A Change of Color

Spring has come to Sacramento and I took advantage of our beautiful, sunny and low 70s weather and did some painting over the long President's Day weekend.

I always forget what a pain painting can be.  And the older I get the more literal I mean that.  My quads have been on inactive duty since around October so after just a few hours of squatting, stretching, bending, and climbing I was feeling like rubber.

Although I'm a big fan of color - who isn't - I'm also becoming a disciple of the school that says gardens should have a limited color palette.  To that end, I'm trying to move toward the classic brown, white, and green color combo.

That meant that my red and white shed would need a latex bath of Behr's Sweet Molasses.
 

This is the view from our back porch.  The shed dominates the scene in all weathers.  While many guests (and at least one member of my family) have remarked about how quaint it looks, I found myself wanting to notice it less often.  I want the plants to be the star when they grow in.  

After a couple days, this is what I ended up with:

It still holds some visual weight, but I think that's more of a result of its size than its color.  

Growing up on either side of the window are climbing roses that will someday cover a majority of the shed in profuse white blooms for months on end.  I'm looking forward to that.

One more thing: I had a poetry teacher that used to tell us that we needed to know the rules before we could break the rules. Well, if my rule is a color palette of green, brown, and white, I broke that rule with abandon when I let my daughter pick out the paint color for our Adirondack chairs.  

We went from weathered (which I liked) but dirty (which no one liked)

To this eye-assaulting pop of color:

I really wanted to paint these a matching brown, but since this was a family project, I deferred to my daughter's choice.  One of the best things about painting, and gardening, is that you can always change your mind.

Years of Learning

Temperatures in Northern California finally cooled off into the upper 90s making it possible to devote some of my weekend hours to finishing one of the first main projects at my new house.  All that remains of this project is to think of a name for this part of the garden.  Why is that gardeners have a need to assign names? 

I have spent the last decade watching Gardening by the Yard, Yard Crashers and the innumerable P. Allen Smith shows.  I have read garden design books, books about specific types of plants, and books about the lives of gardeners.  I have read, subscribed to, and written blog posts about gardening.  And all that information, all that time and energy has led me to this point.  In my new garden, I feel as if I have to prove that I actually learned something and that I can apply it to my own life.  What good is knowledge otherwise? 

With that in mind, here are some of the lessons I have learned and how I applied them to this project:

Lesson – Just Live With it for awhile

I waited a couple months before I even tackled this project.  I stood at the window in the house and just looked at this corner of the yard and wondered what it would look like if I did X, Y, or Z.  I checked the sunlight at different times of day.  I went back to the window and imagined some more.  When it came time to break ground I did one thing at a time and then I stopped and went back to the window and lived it with it some more.  From start to finish, this project took 5 or 6 weeks to complete as a result.    

The view of the new bed from our patio

Lesson – Take your time and do it right

Most of this area was grass.  There was an Aristocrat Pear tree and an Oleander that had to go as well.  I dug all these out by hand and with the help of a new “Mr. Diggy” (heartfelt thanks to Calvin).  Then I put in the drip irrigation lines because nothing non-native will grow here without supplemental watering.  And then I went back to waiting.  I waited for the grass I missed to show itself again and when it did, I dug it out with my hori hori (best garden tool I own).  That left me with a bare patch of dirt for a while and I ached to get it planted, but I knew that if I got ahead of myself I could spend a lifetime weeding unwanted grass and that it would be so much easier to do it now with nothing in the way and nothing to disturb.

Lesson – Curved beds look better

My wife doesn’t often offer up comments on my gardening.  She sees it as my realm.  She’ll comment and compliment when I show things off to her but for the most part she lets me do whatever I want and is learning to trust that I have some kind of vision for things.  But after I carved the outline for this bed she broke from tradition and told me “I like the shape of that new bed.” 

Lesson – Paths don’t have to be made of stone

I’ve always loved stone pathways.  But stone is expensive and it’s labor intensive to install.  Plus, there’s the added and ongoing chore of weeding the cracks between the stones.  This time, I’m letting the lawn be the pathway.  Besides, a green lawn when used as a foil to the rest of the garden can be quite charming. Check out these pictures I added to my "Grass Pathways" ideabook on Houzz.com:

Grass Pathways

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Lesson – Repetition

When I go for a walk or take a drive and notice other people’s gardens I am almost always drawn to the gardens that use repetition in their plants.  There’s something wonderful about a garden filled with ferns or large patches of ornamental grasses.  And yet, when it comes to my own garden I have always wanted to use as many different plants as I could get my hands on.  There are hundreds of Japanese maple cultivars so how in the world is a gardener supposed to live with just one?  But in this case, I really did try to limit my plant selection.  I used mondo grass along the border and punctuated the garden with Japanese blood grass.  From there, I pretty much broke the rules though.  I planted a Baby Blue Spruce, a Snow Fountains Weeping Cherry, a Jubilee blueberry bush, a Mr. Lincoln rose that was given to me last month, and a Black & Blue Sage.  Even along the symmetrical trellises, a natural place for repetition, I failed.  I planted a climbing Iceberg rose on the right but planted jasmine on the left because . . .

I love the way Japanese Blood Grass (Imperata cylindrica) catches the sunlight. 

Lesson – Never plant thorny things where people walk

I really wanted a climbing rose to grown up this shed.  It would have looked awesome to have two climbing roses growing up over the window.  But I remember how annoying it was to walk under the arbors at my last house and get my hat or my shirt sleeve stuck on a thorn.  So I planted jasmine on the trellis near the pathway because it is easily trimmed and it won’t wave a thorny fist in my face when I walk past it.

Non-thorny jasmine on the left

Me So Thorny rose on the right

Lesson – Plants will grow

In my gardening life the times when I have been most pleased with something I have done was initially after I finished planting.  I arranged the small little plants just so and I stand back and congratulate myself on having an aesthetic eye.  And then the plants grow up and things don’t look like they used to.  Why I neglect to conceive of a plant’s ultimate size is beyond me.  Perhaps because I didn’t have the experience of watching them grow to maturity?  This time around I did my best to leave room for things to grow.  As a consequence, there is a whole lot of mulch being used as ground cover right now but I think that in a year or two, much of the mulch will be composting in place and the plants and trees will be filling in.  If not, I can always buy more plants to fill the spaces.

Piece By Piece

I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.  I don’t have any grand plans.  I don’t even have simple plans.  Every Saturday morning I trudge out to the shed, pull out the lawn mower and get started mowing.  It seems like it takes all day.  It really takes about 90 minutes.  But the chore of mowing the lawn is taking up too much of my mental time.  By the time I am finished I feel a little bit defeated and quite a bit overwhelmed.  I don’t know where to start.  What can I do to make this easier?  What can I do to transform this place into the Eden I found so easy to imagine when we first toured this house a few months ago? 

My new back yard is very nearly a green blank slate.

My wife has been encouraging me to hire someone to mow the lawn – at least for the summer so I can focus on the things I enjoy like planting trees, putting in pathways, and creating borders.  But I have resisted out of stubbornness.  I tell myself “I don’t want to pay someone to do what I can do for free.”  And yet I don’t think twice about paying to have someone change the oil in my car.  Surely, if I was going to have to surrender my man card for paying someone to mow my own lawn the Man card Defense Authority Department (McDAD) would have already taken it away for not changing my own oil filter, right? 

I have also resisted hiring someone to mow my lawn because part of me begrudgingly knows that this sort of angst is a necessary part of my assimilation with the new house.  This is part of the “just live with it for awhile” strategy that I know to be good advice.  It’s just that it has been harder and more discouraging than I imagined it would be.  I have missed the satisfaction that comes with creating a new bed.  I have missed the creative spark that flares up when you finally think of the perfect plant for the perfect spot.  I have missed that simple feeling of accomplishment when you stand back and realize that you have successfully addressed a problem.  But every week that I spend walking back and forth through the yard I sense that I am learning something valuable even if I can’t quite take that knowledge and transform it into a bigger picture.

This weekend I really started to sense a change though.  While I mowed the lawn, I noticed that one section of the yard was really dry in spite of being in deep shade and in spite of having given the impression of perpetual wetness earlier this spring.  I noticed that a different section of yard that was especially uneven and promised at least one gruesome ankle injury if the issue doesn’t get addressed. 

I started filling holes and discovered
many more in the process.

Though I was silently complaining to myself about the size of the lawn, the time I spent out there afforded me the luxury of day-dreaming about the summer ahead.  It occurred to me that this yard is big enough that I wouldn’t feel conflicted about filling up my daughter’s pool and just letting it sit there for a couple days.  The grass beneath it could die and it wouldn’t be a huge eyesore like it would have been in the smallness of our former yard.  As I struggled to maneuver the mower as close to the shed as I could, I had a quick vision of a small bed of flowers surrounding the shed with a trellis of sweet peas in the middle.

I think I'll remove the ornamental pear tree planted so closely to the shed and put in some kind of flower bed.

I could imagine a fall day, years from now, sitting around a stone fireplace with friends and kids while the dark came on us. I imagined friends sharing spiked hot chocolate or mulled wine while the autumn colors of trees I have yet to plant cast a quiet spell upon us.  

I found this picture on Houzz and I would love to mimic this some day.
(Traditional Patio by Portland Landscape Architect beautiful bones and purple stones)

Another view from a different angle.
(Traditional Patio by Portland Landscape Architect beautiful bones and purple stones)

I don’t know which of these things will come to pass.  Maybe I will have a different vision at some point that will inspire me to go in another direction.  But the encouraging thing is that I am starting to believe that I will, eventually, make this work.  This will become a place I can handle or at least a place that I will enjoy trying to handle. 

Living with it for a while is still going to take a while.  But piece by piece I am putting this puzzle together and it’s starting to feel okay that I’m doing it all without the picture on the box to guide me. 

Broken Ground

I am pleased to say that the front yard redo has begun.  The guys came at 7:00 a.m. yesterday morning and brought their sod cutter with them.  I am tempted to ask them to stop here.  Look at all that bare dirt!  I could just go crazy with plants and never bring the lawn mower out front again.  

But I will resist.  For one, I don't think my wife would go for it.  Secondly, the benefit of lawn in this case is that it's actually lower maintenance for me than other options since I can just mow the often-mentioned and much-hated palm seedlings that constantly grow in my yard.  And, finally, if and when we come to a point where we decide to sell our house, I think the "average" buyer would prefer the expected American front yard which means green grass. 

Speaking of grass, in the picture above there is a strip of rock that borders what was the lawn and the walkway.  The landscapers will remove this rock and use it elsewhere.  They will replace it with even more grass.  This is fine with me as I had grown weary of weeding this strip.  I may eventually remove the grass that will be installed where the rock is now and replace it with a curvaceous planting bed or perhaps grow a boxwood hedge, but for now I'm going to let the plan of sodding this area proceed without intervention. 

In the bottom left corner of the picture above you can see a black drip irrigation line.  This line currently runs directly from a hose bib a foot or two away.  This setup has worked for me just fine, but the crew is going to tap into the in-ground system and run the line beneath the stones and re-install the drip irrigation.  This will make the area look cleaner and it will be one less thing for me to worry about.  I find that drip irrigation timers can be unreliable after a while and those pesky batteries die without my permission. 

Unfortunately, what was originally estimated to be a 2 or 2 1/2-day project looks like it's going to end up taking 9 days from start to finish.  The crew has been splitting time between my yard and my neighbor's yard which they are also re-sodding.  They expect to complete the grading of my yard today but they won't have enough time to put in the pipes and lay the sod before the day is done.  And now the rains of Northern California's wet season are scheduled to begin in earnest tomorrow morning and continue for five straight days.  They are warning of potential flooding.  Which means lots and lots of mud in my yard and not a very good time to be trenching sprinkler lines and laying sod.  [Insert grumpy face emoticon here!]

No work will be done in my backyard as part of this project but that doesn't mean things aren't changing there too.  The crepe myrtle leaves are changing and starting to fall finally.  I plan to use the time after the leaves have fallen to study the branching and do some artful shaping - paying special attention to the lower limbs so that eventually I can push the lawn mower beneath it without having to duck.  Those seeds just jump off the tree and attach themselves to my hair.  It's annoying.     

One of my Japanese maples, a 'Glowing Embers' has really gotten orange in the last week. 

The 'Red Dragon' pictured above is still red but it's not the deep maroon that it was this summer.  I love sitting in the iron chair next to this tree.  I love the way they look together.  The colors are so different.  The texture, also, so different.  This is a slow growing Japanese maple.  This is a quality I have grown to appreciate.  This tree looks just as perfectly sited as the day I planted it.  I can't say the same for every tree or shrub I have planted. 

And finally, a seldom-used but fairly old Japanese cultivar called 'Otto's Dissectum' has gone from light green to orange and red.  I've been growing this in a wine barrel for a couple seasons now.  It's such a nice tree.  Some day I hope to create a spot of its own for it - a place where it can sink its roots and grow without impediment and live up to its potential . . . a hope I'm sure we all desire for ourselves and our loved ones. 

Redwood Boxes

Continuing my theme of having too many containers, I present my latest additions to my garden:

Redwood boxes with finger joints

I can’t take any credit for these.  I stole the design idea from Essence of the Tree’s web site.  I’ve been lusting after their version of these boxes for years.  The wood used in their boxes was collected from structures in the San Francisco area dating back to the 1880s and they have a ton of character as a result.  Character comes at a price those.  At $350 a piece, I could never pull the trigger.  And if I did, I would feel guilty if I put anything in them that would cause them to deteriorate. 

I can’t take credit for the construction of these boxes either.  I commissioned my friend, Jordan, to build them for me.  Jordan is a talented young carpenter who also built a large planter box/trellis structure for me, but the design of these boxes presented him with a challenge because he had never built anything with finger joints before. 

The wood from these boxes is signicantly less than the 130-year-old versions that inspired them, but there is still some charm in the differing grains and how those differences are amplified at the corners.
 

A little wood glue helped stabilize the joints while this was being built.

Jordan confessed that the first box he built was actually easier because the redwood he used was straighter.  The second box required a lot more shaving, sanding, and salty language to complete. 

I really enjoy having pieces in my yard that were made by friends.  For one, it’s a nice reminder that I am surrounded by gifted people who are willing to share their talents.  But it’s also nice because it saves me money while also providing a little extra money for my friends. 

One of these will house a dwarf Japanese maple called 'Murasaki Kiyohime'. 
I'll post a picture when it leafs out.

You’ll have to excuse me now.  I’m off to see if I can make friends with someone who knows how to weld.  

Pot Ghetto

I re-potted this Acer palmatum 'Koto No Ito'  just
because I liked the pot and it was on sale.

The most amazing things to me about A&E’s show, “Hoarders” isn’t the amazing amount of junk that gets collected by people, it’s the amazing number of people they find to feature on the show. 

It's easy to scoff at them but it usually turns out that hoarding is a response to some kind of emotional trauma suffered by the hoarder and letting go of their junk requires them to first deal with the reason why they started their hoarding.  If I hadn’t watched this show, I would have gone on assuming that hoarding is what happens when the average person lets their collecting gene go unchecked. 

I have always allowed my collector gene to manifest itself in whatever manner it felt like.  When I went to the shooting range (i.e. the abandoned gravel quarry in the woods) with my dad and older brothers I shot my BB gun for a little while, but the real fun was collecting my dad’s spent .22 shells and putting them back in the containers they came in.  I collected baseball cards too and eventually filled my room with them.  Then I started collecting books and magazines.  Or at least not getting rid of those I had read.  And for unexplainable reasons I saved toenail clippings in an empty 35mm film canister for a year (or two) in college.  That last bit should probably never have been published because I'm pretty sure that proves I'm a bit off, but I’m willing to admit it here so I can make my point: when I watch "Hoarders" I find myself saying “there, but for the grace of God, go I.” 

Keeping my collections under control is still a struggle for me though.  So a few months ago I decided to read a book called “The Joy of Less.”  The book had a profound impact on the way I viewed the things I have and what gives them value.  It really got me to examine why I keep things like books that I will never read again.  Answer: on the off chance that by having it on my bookshelf a visiting friend will give me +1 in intelligence when they review my belongings to make their assessment of how I live my life.  I know, it’s stupid, but that’s got to be the only reason to hold onto that second copy of "Skinny Legs and All". 

So I’ve been minimizing.  I donated bags full of clothing that doesn’t fit my waistline or my current style.  I finally got to the point where I could recycle CD jewel cases without feeling like I was losing something irretrievable.  And then I threw away about 100,000 worthless baseball cards.  

This was just the first of three great baseball
card purges.

I have made a lot of progress and I have reclaimed some valuable space in my home.  But there is one area where I may have gotten a little worse: my growing “pot ghetto”.  Whoever coined that phrase must have been a poet because it perfectly captures the spirit of any collection of unused pots. 

Pot Pit

My collecting of pots started innocently enough.  My patio takes up a huge portion of my backyard so I started adding pots to it to break up the otherwise nondescript concrete.  One pot wasn’t enough and every good designer knows you can’t have an even number of design elements so two pots wouldn’t suffice either.  Three pots clustered together was a good start but it didn’t leave me enough room to grow a plumeria or some running bamboo that couldn’t be trusted in the ground.  Even numbers still don’t work so four pots wouldn’t suffice – I needed five for sure. And that was just in one corner of the patio.  There was still plenty of surface space that could use some embellishment.  So now I have pots all over the place.  I even have pots that don’t have plants.  They are just collecting cobwebs in my own personal “projects” section of my yard.  

My poor neighbors have to look at this
when they spy on me in my yard.

I justify keeping the extra pots by saying that I can use them to house impromptu plant purchases or for plant divisions or just to mix and match colors as the seasons change.  But the truth is, just like the shirts I donated to GoodWill, my taste in pots keeps changing.  I need bigger pots in newer styles.

The difference is, I haven't been able to bring myself to tear down my pot ghetto and I don't think I ever will.

Dialing it In

The other night I was showing my friend, Brian, my latest garden project. He said, “Wow, you’re really getting to dial in on things these days!”

Brian is in the beginning stages of getting his yard to match his vision. Although in many ways I feel that I’m right there with him, I have to concede that most of my yard is getting close to something that looks like a finished garden. Sadly, I don’t have a lot left to do in the way of breaking new ground. The upside of that is that it means I can focus on dialing in on the things that have been bothering me.

I miss the creation aspect of gardening though. I don’t think there’s anything as satisfying for a gardener as taking a stretch of grass and turning it into the reflection of an inspired idea. But I have to admit that there is also something immensely satisfying about taking care of the numerous items on my list of things that have bugged me.

Within the past couple weeks I have been able to redo this stepping stone area, for example. I had installed these stones three years ago and had hoped that by now the Baby Tears would have filled in around all of them.

This picture focused on the better looking gaps and is closer to what I had hoped the entire area would look like.

Although it grew beautifully around many of them, there were several gaps between the stones where only errant grass blades, dandelions and unidentified weeds took root. I finally grew tired of weeding and wishing and redid this area so that it is cleaner and won’t require any more weeding. It’s a compromise from my original vision but I think it’s one that will eventually make me happier. It’s almost like having a permanent weed-blocking mulch.

The new look: planted with dwarf mondo grass, these gaps were left for form and function since there is a downspout nearby.  I will let the lawn fill in around the outside of these stones. 

Also on my to-do list was the drip irrigation line that I have buried around the outside of my patio. I love having it buried because I don’t need to worry about people tripping over it, but the drawback is that when I want to add a pot to the patio or fix a leak, I have to get out the shovel and start digging (carefully). Well, a few weeks ago I started noticing a wet area near the end of the buried line. What would have been a quick and easy fix had the irrigation line been above ground turned into something that I kept putting off.  After weeks of procrastination, I finally took a few minutes and dug up the line and fixed it. It took all of 10 minutes. It took about as long to wash my hands and arms off as it did to fix the leak. But I got it done and my efforts are already paying dividends.

Last weekend was devoted to installing what I am calling a "leach field" drainage system that should start whisking away the water that accumulates in a low part of my lawn which just happens to be right next to the corner of the house’s foundation. 

This drainage system doesn't look pretty right now, but it's working.  I added a semi-permeable mortar-like product called Gator Dust to the pea pebbles to help funnel the water toward the drain. 

The French poet, Paul Valery, once said “no poem is ever finished, only abandoned.” I have long thought that a garden is a tangible form of poetry that we gardener poets work and work until it says just what we want it to say. And then what we want to say changes just a little so we try to say it differently. Maybe my garden is close to saying something I wanted it to say, but I know it is far from finished and I am looking forward to the rewording.

Google Your Garden

Gardeners who have spent any significant amount of time in one place become intimately familiar with their plot of earth. The truly aware gardener knows minute details like which 5-foot area gets waterlogged after a rain or which area only gets sun during the hottest part of the day or where the shade from a younger tree falls throughout the day.

Gardeners know these things because they spend time walking around their yard, experiencing the garden at different times of the day and different times of the year. It is this awareness that helps them bond with their garden and become aware of what it needs and what it could do without.

But sometimes it helps to get a new perspective on something you get so close to. To quote Toad the Wet Sprocket’s song “Butterflies”: “You know how when you get so close to something that big you can’t see anything at all.” I think that’s how it is with gardening. We tend to get a little myopic about black spot on the roses or the floppiness of the nicotiana.

The easy solution is to invite someone over to take a look around and listen to their reactions. I was reminded, however, that technology can also provide a unique perspective. Google Maps have been around for several years and although I’ve checked out my house before I had never thought of how I could use it to improve my garden. So I checked it out again today . . . although nothing new has come to mind yet, it did reinforce some of the things that I’ve been thinking about. Namely, I need some privacy from the prying eyes of the 2-story house to the left of mine. And I still hate seed-happy palm trees.

Home is where the heart is.  On either side are prying eyes and an evil seed-dropping palm tree.

Google can be used for some other cool things related to the garden though. Check out what Genevieve Schmidt of North Coast Gardening discovered you can do with Google’s new image search by image feature.

Updated Shots of My New Bed

I've lost a few of the azaleas I planted in this new bed a couple months ago but everything else seems to be coming along okay.

April:

June:

April:

June:

When the Wine Barrel Runs Dry

On Memorial Day, my friend, Brian, and I were standing by the barbecue because that is what men are supposed to do.  He looked down at the half wine barrel I have sitting nearby and commented on it.  At that moment it was filled to the brim with my daughter's toys.  For the last year or so it has served me well as a makeshift toy cabinet for outdoor fun.  It is weather resistant, durable, and it "corresponds" with my other outdoor containers.

As I discussed its merits with Brian I noticed that the staves had become loose and were beginning to pull away from the steel bands.

Being a little OCD about such things, I didn't hesitate to pull everything out of the barrel while I let the hose fill a couple five-gallon buckets.  I then poured both buckets into the wine barrel and at that point it became apparent just how much the staves had shrunk and pulled away from the others.  Within minutes all 10 gallons had drained from the barrel.  So I filled the buckets again and added them to the barrel and this time it took a little longer for the water to drain.

I have repeated this step several times and each time I do so it takes longer for the water to drain.  After about 24 hours the bottom 6 - 8 inches were basically water tight again.  I'll keep adding water until the wood has absorbed enough water to expand and become water tight from top to bottom.

Whether I decide to go back to using this as an outdoor storage or convert it to a planter for this summer's tomatoes remains a game time decision.  But in case you were wondering, 12 months in a Mediterranean climate under a protected eave is too long to leave a wine barrel dry. 

That does not mean that I wouldn't recommend these large, durable, containers.  They are ideal for those of us with small backyards but large ambitions.  In my 1/4 acre lot, I have several of these barrels that I have planted with a variety of plants that I wouldn't otherwise have room for (or the proper setting for) including an orange tree (Citrus sinensis 'Washington') on my full-sun patio; a dwarf Albert Spruce (Picea glauca 'Conica') for a shady corner on a slab of concrete that borders my house; and a beautiful clump of Black Bamboo (Poaceae Phyllostachys nigra)that I would never, ever have the courage to plant in the ground but which sits happily in a wine barrel on top of another concrete slab in the back corner of my yard.  I have even used a wine barrel as small water garden in years past.  A constant barrage of media coverage on the dangers of the West Nile Virus finally convinced me to abandon my little pond though. 

The moral of this story is: take care of your wine barrels and they will reward you with the freedom that comes with abundant possibilities. 

A New Flower Bed

When you buy a house, you buy a landscape.  Some good and some bad.  When I bought this house I liked the shade from the mulberry tree, I liked the roses in the backyard, I liked the brick-bordered flower beds in the back yard.  But I hated the palm tree in the back corner, the sickly juniper in too much shade, and the formless jasmine under the front window.  We inherit wealth and we inherit genetic traits like alapesia.  Over the last several years I've been focusing on improving the "genetics" of my yard.

Some things, like the palm tree, were just begging to be torn out.  The jasmine in the front though has held its place largely because I didn't know what to do without it.  But then last weekend the wifey mentioned how she hates the jasmine.

It was a light bulb moment for me.  Within minutes I was outside cutting down and digging up the jasmine.  The next day I was at the nursery picking out plants.  And a few days later I was at the quarry picking out a thousand pounds of New England Tudor Stone.  Aside from some mulch, I'm just about finished.  

In this bed:

Hydrangea 'Nigra'

Azalea 'Gumpo White'

Azalea 'Fielder's White'

A potted Acer palmatum 'Kamagata'

Myosotis palustris 'Water Forget-Me-Not'

Lady Fern

And here's a picture of it all put together before the mulch goes in to cover the drip irrigation line.  It's also littered with droppings from the mulberry tree that will give this whole bed a lot more shade as the leaves fill in.

Rusty Iron Arbors

Today must be day 16 in what is starting to feel like the modern version of the 40-day flood. It's rained for so long that when we had a brief respite around lunch time yesterday (Tuesday in the picture above) I took advantage of it and mowed my lawn so I could stop obsessing about when I might get another chance to get out there.

In spite of the rain, it has been warm enough that things are happening in the garden even without my input. Those vegetable seeds I planted are doing their thing even without me hovering over them worriedly wondering if they would sprout and if I needed to do something to make it happen.

In the absence of actual gardening I've been spending a little time just taking pictures and marveling at the gorgeousness of spring. It's amazing to watch a little nub on a stick burst out of its shell and become a full fledged leaf or flower in the span of just a few days.

When I walked around in the yard today it was just starting to rain again. The sky was dark gray, the air was cold, the plants were alive. But what struck me was the non-living beauty of my rusty iron arbors.

I bought these a few weeks apart from each other at Green Acres here in Sacramento. They were reasonably priced (in the $100 range) and I love the way they look in the yard. I think they provide a rustic, shabby-chic kind of feeling to this part of the garden.

Thanks to a new book by popular garden writers Rebecca Sweet and Susan Morrison that was recently published, vertical gardening is the big trend in the gardening blogosphere these days. This month it is even the focus of the Garden Designer's Roundtable. My little plot of earth often feels too small for my garden schemes. These arbors represent my rebellion against the reality of restricted horizontal space.

I love that on these two arbors I have a place to grow a second 'Iceberg' climbing rose,

a white bower vine and a white 'Shiro-kapitan' wisteria, which is not long for this world and a topic of an upcoming post.

Can you see that blue sky behind the twining vines of the wisteria? I'm so thankful that I have photographic evidence that I didn't just dream up the existence of such a thing!

It's going to be gross out for another week and the gardener in me is feeling disgruntled. But these arbors provided me with a good reminder that even in times of dreariness there are things in life to appreciate.