Flowers for brightening a dull winter afternoon

It's 20 degrees Farenheit in my neighborhood, with snow on the ground. Earlier today, alone in the house and sorely missing my flower garden, I cruised the web to find some comforting photos and videos. I stumbled across these gorgeous pics of a cottage garden in Alaska and then found this video of a garden in Devonshire England:




As you can imagine, those lovely images banished most of my ennui. But what really cheered me up was being surprised by my hunk o' burnin' love, who came home cherry-cheeked from zipping around town in his topless MG Midget and dropped a snugly-wrapped bundle of cream-colored roses on my desk.

And here they are. Sorry about the jacket slung over the chair, the stack of garden catalogues, and that dribble of tomato soup (lower right); I'm afraid this is a typical Saturday-afternoon look for our kitchen table. And yes, the vase is too similar to the tablecloth, but these roses are going to my office just as soon as I give it a few licks with the feather duster and the vacuum cleaner.

If any of you are shopping for bridal bouquets, the creamy roses are Vindela and the antique-looking ones are Sahara. They're both imported from Ecuador.

What's new in the garden

My hunk o' burnin' love set up this stone fountain two weeks ago. I love its gentle trickling. I was afraid a fountain on the patio might overpower the other sounds I enjoy: the wind whooshing through the treetops, the mellow tones of my hand-tuned wind chimes (which are stirred only by fairly strong breezes, making them an occasional treat and never an annoyance), and especially the gorgeous hymns played every day (for ten minutes at lunchtime and again at dinnertime) on the carillon bells in the tower of the old church two blocks away.

But everything's perfect. The fountain is a wonderful addition to the garden.

We have four varieties of oriental lilies in the front garden, so their bloom times are staggered. We're still waiting for the Casablancas (pure white), but these pretty pink guys are already gone. (I've forgotten the name of this variety. If you know it, please leave a comment.)

We just planted five clumps of Stella de Oro daylilies. And yes, that is their true name--a mixture of Italian and Spanish. "Stella" means "star" in Italian and "de oro" means "of gold" in Spanish. People who call this daylily "Stella d'Oro"--which is actually "star of gold" in Italian--are just plain wrong. Ask Walter Jablonski, the guy who hybridized and named the cultivar. It's Stella de Oro.

This whiskey barrel holds my herb garden, which consists of basil, thyme, parsley, chives, and spearmint. I had a couple of love-in-a-mist plants that didn't fit anywhere else, so I stuck them in the barrel and now they're taking over. They make really interesting flowers and seed pods, though.

Okay, last photo. I took this one several weeks ago, when the peonies were still blooming. We can put a few candles on the tables and be ready to party at a moment's notice.

A beautiful mess in the garden

I've been happier with my front garden since I moved away from carefully coordinating shapes and colors and just started sticking plants in wherever I could find twelve inches of bare ground. Yes, I know it was "wrong" to plant cool blue delphiniums next to this big royal-blue pot of red, hot pink, and orange impatiens, but this quirky, colorful hodgepodge is true cottage-garden style.

The bench in the background, accessed by a flagstone path behind the fountain, is a great place to watch butterflies and daydream.

I used to hand-water many of the plants in this garden, which includes six rose bushes. Now I just connect the hose to this tall copper sprinkler, which spends its free time posing as garden art.

If you're still wondering why I haven't been blogging about writing lately, it's the garden's fault....

I'm still in the garden...

Sorry, but I've just been too busy to blog for the past couple of weeks. Here are some more garden photos for those who enjoy them. I hope to get back to blogging about "writing" things in another day or two. Thanks for your patience.

I watched this selfish robin chase away four other birds who tried to interrupt his bathing. He sat there soaking for a good ten minutes, then "posed" for me before fluttering away.

The clematis looks purple in this photo, but it's actually a lovely electric blue.

A very old planter on the garage wall. We can't decide whether to paint it or not. (Suggestions welcome.)

For privacy reasons, I don't like posting photos of the front of my house, but the front garden has been beautiful this spring. The roses have subsided after their first flush and the lilies have begun to open. These are Stargazers, my favorite; up next are the Casablancas (white) plus two other varieties. We'll be enjoying lilies for another month, at least. (Growing tip: although oriental lilies are stunning from a distance, plant them next to a walk so you can enjoy their wonderful fragrance every day.)

Fragrant Friday (in the garden)

This time of year, entering the back yard from the patio means brushing past these wildly fragrant peonies.

These are for my office...or maybe the kitchen table.

Apropos of nothing, the new Counting Crows CD contains some very nice surprises. (They've moved away from the pop tunes of Hard Candy and back to the edgier sounds of Recovering the Satellites.) I just gave it a preliminary listen on my iPod as I watered and deadheaded flowers. The first three songs were so good I hit Replay when each was over. The lyrics are full of pathos, but hey, that's Adam Duritz. The guy's a mess. Besides, I find listening to that kind of stuff very helpful when I'm writing a story about a tortured hero.

Everyone have a great weekend. And wear your bike helmets, okay?

Elvis and the rhinestone sunglasses

As I strolled toward the entrance of Wolfgang Puck's restaurant in downtown Denver one evening in July 2002, a man caught me in his arms and boomed, "Hey, baby, where you been?" I was about to slam an elbow into his gut and bring my heel down hard on the instep of one of his blue suede shoes when I realized I was in the arms of Elvis. The impersonator had been hired to accost guests as they arrived at the fifties-themed Harlequin party. ("The Company" always throws a lavish party for its authors on the Friday evening during Romance Writers of America's national conference.)

All those cracks about my husband being my "hunk o' burnin' love" aside, I was never an Elvis fan. But I still laugh when I remember the Elvis who hugged me in Denver, and I still have the pair of hot-pink, rhinestone-studded shades he gave me (they were one of the party favors being distributed that evening). When my boys were teenagers I wore the sunglasses on our patio just to see their looks of horror. For some reason I slipped them on just now as I went outside to check on my flowers.

I don't know how many photos of this chair I've posted in the past three years. My husband and our sons made it for me about a dozen years ago, and it's still my favorite seat in the garden. Every couple of years it gets a fresh coat of this wonderful blue paint. And each spring I put a pot of fuchsia beside it because I like to pluck the blossoms and fiddle with them when I'm daydreaming. (They look like little ballerinas or fairies, don't they?) The arbor you see in the background of this photo is strung with tiny white lights that make the patio extra-inviting after dark.

Here's a jumble of pink stuff in one corner of the front garden: You're looking through a not-yet-blooming pink rosebush at a newly-planted azalea bush, a patch of "Zing" pinks, and a just-beginning-to-bloom pink peony, all on the other side of the front walk. A few years ago I wouldn't have planted these clashing shades of pink right next to each other, but now I'm thinking, why not? Surely a woman who's old enough not to care if the neighbors see her in pink-rhinestone sunglasses should feel free to arrange her garden to suit herself. As my Number One Son put it a couple of years ago, "You're fifty years old and you write romance novels. I think you've earned the right to be eccentric."

Yeah. So as soon as I post this, I'm going to slide my silly sunglasses back on and take this computer out into the garden to write some romance.

More garden news

Not ordinarily a geranium lover, I squealed when I saw two lone, unhappy-looking specimens in 4-inch pots at the garden center. This photo was taken on a bright morning, but the blooms are actually purplish red, and I swear, you'd expect them to glow in the dark. The label fell off, so I can't tell you what they are, but I've doused them with Miracle Grow. I should be able to post a more impressive photo in a couple of weeks.

I've been calling this edge of the patio "the garden center" since my hunk o' burnin' love brought home about twenty perennials and shrubs from a plant auction last Saturday. Still left to be stuck in the ground are these five rhododendrons, two cherry-red azaleas, and the find my guy's proudest of, an apple tree on which he's planning to experiment with espalier. What's interesting about the tree is that branches from six varieties of apple trees have been grafted onto a single trunk. (Red Delicious, Gala, Mackintosh, Golden Delicious, Jonathan, and what I can only call "The Mystery Apple" because its label fell off.) If all goes according to plan, in a year or two we'll have apples ripening continually from summer to fall, with each branch producing enough for the two of us to eat out-of-hand and maybe make a pie. While four of the branches aren't very far along, the top two are already showing lots of baby apples, so we'll get at least a taste this season.

I'm all about instant gratification (buying plants in pots), but my husband is the patient type (which pretty much explains our 32-year marriage) and occasionally insists on planting seeds. He's currently waiting for these morning glories and moonflowers to germinate so he can plant them on either side of the arbor. Moonflowers are big, white, showy darlings that open only at night and are wonderfully fragrant. It'll be nice to have them on the far edge of the patio, where we spend so much time in the evenings. (Oh, and check out the pot of Gerbera daisies on the table. Those lush leaves always make me hungry for salad.)

Note to everyone who has e-mailed to say they're jealous of my woodsy back yard: There's poison ivy out there. Somewhere. I haven't seen any, but the left side of my face is blistered. Ick.

More garden pics

"I don't know why flowers make me so happy," I remarked last night to my hunk o' burnin' love. "They just do."



Here's a wild corner of our back yard. Follow the path to the base of those two trees and you'll see my husband's compost heap.

The blue flowers are another great favorite of mine, Virginia bluebells. In the ten years since we moved here, I've picked them every spring like there was no tomorrow--and now, suddenly, it is tomorrow, and the bluebells no longer dominate this patch of ground. This spring I have refrained from picking a single bluebell in the hope that they'll set lots of seeds for next year.

It isn't as though I don't have plenty of other flowers to pick. From now until late autumn, I'll have fresh flowers in my home office every day.

I can hardly wait for the roses and the lilies to bloom....

PG-rated post: The sexiest flower in the garden

I just came in from my garden, where the bleeding heart has started to bloom. Bleeding heart was a favorite in our grandmothers' gardens, but they often called it by another name.

They also enjoyed shocking children by revealing the secret inside the bright pink, heart-shaped blossoms....












EDIT: Looks like the text on these photos is a little small. Just click on the photos to make 'em big.

Waking the garden

It's time to begin the spring clean-up in my garden. I've got scads of roses to prune, and there are dead leaves and winter-burned plants everywhere. The daffodils are on their way up, but it'll take at least another week's worth of sunshine to fully awaken them.

I was hungering for some color, some cheery blooms to tempt me out to the garden.So yesterday I potted up this yellow ranunculus, along with a flat of fluttery pansies (pure red, blue, yellow, and cream-colored) and another flat of jazzy primroses...

...and a dragonfly. He'll probably be living in a lush bed of periwinkle (which is just beginning to send out its sweet blue flowers), but I stuck him in this pot long enough to photograph him. I can't wait to see the colored glass catch the light on sunny afternoons.


Here are some of the primroses. As you can see, the euonymous behind it needs cleaning up. But now that I've got some early color in the garden, I'm eager to get out there and get busy.

On whiskey barrels and snowy woods

I love the four seasons of my garden. This morning, the whiskey barrel looked interesting edged with snow. A few months from now, it will be full of water, a small fountain splashing on the lacy ferns snuggling against its oak sides and rusted iron bands.

I spent part of yesterday perusing flower catalogues (I think we need some red lilies in the front garden) and sighing over several of Claude Monet's paintings and some actual photographs of his lush gardens in Giverny. I'm longing for "garden weather," but must admit that my spring, summer, and fall gardens wouldn't be nearly as wonderous if they weren't preceded by the stark, snowy landscapes of winter.

There's a metaphor on life in there somewhere, but I'll leave you to work it out on your own because my tea kettle is about to whistle.

Speaking of stark, snowy landscapes, The New Republic published Robert Frost's poem, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," on this day in 1923:

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.