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Garden journal - late season 2004

July 02, 2004. The weather is warm and muggy - thank goodness for daylilies to make up for the stickiness! Although a few daylilies bloom earlier, July is really when most of them take off in our garden.
Luxury Lace has smaller, refined flowers

blue blob with breathing tentacles July 05, 2004. Intruder alert! A big bold blue object has been spotted at Lush Gardens. Read more about it on page 3!

July 21, 2004. Mid-summer slump! If it weren't for the composites (coneflowers, sunflowers, and the like) and annuals, the garden would be just a sea of green with dead flowerstalks as proof of the demise of the spring and early-summer perennials. On the up side, the vegetable garden is at peak productivity, with purple runner beans, yellow crookneck and zucchini squashes, red onions, leeks, wax and bell peppers, and of course tomatoes all weighing in - and weighing me down on the walk back! The raspberries are done, the blackberries are starting (but sour). Interesting bugs galore - always something to see!

July 22, 2004. Still exploring the wonderful world of garden insects. I came across this snowberry clearwing moth resting on my hardy hibiscus yesterday evening. For a larger picture, visit my critters page.
this large moth mimics a bumblebee, so predators will leave him alone

July 24, 2004. One more birthday checked off, and what do I have to show for it? An arbor, that's what! It looks kind of bare for now, but by next year we hope to have some healthy climbing roses clambering up and over. We extended the back yard island, and hope the bench will at some future time give a view into a new "garden room" (for now, the view is of the blue blob, see below).

July 25, 2004. Yay! First frog of the year spotted in our pond. In the past week, I had noticed a few times a certain splash as I approached the pond, and started hoping... Frogs never seem to spend (or survive) the winter in our pond, but they show up mid-summer to live until the end of the year. They are welcome guests!
ribbit!

August 07, 2004. In the ongoing War on Grass, another skirmish was fought between the monocot armies and the dicot brigade today. Under the inspiring commandership of yours truly, the dicots scored another victory, claiming a strip of an average of a foot wide along the back side of the back yard island.
The extra room will give the large plants in this garden area, including coreopsis tripteris, Missouri goldenrod, big bluestem grass (which fought valiantly among the dicots!) and lespedeza thunbergii, some room to spread out.

August 08, 2004. It's been marvellous weather the past two days, and downright chilly in the mornings. Today, on a morning walk through the garden, we encountered this sleeping little bumblebee on a heart-shaped morning glory leaf. Peace, man!
zzzzzz.....

Tricyrtis hirta, the taller of the two species September 01, 2004. Fall is on its way - our toad lilies are blooming. Both Tricyrtis hirta and Tricyrtis macropoda opened their first flowers within the last few days. Soon the asters and Korean mums will follow, to start the fall garden for real.

September 04, 2004. Benny found a praying mantis! We were all happy to find it, and then we found two more in different parts of the garden. Amy likes to pet them. We hope they like it here, and stick around.
Chinese praying mantis - phone home?

Colchicum 'Waterlily' September 05, 2004. Today all of a sudden it was dreary and cool - and it felt decidedly like fall. No doubt summer's heat will revisit and today will be temporarily forgotten - but another harbinger of autumn is here to stay: the first colchicum is blooming. These showy flowers arise from a large bulb - its leaves emerge in spring, and fade by summer, so that the solitary flowers always come as a surprise. Also today, I finally made my annual trek, Max and Ben in tow, to Point Phillip Perennials, and returned, as always, with a wonderful haul of perennials and some shrubs; most will be new to our garden, a few are replacements of old favorites that we'd lost along the way.

September 12, 2004. This time of year, the air in the garden is alive with the sounds of all the crickets, katydids and cicadas. For the longest time, I was frustrated in my attempts to find the source of all these sounds. But today, finally, I located a few of the noisemakers. The one pictured here is by far the noisiest: his sounds carry all through our garden. More crickets and katydids can be found on my hoppers page.
Meadow katydid chirping from up high in our empress tree

Aster lateriflorus 'Lady in Black' September 29, 2004. After two weeks vacation (spent in the Netherlands, which gave me the opportunity to admire my parents' garden), we returned to a garden which had taken a decidedly autumnal turn. In our absence, Ivan had dumped enough rain to overflow our wheelbarrow, drowning lots of plants; many late-summer perennials have given up for the season; and a few trees are starting to color up. The only new flower color belongs to the asters - the Purple Domes in the side garden, and the Lady in Black in the back yard island.

October 06, 2004. The lawn was laced white with frost this morning - by this afternoon, the basil will be a bunch of mush. See you next year, Summer!

October 08, 2004. Autumn crocuses are so small that they tuck into tight corners, and are easier to forget about than their larger cousins, the colchicums, which bloom around the same time. And that's not bad - I like to be surprised by pretty little things. All of a sudden, there's the first one, on a single flower stem emerging directly from the soil, without leaves. The Crocus speciosus in this picture, with its sky-blue color, seems almost out of place in its place in the garden, already littered with fall debris and surrounded by plants that are starting to show their autumn colors.
Crocus speciosus ssp. speciosus

October 09, 2004. Berry season! Besides the ones pictured at right, belonging to a Washington hawthorn, we've spotted them on winterberry holly, pyramidal yew, euonymus burning bush, viburnums, and crabapples.

October 12, 2004. Hunting for katydids to photograph this evening (they were cagey - I didn't find any), I spotted a lone blossom in our peach tree. Poor thing thinks it's spring!

facing a bright future October 24, 2004. Now that the vegetable garden is almost devoid of edible material (leeks, chard, and brussels sprouts remain), I could no longer procrastinate on a long-postponed project: finishing the fencing around the garden in an attempt to eliminate the forever messy look. Grass would grow tall next to and into the fencing, out of reach of our lawnmower. Now, with a base of patio pavers running underneath the fencing, that will hopefully not recur next year.

October 26, 2004. Mushrooms are popping up everywhere! Fascinating structures, and as with the plants, weeds, and insects before, observing them up close, especially with a camera, makes them just that much more interesting. See more of our garden's fungal lifeforms on their own page.
Krispy Kream offspring?

Buddha and duck contemplate autumn October 30, 2004. As the lush summer foliage recedes, the hard objects in the garden become more prominent once again. In our garden, that includes an oddball collection of garden ¿art?. This morning, I just wandered around taking snapshots of the various items, and put together a garden art page to celebrate their whimsy.

October 31, 2004. This year, Indian Summer coincided with Fallback day. The weather was warm but breezy, so that a great many of the remaining leaves gave in to gravity. Max thought raking them into a pile was the height of cool, and who am I to disagree? It was also the perfect weather for the very last lawn-mowing exercise of the year. Now I feel like just settling down and listening to some Beat Happening...
dig those shades

promise... November 07, 2004. Most of the trees are bare by now. Only a few perennials are still stubbornly refusing to stop blooming, but for the most part the garden is a wash of fallen leaves. But today, I looked down and was glad to see a flower forming on a stinking hellebore. I've tried to grow them several times, but this is the first instance where they've stuck around long enough to bloom!

November 13, 2004. No more doubts - the cold season is here. We had a freeze down to 18°F a few days ago, and only a few trees are stubbornly holding on to their foliage. The naked weeping cherry was quite striking silhouetted against the clear blue sky today. The bird's nest that was once so perfectly sheltered now sticks out in plain view.

Fothergilla 'Mt Airy' November 22, 2004. I love the smells and rich colors of the fall garden - and this year, I'm choosing to ignore the fall cleanup needs, in favor of just strolling through with my camera. To commit to pixels the fiery reds of this Fothergilla, for example. It's still a small shrub - can't wait to see it aflame when it gets larger!

December 05, 2004. The shivery season is the best time to admire the twisty patterns of Harry Lauder's Walking Stick Corylus avellana 'Contorta', that's why we grow ours right next to our front walkway. The bark has a clean sheen to it, and the catkins still look fresh - and neither are obscured any longer by the mass of mid-green, pleated foliage of summer.

December 06, 2004. Looking for floral color in the garden right around now is a pretty futile effort - but wait! There's a Scotch harebell still looking pretty in blue. In its dimutive way, it's been going all season!

December 18, 2004. After several nights of temperatures dipping into the mid-teens, the pond has taken on a more solid characteristic. The waterfall is still running, for now. We just hope that our denizen below isn't getting too cold - shivering with the fish, but always a friendly wave...