Category: Garden

Nearly four years ago, when we decided to move to Knoxville, I said I wanted a place where I didn't have to maintain a yard.  I may have said, in fact, something along the lines of "I'll never garden again.". I am prone to making grand and obviously false statements about myself like that, statements that I fully believe at the time.  Oh well.

That was obviously not true even though I did manage to successfully ignore my yard for the first two summers we lived here.  I did have a few pots here and there; I thought that would be enough. Even though the yard plagued me, it was the ugliest yard in the neighborhood, and that is not an exaggeration, I wondered if I would really enjoy maintaining a small but simple garden, or if it was just wishful thinking.

Work is still being done.  And the watering system is not complete.  But I am enjoying being out in the garden in the mornings. I still have my planters.  And this year I am using fewer flowers in the planters and more plants with interesting or colorful leaves.  We will see how that works out, but the early stages look promising.

But then I have flower beds to play with, and I have indeed been playing.  I've never had sunny flower beds before, and although there are plenty of perennials, there are also spots for annuals, spots to fill in until the perennials grow, and places that were intentionally left blank, for future experiments and discoveries. 

So my forays into planting annuals have been somewhat scattered and the result is something more like one of those Victorian crazy quilts, than an orderly systematically planned flower bed.  But I hope the effect is pleasing.  It looks promising, but the plants are really too small yet to see if they will achieve the desired effect.  At least the yard looks pretty and happy, and I love driving up to my house now, and I love spending mornings in the garden.

The pansies are still blooming and they make me incredibly happy, even though I know I will have to find something to replace them.  However, I am also learning that is good not to plan sometimes, to allow for the magpie approach to flower shopping, you know the old "oh, that's pretty, let's buy that" methodology. After all, we all need time to play.

Finally!  I love my yard.

It is nothing special.  Since I live in a PUD, there are constraints on what can be done, especially in the front.  But working within those constraints allows for breaking out of my pre-set patterns, and thinking of gardens in new ways.

It is still very much a work in progress.  It is very different from my previous yard as both the climate, landscape, and neighborhoods are all very different.  But it no longer looks like a dead mass of packed clay with scattered patches of sickly grass and weeds.  For this I am grateful.  I am happy also that not everything has been planned out.  There are plenty of empty patches, spots I can fill in with assorted annuals now while I dream and plan what they may be in the future.  No point in rushing that though.  The best gardens, like homes, and like people themselves, grow and evolve with time.

I am seriously thinking about some irises though.  None of the irises pictured here are from my garden; they are from the gardens of my neighbors, snapped during my morning walks with Tikka.  But they remind me of how much I miss the tall bearded irises form my garden in Hyde Park.

And so I am planning an iris bed, specifically a spot for reblooming tall bearded iris. Louisiana and Siberian irises have already been planted in the back, and I am looking forward to their season, but I miss these Grande Dames of the iris world as well.

And so the search is on.  I can admire my neighbor's irises, I can gaze at the irises on display, begging to be planted, at my local Lowe's, and still wait until I find exactly what I want. I still haven't toured local independent greenhouses and nurseries, and it is possible that I will find something I love, but if not, I know of good Iris breeders from whom I can order for fall planting.

When I was little I loved the Crayola color called Spring Green.  I'm not convinced that I truly understood the origin of the name at the time. I remember thinking that I never saw green so yellow and bright in the spring, just as I remember thinking that grass wasn't really the same color as the crayon named "grass green".  But perhaps that was just a matter of location.  My Texas grass wasn't the same shade of green as grass green, but I now realize that grasses come in many shades of green.

Yesterday I was entranced by the new leaves on shrubs and on trees.  They bright color of new growth, the velvety softness, like new skin.  I couldn't help but touch, stroke, caress the new leaves.  Even the prickly leaves of evergreen shrubs are silky smooth and tender those first few days.  And the new leaves on trees, limp, soft like down. 

Already this morning they are firmer, meatier, and you feel the texture of the leaf, the veins in the tree leaves, the coarsening.  But the memory of that tender gentle new growth remains.

Ahh, sinus season is upon us.  And I've lived in Knoxville long enough now that I've caught it. 

The past couple of days I've felt like my eyeballs were about to explode out of my head like projectile missiles.  The sinus situation has taken its toll on my energy levels.  Perhaps I am allergic to something other than mold and mildew, although it has rained so much it is difficult to tell.

It is raining again today.  The Louisiana Iris are sending up shoots, even the one in flats, the ones I was worried about, the ones I complained about to my landscape angels.  They thought they were planted.  Ends up it was totally my fault. The bare-root plants had been sorted out in bowls by color, and I had grown tired of going outside and tipping the water out of the bowls, so I planted them in flats and left them on the porch.  The nice young man who came to plant them couldn't find them and thought they had been planted already. Mea Culpa.

No the photos have nothing to do with sinuses or mildew, just captured my fancy.  If the rain abates and my sinuses remain somewhat in remission, I shall go outside and plant this afternoon.

Tiny Red Hunter Tulips

I had despaired of these.  Just as the leaves were coming up the neighborhood landscape crew mulched the front beds and the initial burst of leaves were all scorched.  The bulbs need leaves to store food for next year and I feared they would need to be replaced.  The flowers aren't necessarily a sign of health, as a dying plant will throw out flowers in a last-ditch effort to reproduce itself.  Yet there has also been new leaf growth in at least some of the plants and I can enjoy the show with a somewhat  lighter heart.

Monday rolls around once again and my to do list is long this morning.  And yet it is April in East Tennessee, and even the simplest walk down my neighborhood street is filled with beauty.

We must remember to celebrate this, even the simplest of lovely things.