While the rest of America was buffeted by terrible storms, with supreme irony, the "perpetually rainy" city - Seattle - enjoyed a sweet balmy fog-in-the-early-morning-followed-by-rare-and-glorious-sunshine Memorial Day weekend.
The only downside was the noise from all the gas-powered lawn mowers and leaf blowers. Hrrrrmphhhh, there ought'a be a law!
I spent the weekend removing all the winter-damaged plants. So sad, and such big gaps are now blotting the carefully contrived, or should I say, designed landscape. With severe damage from the cold and some annoying moth damage I had to remove my beloved Italian cypresses. It was comparable to removing my three front teeth. Those spires always made my mind wander back to the great food in Italy, and the rolling hills of Tuscany and Umbria, and the use of the cypresses as markings for their cemeteries. It is curious that Americans have such a love affair with some of the iconic images of Italy, not realizing that many Italians will not have the cypresses in their gardens because of their association with the Cities of the Dead.
I believe we all lost our rosemary plants. My loss is stark for I used the trailing rosemary to cover a combined measure of 30 feet of rubble walls. The bare walls are NOT attractive! I will replant in the late fall, but I am not sure what I will use this time to cover the walls. Meanwhile I will let nasturtiums, squash plants and cucumber plants cascade over and cover the blight while I go garden touring this summer, looking for the perfect answer to my quandary.
We are all commenting on the very wet May and still trying to figure out the skewed timing of some of our most beloved plants. The tulips are history and the roses are throwing out their first tentative blooms. The rhododendrons almost look tropical, except for the hybrid ones. They are now totally covered in their garish blooms. For those that can never have enough flowers, they better celebrate this orgy of flowerdom.
It is so ironic, for the hybrid rhododendron shrub is not an attractive, well-formed plant specimen, but people tolerate its ungainliness for this brief two-week extravaganza of blooms. However, the foliage of the specie rhododendrons offer year-round subtle textures and color, along with their diminutive and sweetly detailed blossoms.
If interested in further studying the species, do visit the Rhododendron Specie Garden in Federal Way. It will give you a new appreciation for the origins of the ubiquitous hybrid rhododendrons. Rhododendrons do not deserve to be dismissed just because hybridizers focused solely on ever-larger flower trusses.
My first herbaceous peonies have thrown out their blooms. What vigor, and what great cut flowers. The tree peonies were beyond lush, and so suddenly! However, they do not do well as cut flowers. I almost lost my incredible stands of Iris unguicularis, Algerian iris, but they are quietly putting out some small new growth. Losing those would have been as traumatic as my loss of the cypresses.
I also prepared the normal vegetable beds and as noted before looked at filling the new gaps with vegetables, sunflowers, zinnias, cosmos, and always more nasturtiums. I know that the ugliness of the black aphids in August puts most people off from using them, but I have learned to simply rip out the first batch of plants and re-seed.
Last year the nasturtiums romped all over my garden until early November with such beautiful abandon and without any black aphid problems.
While there was great sorrow in dealing with the destruction from the harsh winter, there was also an ironic thought that drifted past late in the weekend. I was healing the garden.
And I need to conclude with words, so well spoken, by Andy Rooney:
"Remembering doesn't do the remembered any good, of course. It's for ourselves, the living. I wish we could dedicate Memorial Day, not to the memory of those who have died at war, but to the idea of saving the lives of the young people who are going to die in the future if we don't find some new way - some new religion maybe - that takes war out of our lives. That would be a Memorial Day worth celebrating."[[In-content Ad]]
