May Day Bouquet

Day 200: Sound & Fury Morris is dancing the sun up at Gasworks Park in honour of May Day, and I will have been on the road for several hours before dawn. That won't prevent the May faeries from carrying out my instructions to leave this lovely May basket on your doorstep, though. Okay, in some cases it will arrive a little early; we must make allowances as the need arises. It would seem that the practice of leaving May baskets for friends and neighbours has all but gone by the wayside, in my opinion a sad thing for such a lovely old custom to fall from use. I have fond memories from my childhood of constructing paper baskets and filling them with pretty posies, sometimes purloined from the flowerbeds of the very neighbours who were the intended recipients of the baskets. And if no cultivated blossoms were to be had, there were always dandelions and forget-me-nots and the occasional fern to brighten someone's day with a floral consideration. It was the thought behind the remembrance: you are my neighbour and my friend. Here is a gift from a simpler time, my May basket for you.

Diggin' And Plantin'

Day 182: I think I have the gardening bug worse this year than ever before. I've laid in two new barked beds, adding junipers, heather, ferns, this lovely Bleeding-Heart (Dicentra), bog rosemary and Lithodora. In the established beds, I've put in a new lavender, an evergreen azalea, tulips and ranunculus (both free), and moved the Crocosmia to a location where it can spread to its heart's content. An old vinca minor was moved and another added along the fenceline, augmented with a small cypress. I added three new containers, one of which received a third blueberry bush, with the other two destined for tomato or other vegetable culture. On Monday, I put in a vining hydrangea, a new variety of hardy fuchsia and a white-flowered Akebia. Today's achievement was extracting a deeply-rooted Euonymus to make room for a purple-flowered Akebia which I'll pick up on Friday.

You'll notice that all of these plants are perennials. I'm saving myself work by working hard now so I can sit back and enjoy the fruits of my labours later (literally in a couple of cases). This is not to say that I won't be adding some annuals. In fact, I will broadcast cosmos seed and let the plants fill in the blanks. I'll undoubtedly buy a "Spoon Flower" Osteospermum as soon as they become available, but otherwise, I'm tired of the hassle of seed-starting and having every square foot of window space filled with flats and pots.

Most of the flowering plants have been picked in consideration of birds and pollinators. The non-flowering species were selected for their ability to cover large areas of grass in the shortest time. It may not be the most elegant landscaping job, but it serves my purposes. Let 'em grow!