My Lovelies, Well Just a Couple

Tulip 'Marietta'

Syringa 'Maiden's Blush'

This baby opossum has been hanging out in our garden
for the past couple of days.
He's quite tiny.
No sign of his mother around anywhere.
I'm not happy about him taking up residence
since 'possums are not known to be friendly to bunnies.

New Dress

One meter of four different fabrics were brought back from Shanghai from the famed fabric market for me to do with what I wished. I would have loved to have seen the floor after floor of fabrics! The market is famous for silks, cashmeres and wools. This filmy embroidered cotton fabric was a lovely choice. Thank you dear! I squeezed a dress out of the meter and lined it with a plaid cotton to give it some body. I used an invisible zipper, which I didn't realize I was buying at the time, and don't think I will ever buy one again. It was much harder to install than a regular zipper. I haven't hemmed the dress yet, but I'm thinking I will have a two tiered hem, with the plaid lining showing a little bit below the embroidered fabric.

New

I'm feeling a kinship to this Polystichum munitum as it reveals new growth a little bit at a time. I too am feeling renewed with a rigorous exercise routine that seems to be chipping away little by little at my maladies. Yeay. I am seeing light at the end of the tunnel at last!
Such sweet goodness in my woodland border!

Happy Plants

Oh the joy of spring flowers, but to add fragrance on top of that (v. carlesii!) is divine.
bergenia

viburnum carlesii

scilla
Some day I will make a scilla meadow like at Kew.
Vast blueness.
That dreamy image is a source of meditative contentment when needed from time to time.

Happy Earth Day!

I've been green even before there ever was an Earth Day. In a drought ridden childhood natural resource conservation was de rigueur. If you were a water waster you were worse than the devil. My favorite and most rewarding work as a landscape architect has been land restoration (reintroducing native plants into disturbed sites), and effectively planting thousands of trees, through my plans, throughout the world. Those trees will far outlive me, hopefully, and keep pumping out oxygen that someday my grandchildren will inhale. Creating habitat for wildlife has been a priority of mine since making warrens for jackrabbits to hide in from the red-tailed hawks long long ago. Now the vast array of song birds, pheasants, insects, snakes, deer (not always welcome!), raccoons (get out of here you tree branch smashing nasty critters!), and mice (I'd rather not invite them!) enjoy our planted thickets, abundant nectar, pollen, fruit and seed sources. I became a non-red-meat eater in college after reading Diet for a Small Planet, and have never ever wanted red meat ever since. It's funny how the reason for this decision was discussed on NPR today as something new, as a way to help the global warming problem, but global warming/pollution/resource depletion are not new concepts. Eating home grown food has been something I've done since childhood too, but now the eat local movement is taking off. I'm pleased that these sort of notions are getting more attention, but gosh it has taken way too much time to reach this moment of widespread consideration.
Here atop our porch column's capital is a Stellar's Jay nest. Mama sits there all day long, usually only her tail visible. She has built quite a fortress for her babies. She resided here last year, yet atop another capital. Maybe this year's site has a better view. Change can be good, as long as it is headed in the right direction.

Coyote

Dashing across the lawn and through the shrubs at a full clip was a fluffy tailed coyote this morning. I bounded off to the north window to take another look and sure enough there he was standing around looking for his next victim (usually a neighborhood cat). He was big and lithe with a tail that looked like attire that my grandmother wore around here neck.

What date is it?

I know it's April 18th, but looking out the window is a vision of December! It's snowing very heavily. The latest recorded snowfall for this region is happening right now! My serviceberry tree, magnolias, rhodies, columbine are all bursting with bloom and probably yelling out, "what the heck is going on here?!" It's amazing.
Here's a little felt project that I worked on recently.

hope

I don't want to be a whiner so I won't describe why my posts are less frequent other than using a word that haunts me from dawn until dusk and from dusk until dawn: pain. But there is hope. Daisy chain making, a meditation so idyllic, offers a dive into the pool of momentary pleasure that far surpasses any manufactured drug. Perspective is relative to a sibling of far more dire consequences. So fret not and see the hope. Enjoy the little daisies in life.

happy birthday my sweetie pie!

the cookies are from our local bakery that is always an inspiration for cookie decorating. they are the masters of cookies!

Grafting

4-H is cool not only for kids but for adults too. Last night at our monthly club meeting the Peninsula Fruit Growers Association came by with root stock and scion wood to demonstrate how to graft fruit trees. I think it was pretty boring for most of the kids but the adults were enraptured.
We have a monster pear tree in our back yard that is a remnant of the old strawberry farm days. It seeded a baby pear nearby and that was the tree of choice to sandwich my four pieces of scion wood. Apparently there is one type of apple, Winter Banana, that can be grafted onto pear trees, so I grabbed one of those branches from the pile that the fruit guys/gals brought. The others were pears: Orcas, Concord, and something Angeline (I'll have to go check the name again). This morning off I went with my fishing knife, some electrical tape, a knife guard I made out of cardboard (so I wouldn't slice up my hand during the whittling process) to the little pear seedling by the fence.
In the past half dozen years I have been using that little tree as a source for chew branches for the bunnies. I was never intending for the tree to be anything more ornamental or structured. So today I had to look at the tree anew and prune it to a somewhat fruit tree shape before I started the grafting process.
Taking the scion wood out of my hunting jacket pocket I scanned the tree branches for the right diameter that would match that of the scion pieces. Finding pretty good matches I started the whittling on the scion and the tree branches (after trimming the tree branches back quite a ways). The cardboard guard was utilized once I needed to make that crucial slice partway through each branch and scion piece. Then these pieces slide together like a dovetail joint (not exactly, but more like puzzle pieces) so the layers of exposed biological matter lined up and became a new branch.
To seal the wound electrical tape was wrapped tight around the joint. Apparently in July I am supposed to slice through the tape and let it fall off on its own, assuming that the graft takes and the branch starts to grow. We'll see.
It should be fun to see if any of the grafts succeed. Then I will have lots of new varieties of fruit in a few years. That's nice, especially since I chopped down my huge Gravenstein apple tree last week. So sorry tree, but it was getting so huge, and I planted it in the wrong spot, where I needed easier access to the gate in the fence. The wood from that lovely tree is so buttery beautiful. It will be used to flavor barbecues this summer.

Doodling with Petals

These are fallen petals of Viburnum bodnantense 'Dawn' from a recent bouquet on the kitchen table.
On a visit to one of my favorite nurseries today I ran across a plant that seemed too good to be true. It is a climbing butter yellow bleeding heart called Dicentra scandens. It grows up to seven feet tall and blooms during the summer. I love bleeding hearts. I have a white one and used to have a pink one. Their delicate blooms are so charming in early spring but to find one that blooms in the summer on a climber, wow! This will be fun to try out, maybe climbing up my snowbell tree. Oh, the image conjured up is dreamy!

bloomerific

a couple of my lovelies
that bring such happiness
corelopsis pauciflora

ribes sanguineum

New Toys

Flower Paper Punches!
Fun!
What will come of these new toys?

The song Anyone Else But You from Juno makes me long for my old guitar (that I gave away years ago...what an idiot!). I'll have to restring my son's guitar and give it a try. Only two chords, C + G, for the whole song so I think I can handle that.
I was so excited when Diablo Cody won for best screenplay for Juno. I loved the wildly original dialog.
Here's the song:


later...
left hand nails clipped. right hand nails long. guitar restrung and tuned. wrote down the lyrics. now i'm strumming away. it's the antidote to news of death threats to Wangari Maathai, Bush's threat of vetoing a water-boarding torture bill passed by the Senate, news of high concentrations of mercury and flame retardant chemicals in fish in the most isolated reaches of National Parks, record profits for Exxon as they whine about a settlement for Prince William Sound at the Supreme Court, and much much more. a sweet song goes a long way to soothe an otherwise crazy world.