After Doom Next Door

I was pleasantly surprised. Things did not look near as bad as expected. There was even some perky left. The daffodils and other spring bulbs all faired pretty well. It was the daylily and iris that took the biggest hit. The magnolia blossoms were freeze fried to a crisp.

Enjoy a little after doom daffodil sampler from Bulbhilla.

After Doom

The only thing that got covered was the weeping Japanese maple on the shores of Turd Blossom Lake. The sheet blew off and the expanding leaf buds look nipped. Two other JM that were leafing out got zapped.

Doom did not turn out nearly as bad as I expected with three nights below freezing and a low of 17. Perkiness is shot of course. The daylily and iris took a hit. That can affect bloom quality for this year. Time will tell.

The warm came back for Easter.

The roadside grasses got cut down. The voles ate pretty much all of the Aromatic Aster up there. That truly annoys me. Damn varmints!

Plenty daffodils remain. Plenty daffodils had the flower stems snapped. Even unfrozen, they won't be standing back up.

The early trilliums were still there.

The garden will grow on. It always does. In abundance.

The Freezing Point

A perfect spring of warmth has turned cold. The extra warm made many plants leap into May like growth. Now they are very susceptible to lesser and greater extents of freezer burn by the normal return of an April bout of winter. I should be used to this by now.

This bit of winter in April has a historical name. It is called the Dogwood Winter. Having a name should tell you something. There are even named winters after this. I should be used to this by now.

Being used to something and feeling disappointed and helpless when the plants you love are about to get damaged and have the season's bloom frozen out of them or worse are two separate things. This particular Dogwood Winter is hovering right around the 32 degree freezing point which is certainly better than a wicked killer cold.

Yesterday morning it dropped down to 29 after sunrise. This morning we have 31. The depth, duration and quality of freezer time are critical to the outcome. Any freezer burn from this one will be minimal.

Too many shrubberies still look like it is May. Next week has cooler spring temperatures in the diagnosis. That might help get the plants back on seasonal track. This is still early April. Blackberry Winter, if it comes, is next. I should be used to this by now.

Freeze Blond

Word is a mighty big rain is coming, as in a possible five to six inches over two days. Now one would expect I would be over joyed by such news in the midst of an extreme drought and surrounded by wild fires. My joy is tempered.

The ground has long since turned to concrete. It will take some coaxing to absorb all that water. Hard rain, solid ground and freshly burned slopes are a recipe for gully washing and flash flooding. This big rain could make a big mess.

We will take this rain gladly. There is no other choice. Pray that the fires are extinguished and hope erosion is kept to a minimum. More importantly, let this signal the end of the dry spell.

It is the winter storms that bit by bit press the remaining herbaceous vegetation back into the earth. I appreciate the assistance and certainly prefer to wait before cutting things down myself. The grasses are left to stand as long as possible. Properly frozen and dried they can stand all winter.

Properly frozen, the grasses turn blond. A metamorphosis occurs. Plants cells are transformed into a crystalline substance that plays brilliantly with the winter's low angle sunshine. My morning view is sublime.

All around the meadows, the transformation to dust is in full swing. Rain may soften things up, but snow and wind do most of the hard pressing. The time for that will come.

There is one last order of business before winter sets in. Above the cracked pot, on the edge of a forest, the native Witch Hazels bloom.

They are a having a very full bloom year which is nice. Still, they don't match the show of the late winter blooming hybrid Witch Hazels. I can have both.

Amber waves of meadow frozen blond on top light up the morning. It's nice when I don't have to leave and can watch the whole show.

Land Grab

When is your garden big enough? In the wilderness there may not be any boundaries to that question.

Last year I began the process of asserting more control on another twenty five feet of ground below the Great Lawn. It is the tangled mess of aggressive plants my garden had once been. That space is the background of my garden. I wanted it to be more floriferous.

It is also a buffer zone between a garden maintained by me and a utility easement maintained by the electric company. I want that buffer zone to speak clearly and visually to their maintenance crews. I want it to shout, Halt!

I cut down two redtwig dogwoods at work yesterday to start them fresh for a new year. I ended up with a big wad of sticks even after giving away plenty that could be used as live stakes for making more plants. The redtwig dogwoods are a plant that will root in the ground from cuttings with a good amount of success.

I had a big wad of sticks. Why not make a screening of dogwood on the ground below the Great Lawn that would be fire engine red in the winter? That would be an awesome background in the winter. So I chopped down the remnants of the wild tangle and stuck my sticks.

Planting live stakes is no big deal garden wise. Hopefully they will take and with a minimum of whacking the wild things, I can get a thicket of dogwoods to grow.

The additional space I claimed is the section above the road cut and below the evergreen shrubberies. Just cutting it regularly will encourage more wild flowers. Having the redtwig dogwoods is a bonus.

The Great Lawn already sits on the lower property line. It might even sort of spill over the line in places. The twenty five feet of ground below is definitely over the line. It's not my land. I just need to borrow it in the Japanese garden sense of a borrowed landscape.

My land grab is not a major concern. The twenty five acre parcel of land below me has been for sale for thirty years or more. People look at it on occasion and never come back. The vast majority of that parcel is an eighty degree slope. It is major steep. If by chance it should ever sell, no problem. It comes with a bit of free landscaping in the utility easement. I just want to borrow it visually.

More of a concern at the moment is the freeze that is going to happen tonight. This Ostrich Fern has frozen the last two springs. Will this be the third time? More to the point, will this rated to zone 3 plant ever get itself in sync with the proper time to wake up?

The suggested low for the morning is twenty six. It is looking to be a freeze of short duration which is good. There may be some slight damage. I expect 'Jane's delicate open petals will be crisped.

The cold is one thing. The wind has been howling and relentless. That just makes it nasty out there. Good luck little Celandine.

Permanent Frost

There have three mornings of frost inducing, much needed, upper twenty degree freezes following the last round of rain. It has been warm enough until now that I have seen daffodils poking up in a few of the gardens I tend. There has been a definite need for a signal that winter has yet to arrive. A lot of plants were getting confused.

The highs have been reaching fifty, which isn't really a good thing, but in the day long shadow of the mountain, the frost and frozen across the byway remains all day. The Posh Estate lives in a cold shadow like this. It makes working there rather chilly at this time of year.

I have been in that chilled to the bone transition phase. My body needs time to adapt as well. It might be fifty degrees, but a penetrating cold hovers, adrift, released from the ground like an invisible fog.

I am lucky that the cold mountain shadow doesn't quite reach the cozy cabin. I still get a solar heating assist for half of the day. Half the garden enjoys a melting sun. The other half chills in the shadow.

My cold bones need to adjust. I have a list of chores that need doing here and at least two more weeks of steady work to get the client's gardens cleaned up for winter and ready for spring. My chilled bones keep finding reasons for abbreviated work days.

I look at my garden from above, enjoying the baby low mounding tapestry of evergreen texture and color of the winter under garden, more than I have wandered through for a closer inspection.

I have been adding grasses to the mix for their winter texture. They are still small, but I am thinking they need the dried carcasses of other herbaceous perennials for the best effect. I will try to remember that next year when the chop and drop begins.

Turned To Mush

There was significant freeze damage. It was very hit or miss. Some things got zapped and some didn't and it very much fell along plant species lines. Some plant species took the sudden freeze with a low of 20 in stride and others got zapped.

Any Asiatic lily that had poked its head up did not fair well.

My new Ostrich Fern with the unfurling fresh green fronds is mush. It came from Asheville in a state of  growth. None of the other ferns up here had begun to grow so they are fine. I expect next year it will be more in sync. It should start over with a more sparse batch of fresh fronds.

The Bleeding Heart is toast. I have no idea if it will try to grow again. It was a bit of a surprise. You kind of expect things that come up and bloom early as habit to be a bit hardier than that.

The ornamental rhubarb is flattened.

I was most sad to see that all the Angelica gigas got hit. We had a bumper crop this year and I was looking forward to the late summer show. My hope is only the outer leaves got hit and the center core and growing point survived. Time will tell. Angelica is a biennial so if they got completely frozen it's all over.

The creeping phlox was unfazed. Even the open blooms look fine.The hosta, astilbes and daylilies, a main crop in the wild cultivated gardens all took a hard hit. They will all grow back, but a hard freeze like this makes for less robust plants for the season, particularly the hosta and astilbe. I don't think you can kill daylilies even with dynamite.

The gardens will grow out of this freeze and grow on to their usual chaotic abundance. All this carnage is a bummer though. The gardener always hopes for the perfect conditions and unlimited success. This kind of killing spring happens often enough, and I have only been here for seven springs, that you can't get to worked up about it or you will drive yourself mad.

It just better not happen again this year. Then I will be pissed.

There Were Survivors

This is the worst of the worst, complete annihilation. And when there are hundreds and hundreds of hosta you can expect this scene to be repeated over and over to greater and lesser degrees of destruction. The ones that are complete mush will likley send up new leaves at this early stage of the game. At 50% or less of mush I wonder if they will bother adding new solar panels. Time will tell.

The iris right beside this hosta were unfazed. The peonies didn't even blink. The astilbes like the hosta were burned to a crisp.



Would you believe there are daffodils still blooming in the wild cultivated garden? Normally daffodils in the second week of April would be normal. Daffodils on a normal schedule this year are definitely outside the norm. Daffodils thrive at 26.5 degrees. They were finally in their element.



The Bluebells, Hyacinthoides hispanica are totally out of sync. They are a full month early and at peak bloom now. The cold did not bother them. I even wonder if it enhanced the depth of color in the blue ones. They look much deeper blue this year. Perhaps I should put on my glasses and take a closer look. The flowers could be frozen on the stem. They look fine out of focus.



The Blue Pot art project is also a survivor. It passed its first real multi day wind test with flying colors. It didn't budge at all. 300 pounds of gravel did the trick.



The gardens were a little scorched but they will grow on.