A tower of Clematis power

Clematis jackmanii and Ville de Lyon

I'm finally getting the two-color Clematis display I've always wanted—it's the second flush of bloom for this red Ville de Lyon—with the jackmanii. The red has never double-bloomed for me before, so I don't know if it's the weather or if it's just big and mature enough to do it. But I am loving it.

I'm finding the clematis becoming an important source of long-lasting summer color, and much better able to withstand hot sun and competition for soil moisture than my hydrangeas. The hydrangeas just cannot compete with the Douglas firs, even in the shade. I really need blues in my garden, and I'm beginning to think I need to make a switch. It's hard to watch the hydrangeas suffer, but water is a precious resource, and for me, "right plant, right place" is the golden rule in gardening, and it means not wasting water to grow plants that use twice as much or more, than more drought-adapted plants.

A garden at 11 years

I'm really enjoying the garden this year, with most of the plants grown-up.

Hedgerow's Gold and unnamed Hydrangea

I whacked the big main branch of the Hedgerow's Gold dogwood last fall because it was sticking out into a path, and now finally it's looking like it will make some shade for that hydrangea behind it.

Deutzia Magician

This is my Magician's fourth or fifth year, and it must really like where it is because it's gotten a lot bigger since last year, and was covered with flowers this year. I really love this shrub.

Strawberry Saxifrage

The strawberry saxifrage flowered really well this year. It doubled its size last year, even though I started cutting down on how much I watered then. I'll continue to do that this year, unless we have a lot more heat.

Heuchera Licorice with Carex Everillo

My Licorice heucheras are still performing like crazy, even though I've never divided them. When I look out from my dining room window and see these flower spires against the dark shadows under the ferns, I just feel like everything is good. I don't do anything for these except weed around them, and look what they give me.

Unknown Peony

Quite a few years ago—five or six—I bought what I thought was a hellebore, sans tag, at the end of the season. I found out it was a peony the next year when it sprouted more leaves, and ever since then it's been getting bigger and giving me more flowers—six or seven this year. As astonished I am at how big and luscious these are, I'm gob-smacked at how cool and soft the petals are to the touch. they don't feel like any other flower I've ever had my hands on, much softer and more alive-feeling even than rose petals.

Squier Strat with anty peonies

The deep baby/rose pink of these is intense, and matches my Fender Squier Stratocaster perfectly. (I also have a camellia that same pink, which accounts for the guitar being named Cammie.)

They do lighten after they've been on the bush a while, but they still look great. I just wish mine weren't always covered with ants. I'd love to bring them in the house. Better outside.

A month of actual spring

Aruncus dioicus, Astrantia, and Wayside King Royale

For a few years I've been complaining about how the weather goes from 50's to 80's and sometimes 90's in just one day, laughing at us as we wish for a slower, friendlier transition. But this year we've already had two weeks with most of the days in the upper 60's and 70's, with just a few days colder or hotter—and it's really been nice. It's also been dry enough to get a lot of my spring work done—weeding, clean-up, weeding, and weeding. So it's already starting to look like a real garden around here.

The camellias are done, the rhodies are in mid-bloom, and the early perennials are starting their show, like the goatsbeard and red astrantia above, with a favorite daylily, Wayside King Royale. I really enjoy the goatsbeard—I never have to do anything for it except cut down the dead plume stalks during cleanup, it doesn't make babies, and it seems to be staying pretty much the same size, leaving room for its neighbors. I don't have many combinations here as nice as this one.

Nicotiana and Salvia Vista Purple

This morning I finally got to upgrading a pair of nursery pots in the front, and putting my favorite red nicotiana in them. This year they have have to share with this large-flowered salvia that I've never tried growing before, called Vista Purple. The nicotiana bloom every day till frost kills them; I hope the salvia is as happy.

Temporary shade for new starts

Unfortunately for them today and tomorrow are going to be sunny and around 80, so I got out one of my hydrangea umbrellas to shade them till it clouds up again on Thursday. I have four of these that I got at Ikea for $4 each, in a white & gray pattern. I stained them in hydrangea shades of blue and purple with acrylic inks from my studio, and they still look new after two years in the elements.

It's really nice to have so much nice weather to enjoy my garden before the real heat arrives.

Hail damage in hostas

My Guacamole hostas came up strong as ever this year, bless their tough little roots, and looked great until we had a little spring hail shower a couple weeks ago, giving me some classic examples of hail damage. These were tiny hailstones, maybe an eighth inch or less in size, and the shower only lasted a few minutes.

Sometimes you see hail damage and you think maybe it's slug damage, but this is what a tiny bit of tiny hail can do.

Small pleasures

 It's been really nice to finally have a few hours in the garden this month, between the storms and showers.

It's a season of small pleasures this spring. Like the violet hue of the siberian iris leaves as we were coming out of winter last month. Never seen that before.

The perkiness of a stand-up hellebore looking at the sky;

The pink, yellow, and blue of the heuchera, Yellow Hammer rhody, and the forget-me-nots;

Two days before I took this photo, this camellia had nothing but buds on it. Then—boom!

And the new leaves of the Shirasawanum Autumn Moon coming out of their pink wrappers;

And last but not least, the fractal-like leaf colors of a hardy cyclamen seedling popping up in a new spot yards away from its ancestors, where I'm happy to have it.

A Huge Plum Harvest...but not for me

After not having any plums last year (probably due to bad pruning) I was really amazed to find my Italian plum tree to be literally covered with plums this year! I was late to get into the garden this year and haven't done much because of ankle & wrist injuries, but in July while they were still small, I thinned 150 of them, only taking every third one or so. Early this month, they began turning purple, and by mid-August it looked like a Christmas tree, covered with purple fruit! I started feeling them and last week they were feeling very slightly soft, and I started checking them every few days.

Sometime between Friday and Tuesday morning, the squirrels pulled every single one off the tree and took a few bites out of the stem end. I was hoping that I could find at least one on the ground that hadn't been nibbled, but nope. Shut out.

No comment on how much I wish I didn't have squirrels here.

Flowers in January!

I don't want to jinx anything, so I won't talk about our weather so far this year, but I've been keeping an eye on my Arnold's Promise Hamamellis, just waiting for it to pop out in bright yellow. It's usually the first to bloom, so I wasn't paying any attention to the Jelena, which usually blooms a few weeks later and is a much younger tree. I noticed a bunch of stuff on the branches, though, from my window, and went out to check:

It's got a few dozen flowers already, and Arnold is still working on his first ones!

The weeds don't look too bad yet, except in one small area, but after the winds we've had, it looks like The Land Of A Thousand Branches. Plenty of cleanup to do later.

I also spotted this fungus, which I've never seen before. Sorry it's a bit blurred, but I love the form. It really looks like a log-eating fungus, and I suspect it's coming up from the filbert stump I cut off and buried last year. Welcome, pretty one!

And the licorice fern is really having a good year with all the rain we've had, even hanging off the playhouse roof! I love this stuff too—what's not to like?

The rhodie buds are getting nice and fat, and hellebore buds are popping up all over. I really love how you can have flowers in the winter, on the dull, gray, damp, cold, gloomy, frigid, blustery, near-freezing, shivery, otherwise cheerless days. It's one of the best benefits of gardening.

A thousand paintings in my garden

As on many other Sundays, I started the morning googling new-to-me artists and artworks, and found quite a trove of them. Looking at the great variety of locations and subjects made me feel that all the work my garden requires is like a great anchor around my neck, keeping me here working on it when I could otherwise be out doing plein air paintings and exploring beautiful places. Then as I was opening my back bedroom window, I looked down across my blooming red daylilies and geums to the billowing zebra grass just starting to show its warm-weather stripes, past the blue mopheads of the Nikko Blue hydrangea, to the soft cloudy light reflecting off the metal barn roof. I brought out my camera to take a photo, and ended up taking a dozen as image after image clicked in my mind as being so very paintable.

Daylily Apple Tart

I took back the words of my lament and ate them as quickly as possible, and laid my misplaced remorse at the feet of Mother Nature, as I resolved to honor these works of life in more, and hopefully better, paintings.

Jackmanii clematis in Big Apple Kousa dogwood

The now voluminous Nikko Blue

Mixed perennials with my new armillary

Satomi Kousa dogwood, the second tree I planted here

Daylily Chicago Ruby

Looking up through the Satomi

The Fairies' table

Welcoming an early Spring

Three in a row—pale pink on the end is Nuccio's Pearl

Last weekend I went with the usual group of plant-loving friends to the first plant expo of the year and as we drove through Portland in the sunshine and warming air, with trees and flowers breaking out in blooms a month early, I made a comment about it being Spring. The driver said, "It's February." I responded, "But this has been going on so long." I couldn't think of it as winter any longer, with temps at or above average all but two days of the month.

Dainty California

And I still can't, even though we've still got almost two weeks to official Spring. My early camellias are all blooming a month early. Two weeks ago, we were all holding our breath that another freeze would hit and freeze the unfurling buds on everything that was early.

Chandlerei

But with every day that went by, I knew the chances of that were lessening. In the ten years I've been here, we've had a few snows and freezes in March, so it's still possible. But the last few days have reached over 60, so I have to act as if it is Spring, and start doing my Spring garden work. I did get my fruit pruning done in January—during a 50º week—so now it's early planting and lots and lots and lots of cleanup.

Unnamed bicolor

But I sure am enjoying my camellias. Every bush is bigger than last year, and every one has dozens and dozens of flowers. They've been blooming almost two weeks now, and the flower fall has started, so every bush has its pool of color around it, like a floating reflection, red, pink and white, all over the garden.

Unnamed peony-flowered variety

The bigger they get, the more I like them. I loved the 7'x7' bushes in the Camellia garden at Huntington Garden. You could sit on the benches in between the shrubs and just be surrounded by flowers, higher than you were.

Pink Dawn and Dainty California

I went out to take more pictures this morning. The buds on my oldest PJM Rhodie have been opening up a little bit every day, and today the flowers were finally open. I got this shot as as the sun was hitting them.

Rhododendron PJM

I don't remember the last time I got an early Spring. I'm really enjoying this one. Next year I should have a Camellia festival.

A little piece of sky

Basalt basin and Hosoba Fukurin

I have wanted to add a basalt basin to my garden from the first moment I ever saw one. The ones I usually see are the size of a large hexagon of basalt, a foot or more across, weigh a few hundred pounds, and cost that many dollars. In spite of how many hundreds or thousands of tons of basalt are quarried in Oregon every year, these natural basin shapes are darn hard to come by. And of all the hundreds of basalt rocks and boulders in my yard, exactly none of them hold water. Until now.

Yesterday, on my first garden shopping trip of 2015, I found a small one, the first small one I've ever seen! Weighing about 25-30 pounds, it was easy enough for me to get in and out of my car, and place at last in my garden. It's about 10" long and currently holds about half an inch of today's rainwater. If I tip it this way a bit, I think it might hold a full inch.

I got it at Boring Bark, in Boring, OR, one of my favorite places to go and shop in. That's my little Eleagnus pungens "Hosoba Fukurin" in front of it.

It is amazing how happy something so simple and beautiful can make one.

There's atmosphere in my garden this morning

Back yard primeval

The sun broke strongly through the fog this morning and made my garden all bright and fuzzy. Happily, it was warm enough to walk around and pull a few fir branches out of the shrubs, look at my camellias that are blooming two and three months early, and wonder again how many days of branch-breaking it will take to reduce all the blow-down to mulch.

The warm light in the warm-ish air showed off the bits of light red

Hamamellis Ruby Glow, Miscanthus Zebrinus

and bright red

Coral bark A. palmatum

and green

Viburnum cinnamomifolium

and the fun shapes left from last year

Hydrangea Nikko Blue

hanging on the fence like a memory of old friends.

Still love my garden. It's time to break out the pruning shears and get to work.

And more good news about my newish Corolla, Bunny—he carried home a bare-root Brooks Plum yesterday with not so much as an ear waggle of complaint.

A year of work and small pleasures

A low-maintenance pathway in high summer

I spent so much of this year working on other things that my garden was on its own for most of that time. The winds of summer were hard, hot, and dry, and only now are we getting close to having as much rain as we need for the trees and shrubs and perennials to be happy again. Difficult weather and the stress of drought during fall can lead to higher winter losses, and I've had this feeling that I won't know till after the spring warming, whether I'll lose any of my friends. I'm happy that so many of my garden inhabitants have been here long enough to grow the roots to keep them watered through these dry seasons, but in the dry years, worriers will worry, and hopers must hope.

I went back through my photos this morning to see what I had that I haven't posted, and found some things among the pictures of paintings, mice, and eagles that I can share as a look back on the year. As little time as I spent in it, I did really enjoy it, and rejoiced in how big the older things have grown.

I've finally been able to have happy fuchsias in pots (it was all about big enough pots and finding a bright, shady, sheltered space.)

Having a clematis finally reach the top of its tuteur:

The exuberant impulsion of a happy daylily:

The lushness of hydrangeas before the wind started:

A strawberry saying "thumbs up" about life:

So, was it a good year? The strawberry says it all.

Best wishes to you and your gardens!