Mockingbird Hill Cottage

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You are here: Home / Archives for garden

Rain, Reading & Rest

May 14, 2019 at 9:37 am by Claudia

And so it continues. Yesterday afternoon, I stood up from my chair, thrust the phone between the slats of the blinds, and took this picture.

Rain, rain, go away. You won. Most days this spring have been rainy. Our well is full. Please move on.

Now.

It’s actually not raining at the moment, but it will start up again this afternoon.

One comfort: our cold temperatures will move on tomorrow. This is the last day of this nonsense. Our neighbors who live at higher elevations have woken up to snow for the past two days. So, I’ll only complain a little bit. I’ll be quite happy to see somewhat higher temperatures and I’ll be even happier when I can move around enough to brave the outside and check in on the gardens.

As Don said this morning, “Well, if you have to be resting your back, it might as well be on a rainy day.” He’s right.

More forget-me-nots appearing hither and yon. This time, between the pavers on the funky patio. One of my favorite things about gardening is the magic of self-seeders. Coneflowers are that way – for years, they have appeared in unexpected places on the property. The same with yarrow, which self-seeded from the big garden bed (and subsequently disappeared from that bed) to the little patch where I plant my seeds. For the past two years, they have self-seeded in the corral. Big patches of them! I love that. So, now I mow around them, letting them grow and flower.

This year, the forget-me-nots have moved to surprising places; the above-mentioned pavers, the gravel, the little hill that leads to the corral, and there are several in the memorial garden – fitting, I think. It’s as if they know where to go.

I’m reading several books at the moment; continuing with Paris in Winter,  adding in some Beverley Nichols books that I had waiting for me on the shelf. Have you ever read Beverley Nichols? He wrote the most delightful books about gardening in England. They were written in the thirties and forties. Nichols was a prolific author; writing fiction, non-fiction, children’s stories, plays – he counted Noel Coward among his friends – and had a flat in London along with a country house. The first country house was a thatched cottage. He eventually wrote about three different country cottages.  The first in the Allways (the fictional name for his cottage) trilogy is Down the Garden Path. The next – which I’ve just started – is A Thatched Roof.  

I should be living in England, you know. I’ve always thought that. If not England, then Paris, please. Both Don and I are about as British (ancestry-wise) as you can get and both of us started our careers acting in British plays. Don excels at British farces, especially the plays of Alan Ayckbourn; I was very good at Noel Coward. Both of use just knew in our bones how to do those pieces. I could do a cracker-jack of a British accent when I was in junior high school.

Let’s face it, we’re both Anglophiles.

Anyway, another day of back rest and rain. So books to read and some hot chocolate should come in handy.

Happy Tuesday.

Filed Under: books, flowers, garden, rain, reading 39 Comments

Potpourri on Friday

May 10, 2019 at 10:30 am by Claudia

• After weeding, adding top soil, sowing morning glory, moonflower, sunflower and zinnia seeds and then cutting back rose bushes and adding mulch, I staggered into the house, took a shower, ate some lunch, and waved my white flag. Most everything is done now, except for some bramble pruning and routine maintenance (aka weed pulling.)

I’ve worked for hours every day when it wasn’t raining, lugging bags of mulch and top soil and potting soil, bending over thousands of times, and yanking on brambles and weeds, and my back was aching and I was just plain exhausted. I think this was probably intensified by the fact that I knew I had reached my goal and my body was screaming at me to “Let go and STOP!”

This wild patch of ground needs taming, as I said yesterday, and every year it needs to be re-tamed. The work has always been tiring, but 13 years ago when I started gardening here, I was 53. Now I’m 66. That’s a big difference. Anyway, I told Don that I was exhausted and ready to cry and he held me and comforted me and ordered me to do nothing today.

Before someone writes to me and asks why Don doesn’t do more of the work (as someone did last year in a passive-aggressive email), let me assure you, he would if I asked. I very seldom ask. I’m pig-headed and I know what to do and how to do it and I like to be in control. None of that is Don’s issue. It’s mine. I’m going to have to learn to delegate the heavy lifting. But everything else, I really do have to do myself. And besides, Don has bad knees which cause him a lot of pain, so why would I want to cause him more pain? He does a lot of the mowing and a heck of a lot besides that and I’m grateful to him.

Normally, I would pace myself a bit more but with all the rain we’ve had. I’ve had to increase my work load on those rare days when it’s dry out there. And I had to get those seeds in the ground – it’s well over a week past my usual sowing time.

I’m also battling allergies which doesn’t help.

Anyway, this isn’t meant to be a complaining post. After all, I decide what to do every day. I’m just sharing how I felt at the end of the day yesterday. I’m taking it easy today and tomorrow. I’ll water the plants – although it’s supposed to storm, so I may not have to – but that’s it. I need to rest my back and my hands. I rescheduled my oil change until Monday.

But, it sure looks good out there.

• By the way, that tulip has the most incredible scent! I’m used to store-bought tulips with no scent and never thought to lean in and smell this particular tulip until this year. Heavenly!

Moody porch – yesterday was quite cool with gray skies all day long.

• The garden bed on the other side of the house is becoming quite the woodland shade bed. Besides the day lilies, liatris, catmint, coneflowers, and butterfly bush that are already established, ferns are appearing, and the Solomon’s Seal that I planted last year has tripled in size.

I want to plant more of it in the newer bed that I started last year. That’s the one under the kitchen sink window and it’s all shade. Since Solomon’s Seal spreads like a ground cover, I think it would fill that area rather nicely.

You can see some of the ferns in the background. I’ll take more photos soon.

Also self-seeding into the bed from the edges of the lawn are some lovely white wild violets.

They’re scattered around the bed and I love them there. Funny how a garden can evolve with unexpected additions, isn’t it?

• I’m reading Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader. It’s been around for several years but I’m just now getting to it. I love books about books and reading and her essays are delightful. I ordered it from our library system.

• You know that Don and I do this silly thing now, right? We sit down to dinner anywhere between 6:30 and 7:00 and that means that there is already a TCM movie in progress that started at 6:00 pm. We watch the movie from that point on, trying to figure out the plot and what happened before we tuned in, and sometimes the movies are bad and sometimes what we see is so intriguing that we make plans to watch the whole thing.

Last night, we saw a movie that was so dreadful, so bad, that we kept laughing through the whole thing. It was called The Fastest Guitar Alive and it starred several people I had never heard of, and…get this…Roy Orbison. While I am in awe of Orbison’s singing voice and am a huge fan, he could not act his way out of a paper bag. To be fair to Roy, the other members of the cast weren’t so great, either. Terrible script. Terrible direction. I won’t even begin to try to describe the plot, except to mention that Roy carried a guitar that had a gun in its interior that would emerge when needed.

When Beach Blanket Bingo  looks like an art house movie in comparison, you know it’s bad.

We were stunned. It was so horrible, so unbelievably ill-advised, that it was fascinating.

In one fight scene, we could clearly make out the face of the stuntman – no attempt was made to disguise him. The camera would flip back and forth from the actor’s face to the stuntman’s face and it couldn’t have been more obvious.

Hilarious.

Okay. I’ve rambled on enough.

Happy Friday.

 

Filed Under: books, flowers, garden, movies 48 Comments

Thursday Thoughts

May 9, 2019 at 9:54 am by Claudia

Glorious day yesterday! Sunshine all day long. Sunshine has been nearly nonexistent around here (and will be again for the next week or so). I took advantage of it and worked outside all day long. The temperature was mild, birds were singing all day long, I was potting plants on the porch – I felt content.

Then I went a bit too far and mowed the back forty at the end of the day.

I always take on a bit too much. Don could write a book about me “doing just one more thing.”

But I got a lot done. There’s more to be done today, weeding, laying out the top soil, sowing seeds, and just a tad more mulching.

Tomorrow is going to be a thunderstorm kind of day and I have to take my car in for an oil change. I deliberately scheduled it for a rainy day.

Just a few pictures from around the property. I’ll take some proper pictures of the porch soon, but by the time I was finished, it was late in the day.

As I was dumping debris on the pile near the shed, I saw these lilacs off in the woods. They’re on my neighbor’s property which flows right into ours. Anyway, we’ve lived here almost 14 years and I’ve never seen these before. I walked over there to investigate. They are on a branch that is at the top of an old lilac bush – the only part of the bush that’s blooming.

Amazing!

On that section of the property – just beyond ours, there are the remains of stone foundations in two different areas. I wonder if this was connected to those long ago buildings? There are also the remains of an enclosure for some sort of farm animal.

I wish I had a photo from long ago. It would be fascinating to see who lived there. It’s all overgrown now.

I’m convinced that if I left everything to itself, our property would become completely wild in a few years. Much of gardening is about trying to control something that is, by its nature, uncontrollable.

And just off from our shed – on our property – these lovely daffodils:

So many of them!

These same daffodils are in the big garden bed but for some reason this year, there are no blooms, just leaves. Go figure. There are lots of oddities this year: reliable perennials not emerging, less leaves on the climbing hydrangea, daffodils without blooms…I’m sure it’s due to the bizarre winter we had. I wish I knew more, but as I’ve said before, gardening has a mysterious element to it and you can’t always figure it out.

Happy Thursday.

Filed Under: flowers, garden, grass 45 Comments

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Welcome!

Welcome!

I live in a little cottage in the country with my husband. It's a sweet place, sheltered by old trees and surrounded by gardens. The inside is full of the things we love. I love to write, I love my camera, I love creating, I love gardening. My decorating style is eclectic; full of vintage and a bit of whimsy.

I've worked in the theater for more years than I can count. I'm currently a voice, speech, dialect and text coach freelancing on Broadway, off Broadway, and in regional theater.

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