have a beautiful garden

This is a good place to sniff roses and write poems in the morning. It’s a bit dishevelled and weathered, but it’s spilling with blooms and herbs. There’s a table with an umbrella and weatherworn chairs behind the camera view.

garden is ready today for me to inspect and modify.
It’s really warm out – not languid warm, but sunshiny; it’s the kind of weather that makes one want to do dutiful things in the garden.

At first glance, it looks like it’s been a hard winter. There’s a lot of debris and winter-kill. But everything’s poking up from the earth as it should – sometimes in surprising places. There are hollyhocks sending up foliage along the old brick wall. (Where did they come from?) There are myosotis seedlings everywhere, and I will pot some of them. The green onions are several inches high. Peonies are breaking soil. There’s some kind of shrub breaking bud – I don’t remember what it is, but I bought it at deep discount in the autumn and planted it in a hurry.
Today: rake and spade. I’m moving a tree peony quickly to oppose its twin on the other side of the porch stairs. I like symmetry. I might start pruning roses, though I usually wait until the forsythia blooms for that task. It’s warm at last, and I want to go out and smell the earthy things.

but Gertrude puckers what’s left of her leaves in disgust. I don’t think she’ll make it. I’ll let her overwinter before I give her the boot.
The other transplants: echinacea – pink – seems to be lifting out of funk with leaves if not blooms.
The tree peony seems shocked, but not insulted.
The wee peony is insulted and shocked.
The stachys is perfectly happy, oblivious.
White echinacea is happy as a pig in mud.

The other tree peony is going to get a big surprise in a few weeks…I am sharpening the spade.

has been placed near … I forget her name … Mme Pierre Oger? Abraham Darby? I don’t remember. Some lovely damask, the only one who isn’t shivering off leaves and droopy.
Gertrude grew one long, curly tap-root – peculiar for an old rose – which wound its way under the porch. Some of it snapped when moving her. That’s what ruthless gardening is like…one moment pouting on your throne, the next having a rude uprooting, with snapped feet. C’est la vie.

Gertrude is moved elsewhere. If there’s one thing I won’t stand it’s a sulking rose.

Today, a critical eye.
Balance is needed, although a keen design ability is missing. I moved a pale pink tree peony, and its sister will join it once the wild roving tomato is gone. These will flank the porch stairs. I planted mirror image hydrangeas, the five-foot kind, on either side of cedars, on the right side of the yard, where sun segues to shade.
I moved the centre plant of three mauve-pink echinacea to the opposite side of the yard for balance. In its place I put in a white echinacea. The white balances a white rose of sharon.
The hardiness of the white echinacea will be tested over the winter…I don’t usually have luck with these, though they are pretty, in a Sissinghurst kind of way.
Wait…perhaps I should have had one green and white side, and one pink and blue side? What have I done? (Weeps quietly into green sleeve.)

I see spears of new ginger poking through herbs and lining the small stone wall of the Secret Garden. (The Secret Garden is behind a spreading Yew and several bamboo like plants that were here before I was.)

There are tiny ninebarks growing where I planted cuttings.

Only Gertrude looks unhappy, and some of her sister roses. Either I cut her back and see if she sulks, or I move her away from framing the back porch entirely.

I will remove the orange daylilies today. Their orangeness and transience belong in another garden.

nothing yellowing.

I see that the peas are podding in an ornamental urn, and the bean plants are leafing, curling around antique roses, and holding up the old trellised fence. I will soon be eating my garden.

so it seems fitting that the garden looks like it has always been the way it is.
The front yard chestnut trees look pendulous with wet leaves. It has been raining torrentially. The hanging baskets by the front porch are beginning to look voluptuous, spilling their frothy ivy geraniums over the edges. There are small skirtings of soaked impatiens along the edge of the semiGothic iron fence. It is restrained and tumultuous all at once.