I was so pleased with those that I ordered more last year. Now I have many of them! They come in yellow as well, but I have decided to concentrate on this deep purple colour. There are 23 in the picture, below, sprinkled along the border of the side garden. They are hard to see, though. Next ye...

Pretty pictures for which I have not yet found a theme... I love flowers, I love Indonesian textiles...look at the gorgeous combination! I bought the dahlia tubers at the grocery store - two pink ones and one purple one. Only one sprouted..and it was white. Of course. But it was huge! So they made me very happy. I bought the Indonesian ikat textile from an Indonesian festival that took place at Lansdowne Park, here in Ottawa. I traveled around Indonesia when I was younger, so the festival gave me a little taste of that time.  I rarely talk about vegetables, because, well - flowers! But I do also grow vegetables. Last year I bought green pepper and eggplant seedlings. They did pretty well! I grew the cherry tomatoes from seed - just threw them into the front of the rose garden, then was chagrined when they grew very well and blocked my view of the flowers...ahem. Next year they are going back to the vegetable garden! They grew very well in the rose garden, though. I al...

Inspiration abounds. I was reading about the life of Vita Sackville-West (and what a life!) when I read about her "White Garden" at Sissinghurst. Apparently it's famous! She wrote, in 1950: "All the same, I cannot help hoping that the great ghostly barn-owl will sweep silently across a pale garden, next summer in the twilight- the pale garden that I am now planting, under the first flakes of snow." The U.K National Trust, which manages the garden, states "Only the colours of white, green, grey and silver were to be allowed to grow in this new pale garden thus creating what we now call the White Garden, one of the most famous areas of Sissinghurst." Photo source:  https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/sissinghurst-castle-garden/features/a-moonlit-masterpiece-at-sissinghurst-castle-garden Simultaneously, in July I noticed a curious lot of white perennials on sale at the Canadian Tire near me: white bleeding heart, white liatris, white scabiosa...

No discussion of the garden would be complete without my describing the Side Garden, a strip of land on the other side of the driveway. Since I am on a corner lot, I get this extra strip of land to work with. It delighted me, as it meant I could have two front gardens. But, ah, what a tortured piece of land it was!  Weeds, rocks, sunshine, thistles and lurking roots of decapitated Virginia Creeper. Ah, the Side Garden! So it was weedy, and wild. The previous owners had pulled down a cedar hedge on this corner plot (quite the safety hazard, everyone in the neighborhood agreed), and put up a shiny new fence. Great! But then, they never got around to landscaping in front of it. By the time we moved in, it was a weedy overgrown mass. The grass had been mowed, but it was hardly the lush green carpet of your dreams; no, it was clover and dandelions, knotweed and toad flax, crabgrass and such. But it got great sun. Oh, this corner had such great sun! Unlike the main front gar...

We are deep into winter here in Ottawa, no denying that. So, since there is no gardening to be done, I will post the pics I never managed to post last year.  Let's start with gladiolus. I didn't have gladiolus in my garden growing up. My grandfather did grow it in his garden, though, notably, in his vegetable patch! And so, I associate gladiolus with vegetables. Alas, my vegetable garden is smaller than his was, so I planted my gladiolus in the rose garden. Or, more accurately, in the patch of land painstakingly reclaimed from the voracious goutweed. But one day it will be a rose garden, so there we go.  Very cheerful, these blossoms were, and I really enjoyed looking out the kitchen window and seeing them. It made all my efforts worthwhile! I also had a purple gladiolus, which was fun. Also in this garden, fluffy pink and yellow double holllyhocks! That was a surprise - I bought them as seedlings and they were supposed to just be single hollyhocks. That...

Well, talking about irises so much in that earlier post got me thinking about future iris garden plans. And, boy, do I now have plans! These plans have been particularly stimulated by some photos of irises that I came upon. Isn't Google amazing! I forget how I found this one - I think I googled "a nice lawn makes a garden look better." I am trying to figure out why other gardens look so good and mine looks so....scruffy. I really think it is the lawn, so this year I am going to focus on getting my front and back lawn looking better. This will require lots of manual weeding (I like weeding - makes me feel so zen), and sprinkling fertilizer and lawn seed. I did this with my side lawn in the front, last year. It went from looking like a wasteland to an...acceptable patch of green. That is an improvement! But back to the flowers! Look at this: Hot pink and orange and a lush green lawn. Me loves! Don't you think I need a garden like that? Hot pink ruffled Ori...

I had a serious illness back in May 2018....a very bad, bad case of Iris fever! Now, don't get alarmed, it's nothing fatal or debilitating - except to the wallet! And, indeed, my wallet was well and truly damaged by my iris obsession. Though, actually, not quite as badly as it might have been, thanks to some wonderful connections I made...but I will get to that! In my garden growing up we had some purple irises - dark purple and white bearded irises, given to my mother by a friend of hers. Tall, green swords, tight purple buds, then big, heavy beautiful flowers. When I finally had my own garden, of course it had to have irises. There were irises all over the neighborhood - I needed irises! But I didn't just want the usual purple ones, I wanted some exotic colours. I went to trusty Google, and found a website, Breck's Bulbs, that sold many colourful varieties. I wanted them all! But they were pricey! So after much dillying and dallying I got the ones that my heart j...

Of course, I love to garden. But I also love to make flower arrangements! I think flower arranging is my first true love. Well, that and flower gathering,  which, as a kid, I sometimes did in places where one isn't supposed to gather flowers. Ahem. Well, that is a story for another day! The first few years we lived in this house I didn't pick too many flowers, as there wasn't much of a surplus. I rationed them out - a stalk of yellow primrose here, a few purple clematis there. But this year, I finally felt I had enough that I could splurge! As well, there were a surprising number of new wildflowers - daisies, monk's hood, flowering oregano, so those went into the mix too. And what a mix it was! Look at this gorgeousness - monk's hood, hydrangea, flowering oregano and phlox from my garden; globe amaranth and some other pink flower that I bought as annuals and in a flower basket. Glorious! And see how artistically I posed them, on a weathered stump? This bo...