Jerry's Thoughts, Musings, and Rants!

Spring Has Sprung

It was a little over a month ago that I was whining about the snow we had been having. A friend commented that she didn't know why anyone would want to live in a cold place like Burlington. Reflecting upon it I think it is because we have clear, well-delineated seasons.

Six weeks ago we had this . . . .

Today this is what I saw when I arrived home from work . . . .

This is what I call seasonal delineation!

Out back, where the sun hits the garden last thing in the day, winter was more slow to depart. Still the lilac tree has budded and the blooms are ready to burst forth.

I love when spring breaks loose in the air. A time of promise. It is funny how quickly one can forget the trials of winter in the rush to slip on some sandals and race out into the garden.

The Iris

Right now the garden is in its 'in-between' mode; the early spring flowers (bulbs) are finished, the late spring flowers are pretty well done and it is nothing but green as I wait for the summer flowers to start to bloom. One of the greatest challenges of being a gardener I think is in trying to arrange for colour throughout the growing season, but after all of these years I think I am finally getting the hang of it.

One of our favourite flowers is the iris. Unfortunately they have such a short growing season. I took these pics awhile ago and decided to include them today so that I can recall the stages of garden growth when the bitter winter kicks in.

In our garden there are two types of bearded iris - dwarf and the giant bearded type. The dwarf iris are planted in the front of the house and they seem to spread like wildfire - the two small plantings are now two HUGE plantings which need to be split. I actually did split some last year and the ones I planted in the side garden are doing quite well. There are two colours: a pale blue and a deep purple.

In the back gardens we have four types of bearded iris:

A chocolate brown iris which seems to do really well where it has been planted. The huge blooms last for a long and the plant seems to be multiplying nicely.

A less showy yellow and mauve bearded iris. The blooms are less showy than the large bearded iris. They appear to be more delicate yet them seem to have more staying power. This one was a gift from a neighbour down the street who showed up one day with the roots (rhizomes) and asked if we wanted it. What gardener says no to free plants?

This one has large peach coloured flowers. It tends to get the most compliments of them all. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be very prolific; I don't think it is spreading and it never has more than one flower stalk.

This one is my favourite. The flowers are variegated with a creamy white and purplish blue. This plant is quite prolific both with blooms and with spreading. I have split it twice and it is ready to be split again - yeah.

The Canadian Iris Society has an informative website and includes tips for gardeners. This is the tip for this month:

Quick Tip on Iris Growing for May-June
Enjoy the fruits of your labor. Some nice iris should be blooming in your garden at this time. As a gardener, I know you probably don't like to just sit around, so here is something to think about... After all the blooms are completed, clean up the garden by snapping off the stalks at the junction of the stalk and rhizome. The technique is as follows; grasp firmly near the bottom of the stalk, bend-twist-snap and the stalks break off cleanly from the rhizome with minimum effort. With a little practice this technique is becomes very easy to do. This type of after-bloom cleanup is more preferable than cutting the stalks as there is less chance for rot and infection from the remaining portion of stalk, it is also quicker than cutting. Try it and see. Why do this at all? Besides having a nice clean, good looking garden, it opens up the iris planting to better air circulation and allows more sunlight to reach the rhizomes. This promotes better and stronger, healthier rhizome increases so that you have another great season next year! C.H.

Family History

You are no doubt wondering what the heck this vase full of peonies (and a cat who shouldn't be on the kitchen table) have to do with family history . . .

It goes back more than 200 years ago. My grandmother's family (many generations ago) were living in the 13 Colonies (New Jersey to be precise). Staunch monarchists, they were content to let history with a vile king run it's course rather than do anything crazy.  Obviously others were not so patient and they fought a little 'skirmish' known as the American Revolution.

When it was over and the the forces of the King lost, the upstart rebels were not exactly taken with those who had not supported their cause. Seeing the writing on the wall, many of these families packed up their cherished possessions and fled to Canada. The woman of the Smith household (I don't know her name - have you ever tried to trace a family named Smith?) loved her garden and was particularly proud of her peony plants. Guess what she tucked onto the wagon with all of her worldly household goods?

Once in Canada the family settled in the Niagara region with many other United Empire Loyalists. The story of these peony plants became the stuff of family lore. These weren't just any old peonies, they were family themselves!

My grandfather, who lived in Beamsville, was a brilliant gardener and his peonies were always a beautiful sight. He would often tell us the story of how they were brought to Canada, making sure that we understood that they were family.

After my grandfather died my mother and her sisters couldn't bring themselves to sell the family home. They rented it out to one bad tenant after another. In short, a headache! Finally they had had enough and they made the decision to sell the house. There was a stipulation in the bill of sale: the grandchildren could come and remove any plants from the garden that they wanted.

I wanted some of the peonies which had been so special to my grandfather. Unfortunately I had nowhere to put them as our house was nothing but a construction site at the time. Our friends came to the rescue and agreed to 'plant sit' , taking great care with the plants for close to 2 years until our house was ready.

They were one of the first plants we put in the garden and the rest of the garden grew up around them. Every year when they start to inch their slow progress up from the ground to brilliant bloom I am remembered of that ancestor who valued beauty and roots. It seems strange to think of a plant as family but these certainly are a strong tie to my past, the present, and the future.

And Victor, ever the vain kitty . . . he knew I was taking photos so even though he isn't allowed up on the table he jumped up and wouldn't stay out of the pic. Talk about family!

How Does Your Garden Grow?

We have lived in this house for just over four years. When we moved in it was newly constructed, raw, and surrounded by mud. Other than arranging furniture and hanging our art we have done very little inside the house; outside is a very different story.

Because of the soils dumped on the clay by the builder creating gardens was a huge problem. Any new garden had to either be raise up with good quality soils added or else we had to dig down for more than a foot, remove the bad soil, and replace it with good soil. Needless to say over the past four years we have spent close to $800 on soil alone!

The front of the house has a large balcony so I wanted to create a raised garden in front of the balcony to provide some privacy, shade, and to break up the geometric harshness of the building.

This was the garden when we first created it:

This is the same garden this week:

Along the side of the house we had some trouble. The next house is quite close and little sunlight reached the grass that the builders placed there . . . and so it died. There was a huge patch of mud. Last year my neighbour and I decided to have a cement walkway put in with a garden on either side. I planted a shade garden which has really taken off!

In the part of the shade garden which gets the least sun we tried to duplicate a wild forest garden with trilliums, Jacob's Ladder, Jack-in-the-Pulpit, mayflower, and other native flowers.

The back has seen the most change. We started with a flower garden back in 2004:

The back shows what the soil is like hidden under the sod. This is the same garden this year:

You'll notice that we expanded it considerably. We also added a pond:

Last year we noticed that the grass that was in the shade of the fence was not doing well, what to do? Dig it out and create another shade garden. This is the result:

We are at the point where we need very few annuals. Our trips to the garden centre and far less expensive then they were in the past. Now I am busy splitting perennials and giving them away, and replacing those plants which don't make it through the winter.