Days of the Constant Gardener

Growing sedums and succulents in pots is also a frequent search.  This was how this particularly pot looked yesterday.  Notice the lumber behind the pot?  Hopefully, Handsome Son has finished my small building project whenever someone sees this in the future.

Like the Jimmy Buffet song, "It's Five o'Clock Somewhere," blogging has that at once ephemeral and everlasting quality.  No matter what the day, temperature, season, or weather, there is a blog entry about just that thing.  A couple of my blog entries and pictures seem to have gone almost viral.  Someone, somewhere is constantly accessing them.  It comes down to everyone wanting a blue bottle tree and more information on the dappled pink dwarf leaved willow, particularly how to prune them.

Daylily 'Arthur Kroll' is looking fabulous.  Don't bother searching for this patented plant; it has yet to be introduced (at least on this day).

But that's not how gardens really are.  They need constant attention.  They grow.  They change.  Sometimes for the better, often in my area, it seems, for the worse.

We have been plagued by some very harsh growing conditions.  Our very planet is changing.
I have been plagued by some particularly bad luck as well.  There is that fracture.  I am still moving slowly through the garden.  It has made me much more organized about how I garden.  It has tamped down any vestigial OC with which I may have been mentally toying.  It has made me prioritize my life a bit.

It has also made me realize what a time warp the internet really is.  Try entering in quotations "Barack Obama 1990".  If you actually select an internet post made in 1990, you will see him only as a bright and smiling young black man.  No mention of anything else.  It is the same with my garden and this blog.  You can visit my garden without the devastation of this last brutal winter.  You won't see the devastation wrought by some type of sawfly boring into roses, willow, and privet alike.  You won't see that I had my son rip out my yews and dig out dead shrub after dead shrub this summer.

You won't see how a garden gets from point A to point B, whatever those points represent.

If you are searching for information on planting a rock wall or disguising a drain or leach field you may come across pictures and blogs entries I posted for a residential customer for whom I did some landscaping and maintenance.  It was truly a beautiful project.  You will not see how the lack of any care or watering these last two years has decimated their landscape.  In this strange reality of the web, things are caught and captured forever pristine.

Coneflower have a timeless quality, and say summer in the garden.

The National Historic Register Pipe-Severance House, referred to as "the Pipe" by my family  now while it is owned by my brother and his wife.  Someday it won't be, though.  My neighbor, Dr. Darrel Apps, wrote in a book on gardening that you could trace the establishment of homesteads by settlers by the notations on orange daylilies sometimes referred to as "ditch lilies' as pioneers fanned out across the continent from the Eastern seaboard.  While weeding this planting, I happened to note it contained both ditch lilies, and his first big introduction 'Happy Returns'.  Odd that it would and that I  would be weeding it and realize this!

 This unsettling quality of shrubs and trees dying in this area and not being replaced has me worried.  This hesitancy of the coming generation of the Great Recession's lack of picking up the shovel is worrying, too.

This virtual life online is as disconcerting as reality TV.  And here's a thought, since I returned to my own home following my injury, I no longer watch TV.  I stream all my media content, which makes being able to ask the good, big questions of the day even more important.

Who am I and what do I want...

I am also one of the current 41 percent without a landline.  This is life now.  My college self would not recognize this life.