We seem to get this spell each May, around mid-month, just when it looks like the weather will hold and the gardening can really start. Nights in the thirties, daytimes in the fifties! Lots of rain. Rain, I don’t complain about, but I do like some warmth. Also, it seems like every time I’ve gone around and sprayed Liquid Fence, another squall arrives with the worst timing. Ten or eleven at night, so it’s too late to go back and do the spraying over. A couple of days ago I lost the tops of a few lilies…but, I have that stand of three in a vulnerable location, and I’ve violated one of my own rules: Anything you want, plant a lot of. The plus of lilies, aside from beauty and fragrance, is that they’ll bloom the same season you plant them, and the cheap bags of bulbs at Walmart perform just fine (a dollar a bulb, with maybe one or two duds).

Above, the other sort of damage the deer are good at. I think as they make their way in the dark, they go by smell more than sight, since I often find the logs and small branches I use to border paths knocked out of place. And beds with new plantings walked over, the seedlings flattened and torn.

Meanwhile, with the oaks, all my beds are full of acorns, so the squirrels are constantly digging.

One of the ideas people get, which sounds surface-plausible, is that feeding wildlife attracts more wildlife. Environmentally conscious gardeners want wildlife, of course. But whether you do or don’t make habitat, your patch of land would normally support a certain amount of life, from fungus to barn owls. Animals, even insects, are territorial, so providing habitat suitable for deer or foxes…or snakes, or yellowjackets…can’t lead to an endless chain of new creatures, burgeoning into unmanageable numbers.

The deer have a problem to solve: they want to eat. Your yard is part of the territory the local family group forages, and did (ancestrally) before your house was built, the trees were cut down, the grass was mowed, etc. You have a problem to solve: you want the deer to leave your nice things alone. It should be clear that trying to drive the deer away, or block them off, solves your problem but not theirs. Still wanting to eat, they keep seeking to do it. Which is why I mow paths around areas in my yard I leave natural, making food lots and shelter for the deer. You can see from my postings that I have a lot of good garden, despite that fact that my yard isn’t just crossed by deer—the deer live a part of their lives here. They shelter and feed here; the mothers leave their babies in my beds while they go off to browse alone. 

This one I call the well bed. I’ve got Japanese painted ferns, Astilbe, Rodgersia, and Black Gamecock Louisiana Iris, so far. And rampant peppermint. When I moved here, I kept noticing how the water after a heavy rain would pool up in an almost perfect circle right here. I suspected a filled-in well from old times, when these outskirts of town that became subdivisions, had farms. I figured an old well wasn’t necessarily safe for walking over, with the water still filtering down, shifting the substrata. The whole back area of my yard seems to have an underlying spring, which as I’ve mentioned, creates a microclimate. The soil retains a lot of moisture, but the plants seem to love it. I attribute that to a huge amount of earthworm activity, keeping the soil aerated, nutritious, and not boggy. Water continues to pool in the well bed and drain off slowly.

 

A couple of years ago I noticed some delicate little leaves, a very tiny plant altogether, but one that began, after the second year of modest growth, to resemble a fern. This year, it’s put up a genuine leaf. I’ve never seen a fern grow in the garden from a spore. On a related note, I was watching an episode of the British show Gardener’s World, and they were showcasing tree ferns. Tree ferns, with a nice Jurassic look to them, can be grown from root segments, so the selling of them appears sustainable. Looking online, I found some sellers offering spores. Well, if an Ohio fern takes three years to form its first identifiable leaf, I think it’s advisable not to wait for a tree fern to grown from a spore.  

Extravagant ruffly glamor. A purple Bearded Iris that turns out to have impressive depths, with its veins and burgundy centers.

I wanted to share the most beautiful columbine. It created itself, coming up from a plainer one’s seed, and has blue semi-double center petals with what looks like white picotee edging; contrasting purple spurs. But this shot may be a little too macro. Who would have guessed columbine petals had that sheared mink effect?

A nicely crafted bird’s nest that fell from the pear tree. As clean as it is, it must have blown out or gotten knocked down by some creature, without having been used. A lot of visible care taken, with the outer large, and inner small, woven grasses.

Here’s my problem to solve, for next bulb-ordering season. I’m not the only one with Lonely Alliums…a lot of the showplace gardens in the videos have them too. They bloom when the daffodils are finished, when the perennials haven’t started, and the annuals can’t yet be set out. So what sort of complementary color and form will reliably mingle with them, and bloom at the same time? I’ll have to do some research.