Prayer For An Inversion

Under crystal clear skies
The wind is still

False Solomon's Seal, Maianthemum racemosum
Unbattered by downpours
Revels in a strong dappled light.



Today the business of new life hummed
The bigger Phacelia bipinnatifida
Makes ready to join in abundant numbers
Two rampant Phacelia brethren
Cavorting in a wild cultivated garden



Viburnum carlesii? still damaged by past battles
Valiantly covers its thin body in white tresses
A warning in clear air
Tainted by a deep resonating cool



Be still tonight
Let the days warmth rise
High up to the mountain tops



Patchy frost may settle below
Cold in the valley bottoms
Far from the heights of Dame's Rocket
Multi-colored Hesperis matronalis
Protected in rising air



Be still tonight
Petal covers closed
Clinging to the remains of sunshine



Be still tonight
Let the days warmth rise
High up to the mountain tops

All Of A Sudden

The purple and yellow iris are everywhere.



A mental map of this garden is still forming, so I am surprised by where some of them are. I knew there were a lot of them. This year of good bloom may just be revealing more.



The hosta are also everywhere. Hosta, hosta and more hosta. Divide and conquer, the slow patient creation of the one acre ridge top garden.



Yesterday's evening stroll was a mad dash with threatening skies, rumbling thunder and low light.



If only the other iris were as prolific and care free as the yellow and purple iris, laments Bulbarella. She needs more. The yellow and purple iris is nice she says, just not her favorite.



Was that clump of iris there last year? Maybe it was buried in a tangle of Clematis virginiana. I keep suggesting that when you are already working with limited sun it is best not to let your desired plants get buried too heavily in the wild things. But then I am a several decades younger and have more experience on the maintenance end of things. Some people focus more on the acquisition end of the gardening life.



The rains came and stayed for twenty four hours. The days high temperature was pretty low, all of 49 degrees.



Tomorrow's low will be dangerously close to freezing, a diagnosis of 35 for down there. We're up here. It wouldn't. It couldn't possibly do such a foul thing this late in the year. Two mornings of nail biting lay ahead.

Native Bloom Day

This fine Garden Bloggers Bloom Day was spent working at Client # 5's until it started raining and then heading higher up the mountain to Client # 4's where it wasn't raining, to consult on a design for a new front bed. We then headed off to a nursery to buy plants and then it really started to rain and I headed home.

There was a small flash flood that did a number on a farmer's freshly plowed corn field in the valley below Crab Tree Bald pretty close to home. A normally very small stream pushed a lot of debris into the culvert where it flows under the highway. It overflowed and headed downhill via an alternate route. I was a bit concerned about what I might see climbing the mountain to get home.

Fortunately all was well closer to home. It must have been a very localized downpour on the west face of Crab Tree Bald.

A second visit to the native plant garden in Lake Junaluska was slipped in on my way home from work one day earlier in the week. Frankly there are days now when I am just too tired to type, so these pictures did not make it in to the post with the Yellow Lady Slipper orchid.

This Chionanthus virginicus, Fringe Tree, was in full bloom. I may need to get one of these. I did get a Cotinus coggygia, the Smoketree which is very similar in habit and appearance.



I was hoping to get to the native plant garden in time to see the azaleas and rhododendrons in bloom, but I missed their peak. A few unidentified native azaleas were still blooming.



Entering the garden I was enveloped by a sweet intoxicating aroma. The Calycanthus floridus, Sweet Shrub, were in bloom and are highly fragrant. The shrubs are kind of rangy in appearance and the flower is distinctly odd. Maybe there will be room for some of them some where though they are not a must have.



The pale yellow cultivar Calycanthus floridus 'Athens' was in the garden too. I did grow one of the straight species from seed last year, but it does not appear to have survived the winter in its small pot on the deck.



This Baptisia alba, White Wild Indigo was very striking. Me likes. I have blue Baptisia seeds I collected and need to sow now that it is warm and I have fresh potting soil.



Adding to the alluring fragrance coming from the garden was this Magnolia tripetala, Umbrella Tree. It is a bit reminiscent of the Schefflera actinophylla in Hawaii.

I'm already wondering how I am going to fit everything I may need into my small mountaintop garden. I want to rearrange the trees.



It stopped raining enough before dark to plant a single replacement tomato for one that keeled over unexpectedly. Of course one replacement tomato became three. How can you buy just one tomato? I also planted another row of potatoes "Yukon Gold' and raked away the mulch in preparation for the planting of the corn.

I am not the only gardener who broke the rules this spring. My neighbor down the road with a sizable vegetable garden already has his corn up on the average last frost date for our area. These people know things.

One thing I can say about the roadside vegetable garden so far this rainy spring is, "Damn Slugs!!!" I'm no purist. I have been putting out slug bait.



The abundant yellow and purple iris bloom in the foreground on the small rise above the roadside vegetable garden. Half this patch has been given away to make room for things considered more desirable, as in something new and different. The lush wildflower greenery surrounding the vegetable garden should give you some indication of the weed suppressing power of a thick layer of wood chip mulch.



In the thunderstorm mist on a mountain, a vegetable garden tries to grow faster than the slugs can eat it. Why oh why with all this lush fresh growth do they crawl across sharp pointy wood chips to eat my melons, squash and cucumber seedlings?



The answer to this question and more might be found by following links to blooming blogs around the world from the Garden Bloggers Bloom Day headquarters, home of Miss Carol, master vegetable grower and varmint battler.

It Only Leaks

When it rains.

The front porch roof anyway. It still needs its ridge caps and wall flashing, but all the panels are now on. Just in time for the first really good thunderstorm of the summer type weather season.



The sound of a good rain on a warm metal roof with open framing was much quieter than I had anticipated. It is a more gentle melodic sound than a hard rat-a-tat-tat. That is a good thing I suppose. Time will tell if different rains produce different qualities of sound.



Even with the leaks I can get out of the rain and find a place in the shade on my front porch now.

Hard To Believe

It is hard to imagine that just one month ago the world was still mostly brown. Yes the daffodils were blooming and there was the growing foliage of other bulbs and meager hints of the wild abundance on the forest floor, but the trees were bare and brown sticks and leaf litter were a dominant feature.



The world is very different now. The ground is carpeted in a lush cloak of fresh green and speckled with the thousands of blue, pink and white Hyacinthoides. Columbine are every where.



The rhododendrons and azaleas continued to gather momentum. The deciduous shrubs have leafed out with the trees, adding to the green bounty.



The late spring perennial bloomers have their time in the spotlight. Hundreds of iris, Hesperis and columbine join the Hyacinthoides in their waning days.



A golden yellow orange azalea



And a deep deep Go Gators orange mingle or clash with the dominant pinks, blues and white.



Take a moment to rest your eyes before we move on.



The bearded iris collection runs the gamut in colors and size.



And runs from one end of the ridge top garden to far end of the roadside vegetable garden. The iris have been spread hither, yon and beyond.



This spring without a doubt has been much more floriferous than last. The columbine and Hyacinthoides were froze last year and the bloom was muted. They are a major element in the garden this spring, companions and a prelude to the rhododendrons and azaleas.



Someone commented that the wild cultivated garden was looking more like an actual garden this year. I think picking up three quarters an acre of sticks and dried stalks for two springs and my ongoing removal of any Clematis virginiana I see is being noticed. Some might just consider it due to the excellent bloom this spring.



The reality is, now it is all easier to see.

The Lady Has Big Feet

Cypripedium pubescens



The Yellow Lady's Slipper



My what big feet you have.



At the Corneille Bryan Native Garden.

Cool Blue

The mornings have been a bit nippy the last few days.

The Killing Fields

Down the driveway and through the dark forest is the other garden,



A garden created and maintained with brutality. This gash through the forest is the electric utility easement and no gardener worth their salt could pass up the use of this full sun.



This garden has issues though. Another maintenance crew can pass through here at any time, choosing any method and any manner of maintaining the garden to their specifications, usually meaning chainsaws or herbicides. A little preemption may keep them at bay.



I spent the entire day working in the sunny utility meadow, moving from one end to the other, killing things. No trees are allowed. All tree saplings were pulled or cut down. Any blackberries found were cut down. They are just a pain. The hideous suckering stick shrub Kerria japonica that had been planted down here was ripped out of the ground. It is just useless.

Betsy's House also got its first haircut since I have been here. A general tidiness may help make the abandoned looked loved and reclaimed.



At the end of the day, the 81 year old Bulbarella comes down for a look at her sunny utility meadow. After a day of leisure and plant shopping, she is scouting the newly cleaned garden for planting locations and eyeing the ravaged ramp patch next to the blueberries as she goes by. We got plenty ramp scattered in many hidden locations and I have been gathering and sowing seed, so no worries.

It just so happens this killing frenzy landed on Mother's Day. I get credit for the work done. I think a natural gardening urge and Mother's Day just coincided exceptionally well.



There is a lot of utility easement to cover and you can image how tree seedlings relish their own chance at some sun. At the top of the path is the roadside vegetable garden which is also part of the utility easement.



Then there are the rubbish piles. When I first arrived in June of 2007, the other maintenance crew had just been through the garden and had a done a major chop, felling many entire large trees and major limbs from those left standing. They chopped it down and left everything were it fell. It was impossible to walk through the sunny utility meadow. That first summer of 2007 I cleared a path through the debris with a chainsaw and stacked the rubbish into piles. In the summer of 2008 several of the brush piles were burned.

Fires just are not a priority at the moment. They need to be tended and watched. I was very tired of looking at these huge piles of rubbish though, so today I stomped many of the piles into half the height and width of their former selves opening room for planting closer to them and lessening their visual impact.

The pile to the left of Betsy's House was significantly reduced. The Black Cherry wood there crushed easiest of all of the wood in the piles.



Looking back at this space one can perhaps understand how it can take several years to cope with all that rubbish and attempt to maintain the space as a meadow that will not be tempting to that other maintenance crew at the same time.



The hillside below the roadside vegetable garden is the far end of Bulbarella's utility meadow.



But I kept on going and went down into my smaller front section of the utility easement killing blackberries because they're vicious, elderberries because they're boring and any small trees because they can't be in there.



With a little more work, the sunny utility meadow could have a feel similar to this.



We just need to work with the freely self sowing like this Dames Rocket, Hesperis matronalis and Scorpion Weed, Phacelia purshii and other herbaceous wildflowers that exist in the utility meadow in abundance already to achieve that feeling.



Half the battle of this garden is killing what you don't want or can't have and cleaning up after the other maintenance crew.