Luna Gardener

I am soon turning 50 years young. I will be celebrating that milestone in Kauai, Hawaii next month.

My sister Vanna a long time island resident will be getting married on my birthday in Fern Grotto where after a cruise down the river, we will enter a cave cloaked with ferns and cooled by the mists of a waterfall where the ceremony will happen.

This is the watercolor painting I have done for her wedding gift. The colors match her bouquet, very tropical.

My office scanner could only scan part of it as it is already framed and ready to ship to her. I thought I would get a digital photo for my files as best I could. It is rare I spend the money to frame something. But when I do, it really finishes the piece.

It is like putting a beautiful layer of mulch on a newly planted garden.

I am posting it here so friends and family can see the gift before it heads accross the ocean.

I can’t wait to get there and paint oceans, mountains and flowers!  I am just as anxious to spend time with my sister on her island and celebrate her wedding.

It has been such a dry year, gardening has become almost illegal due to watering restrictions.  But I have watered carefully with buckets and all my Blowing Rock gardens do thrive. Though hopes are dashed for the planting and transplanting we had hoped to do this fall. We will be building ponds and fences instead.

Perhaps October will provide a miraculous shift in weather patterns.

It has been a challenging year for the nusery as well. A summer of drought and highway construction…Last weekend a car wrecked right into the nursery!  It was the first day of business without the highway department doing construction right there.  It was the only spot on the highway they had not put up gaurd rails!  They will be putting them up now. Everyone got out of the way, no injuries, but the mum benches were smashed. How bizarre is that? 

I wish my daughters could come to Hawaii with me. I had visions of us all toghether on the beach at this special time. Business keeps them home if they have any hope of recovering from the dismal drought of a summer. October is a critical month in our business. Michael will care for our Blowing Rock gardens and Finn the ten days I am gone. God Bless him! 

Until I leave, I am so enjoying the blue skies and cooler air that fall is bringing in, despite the lack of rain.

Now enough chatter, I am off to stain my new fence in the beautiful sunshine…..then I will spend the rest of the weekend learning to paint water!

Enjoy! 

 How I spent my summer:

Raising and canning an unbelievable amount of beautiful bounty!

The above photo reveals the state of my kitchen counters since June. Though I did attempt to arrange things nicely for this photo. The counter is not usually so organized when the bounty reaches the kitchen. I do not have air conditioning, so most weekends in August my kitchen was about 120 degrees of steamy heat.

Mac tilled a bigger garden for me this year. His neighbors in Lenoir are grateful. We have given away all that we couldn’t cope with. Not bad for a first year garden during a record drought.

I have recently learned the art of making giant pots of Gumbo. We have had a bumper crop of okra. I never knew that the file (pronounced Feel-ay) used to thicken the gumbo is ground up sassafras. Here in the south, I have not found it in the grocery stores.

This was also the first year for my home garden, during a record drought. I spent the spring clearing the ugly shrubs, poison ivy and overgrowth on the slope above a retaining wall in the back. It is the view from my dining room door that I stare at constantly.  The slope is framed with tulip poplar, dogwood and sourwood trees. In the newly cleared area I planted rhododendron chionoides and mountain laurel along the top of the north facing ridge. I also planted Vinca minor ‘Alba’ as a groundcover on the slope.

Finding decent mulch around here is a major challenge. I am left to going to Lowes where they have a dismal selection of recycled plastic mulch, Pine chunks, something dyed ugly red and the one I chose for the steep slope, Shredded hardwood. The bags were inconsistant. Some just raw shredded hunks, while others had composted some and were a darker color. It looked like a checkerboard when I finished sliding up and down spreading the bags on the steep slope.  Nevertheless I had high hopes for seeing it turn into a sea of green lush grouncover when the drought hit.

I got a $200.00 water bill last month!  All did survive, and next year ( the gardeners constant statement) I will have that bank covered.

This fall I will plant all white narcisssus and chionodoxa as well.  The phlox divaricata I brought  from Loudoun has survived the drought well and will look beautiful with all the white Vinca and bulbs. I hold the vision. 

Fortunately I did not try to landscape the whole yard at once. I have a driveway full of Dwarf Laurel and Oak leaf Hydrangea collected and waiting for that magic fall moment to re work my front porch area. At the moment it is lined with meatball shaped pink, white and red azalea. It is as though whoever planted them put a pink and a red in the same planting hole. Very strange.

My first year garden has been lovely, a wee sanctuary for myself and the dogs.

I have had a wonderful time working in the gardens in Blowing Rock.  With Mike’s help we have transformed quite a few gardens.  Finn has enjoyed being part of the crew, and knows all the neighbors of our clients. He even knows where one neighbor keeps the dog biscuits in the garage.  

 I will post a few photo’s below.

This is the pond Mike built in March. We call it Finn’s pond. Sweetie, the golden retriever visits him every Monday.

We planted the garden at Miramichi this spring.

Miramichi is the newly restored summer home of the Cannon Family (Cannon towels and linens)

We began the garden restoration last Fall.

This fall we will continue planting ferns and natives. I have ordered Trillium grandiflora, I found one blooming this spring in the garden. I also found a few Turkscap Lillies and saved them. 

 Before_ Fall 2006                        After_Summer 2007

It is hard to believe I haven’t written on the blog since the birth of Barrie Ann.   But, as you can see, I have been more than a little busy. I have also chosen to spend more time painting this year than writing.   I have painted every flower in my garden this year.

I doodle in my moleskin watercolor notebook while I wait for dinner to cook most evenings.  These are the Turkscap Lilly I sketched before they faded.

 Barrie, now six months old, is empowering herself vocally, not yet aware of how loud her experiments with squealing really are. Her noise is happy and silly. She can almost pronouce ‘Hi’ to me on the phone, after much huffing and puffing. 

She loves butterflies.   She will be crawling soon.

Morgan is an amazing Mom.

In a recent visit to the nursery I watched her on a beautiful clear day watering with Barrie strapped to her chest in a carrier. I noticed Barrie was holding on to the hose too, watching carefully as her mother methodically watered the perennials. She did get distracted by the butterflies dancing around her head, her eyes following thier journey from flower to flower. She is a gardener in training for sure….

She arrived in a snowstorm.

I took this photo so she would know how things looked the day she was born. It is  her Auntie Airynee’s grape arbor.

I pulled up to the nursery at 5:00 on the fifteenth of March. Seeing Morgan working alone to put flats of pansies out of reach of snow. I grabbed 100 ft of garden cloth I had brought with me from North Carolina, used for covering plants for frost protection, and helped my very pregnant daughter as she  crawled under the nursery benches to get the last of the tender plants stored for the coming weather.

I said “Your sister came during a freak October snowstorm. I think the sudden changes in baromateric pressure had something to do with it.”  The temperature dropped  30 degrees on my drive up earlier that day. She said she felt fine, no different than any other day. We headed off to the grocery store and bought enough food to last a good long time, got home and put it away by 9:00 pm.  We watched a televison show and went to bed. Twelve hours earlier I had left North Carolina, and spring behind. I was extremly tired and was looking forward to a good nights sleep.

It seems I had just shut my eyes when I realized Morgan was standing at my bedroom door calling ‘Mom!’…in the same urgent voice I had heard her use for years whenever something  was going on. It was 1:00 am and time to go to the hospital.

 I watched in awe as my baby daughter Morgan transformed into a mother during a snow storm. Barrie Ann entered the world with no distress, only a calm state of being, as though she was not surpised at all by the situation she found herself in. She looked like her father, who’s eyes the wee infant gazed into intently in her 1st moments on March 16th.

About 4 inches of snow fell while Morgan labored, she was so fucused…she never even noticed.

Thanks to Airynee and her cellphone, the whole county was on alert. One family friend went to her Pilates class and announced to her  group that Morgan was in labor. One woman said “The girl from Gardens of Delight ?”  The whole room apparently started clapping when they realized who she was talking about. They all shop at the nursery… God Bless them all.

Tomorrow sweet Barrie will be one month old. She is smiling at her Mom now, awakening more and more from her first weeks of angel napping.

The new family created a system for working at the nursery with a new baby, Barrie napping, for now, at good times of day for Morgan to get some things done. Donnie has a nursery in his office above the gourmet, Morgan has a similar set up in her office at the nursery. These young parents are so set up as  a working family.

I couldn’t keep Morgan away from work. She even chose to have the baby during a storm when she couldn’t work anyway! By the second week she was showing up at the shop, with baby in tow. She now has the help of Miss Desi Lee, a gardener I love, helping as Manager of the nursery. The two mothers should manage very well.

By the time I left Easter Sunday, things were working pretty well. Except that we had to unload a tractor trailor delivery of plant material from the south into the basement of the Walker & Clarke building to ride out yet another round of unusual freezing temperatures.  Morgan operated the forklift, I had the baby monitor in my back pocket, and everyone standing nearby pitched in and helped carry it all down the stairs and into safe haven.

Barrie Ann is having to adapt quickly the world of nursery life and to people who come by regularly to see and hold her while we check them out at the register. She will have social skills from the get go…will speak latin early and what an amazing place of nature and beauty to be surrounded by as she discovers and masters her world. The nursery looks absolutely bountiful and beautiful. 

Barrie Ann was not just born to her parents. She has a whole community of people who love her already, including and especially her Grandmother/me.

I imagine she will be running things shortly.

We had the same freeze in North Carolina the night I got home. My Magnolia was in full bloom as well as many many dogwoods that surround my house in the woods. I brought in my trays of Costoluto Genovese tomatoes, Italian peppers and other special things I had sown in the greenhouse for the garden in North Carolina. The seedlings were very cold from their trip in the back of Macs truck, but perked up by morning in my sunny dining room window.   It would have devastated me to lose them.

I am so happy to be home.  As much as I loved being a part of the miracles of March, three weeks is a long time to be away from home. My own garden was calling me. I putter, mulch and plant contentedly, quietly, and decompress from the fast pace of the past few weeks…I mean from the moment I got there the pace pretty much went into hyperdrive. I am grateful Barrie waited to arrive until the night I came into town.  It was all so perfect. I just wish I could find time during my visits to see and consult with everyone. But this time my focus was the nursery and the family.

I am now back to work restoring a fenced in flower garden that was neglected for quite some time. It is on a charming  farm in Sugar Grove. There are two baby draft horses in the field next to me. They are shy and long legged. I am deep in a valley of steeply rolling hills near the Tennessee border. It is beautiful, remote and peaceful. A wonderful mural is painted on the side of the barn.

My heaven would look and feel like this farm. This is the barn.

It is a joy to be weeding there, the soil has been amended well. I am finding lot’s of lupine babys,  rescuing them from a thick patch of weeds. I love finding these treasures amongst a horrific scene of a garden gone wild. It keeps me in the game. Laborious excavation of invasive overgrowth leads to miracles and new life all around. My back is sore and I go to bed by 9:30, but I know when this garden gets cleaned up, it will be beautiful, I can tell it was beautiful.

My grandaughter is beautiful, and I hear her newly born friend Sophie born a few days ago is as beautiful as her mother Dominique. Below is a photo of the two new mothers at age seven. Silly soulmates that they are…

As I said…Miracles all around.

Note: The above painting is by Artist Anne Barron.  Check out the title of the painting.

I have been on a roll lately.  I have a bag packed and the cellphone with me at all times in case Morgan goes into labor and I have to rush out of town.  I feel pressed to get as much in order as possible. We are getting ready to welcome Barrie into the world.

Illustration by Nicolette Ceccoli

Morgan feels more than ready for her to get here, these being her longest days of waiting for that magic moment when Barrie declares she’s on her way.

I am hoping for the planet venus to shift into the constellation of Taurus before she comes. I would imagine it would blend nicely with her Taurus and Capricorn parents. This would give her some earth to ground her and a sense for beauty.

So as we wait…eternally it seems….we are getting gardens ready and doing our best to bring on spring. The last days of winter are so perfect for getting on top of things before they leaf out. Clearing the pallette, preparing for the new growth soon to arrive.

Morgan is getting in plants daily, fruiting trees and shrubs arrive on the 16th. The greenhouse is overflowing and I can’t wait to get there.

Here in Blowing Rock, Mike is proving to be an enjoyable gardener to work with. He is thorough, agile and loves the work. He can put the shine on a garden quickly and efficientlty, as well as, keep Finn happy with sticks and balls all day. It does take patience to retrieve the pruned limbs that Finn has dragged out of the brush piles and put them back. The cinnamon colored lab comes home sleepy and too tired to dig holes in my garden with the neighborhood dogs at the end of the day.

Mike is also teaching me some new things. He pointed out to me the difference between a Carolina Hemlock and an Eastern Hemlock. With out this ID lesson, I doubt I would have noticed the native species as being so different. In Virginia I was missing so much this kind of exchange with my hispanic gardeners. I wanted to be talking a bit about horticulture while I was working.

This is not to say that I didn’t have wonderful exchanges with the latino gardeners. I did. They were very reverent with nature and gardens. We harmonized well in that regard. Most of our communication was about how beautiful things were. Much of it was non verbal, often touching our hearts to express something nice. They taught me the plant names in Spanish and I taught them what I could in Spanglish.

It is pruning season. We have been removing deadwood & crossing branches, opening crowns to recieve more light. Checking on each others work and getting opinions on which limbs to take off.  At home I pruned my inherited Magnolia soulangiana.

It has a lot of character.  I wonder if I will be in Virginia when it blooms.  There is one long branch I may remove after the tree blooms. I find myself contemplating that one last branch, which means I should just go ahead and remove it.

I should have taken a before photo. I am not good about taking before shots. When I get in the mood to do the task, I generally do not take the time to fool with a camera.

We are also edging and prepping beds for mulching. Of course, when I come home from the gardens in Blowing Rock all beautiful and ready for spring … I have to jump into my own back yard.  I need to enjoy the same state of readiness at home.  It is so satisfying when it is accomplished.

In just a few short hours yesterday I was able to dig mushroom compost into two beds and prep them for planting when I get home and spread 20 bags of mulch on my border beds. So many leaves!  I found a massive patch of Vinca minor rotting under a foot of leaves.  I can easily make enough leaf mulch here to be a very happy gardener.

I am finding the red tips of peonies emerging. and can’t wait to see what else I have inherited in my new garden. There are sweet clumps of dwarf narcissus blooming.

I painted them the other day. It has been a while since I had a garden to putter in at home. My garden is in good shape now for me to leave town.

The four square kitchen patch is now seeded and lightly mulched. When I get back to it in 3 weeks I will have a  knot garden filled with geometrically arranged Claytonia, Arugula, Merlot lettuce, Japanese Bunching onions, Broccoli and Spinach.  The expensive vegetables at the local stores are downright unappetizing at this time of year and I can taste the fumigants on the strawberries I thought I was treating myself to last week. My body, a bit garden sore, is craving crisp fresh real food.

I am posting some pictures of straw bale vegetable growing sent to me by one of the community garden folks. A very inspiring and easy way to make soil and grow beautiful food. It is time!  Happy planting! 

Mixed with Anticipation…..

After two months indoors during my moving, painting and unpacking marathon, a few warm days with the scent of spring have arrived. In the mail a letter arrived from the NCLCRB telling me I am now a Certified and Registered Landscape Contractor in North Carolina. I have spent the last year studying and testing for this certification. Just in time too, I was getting antsy to get to work outside. It is nice to have the certification process completed.

The first warm day, I scurried out to survey and get to know my new garden. I raked leaves, seeded the lawn and repotted all the houseplants that have hung on for dear life during my transitions. I will be digging up lots of overgrown Iris, Daylilies and Cannas, to make room for a more diverse group of my favorite plantings. I also need to resolve dog issues. Finn, the sociable lab, attracts all the neighbors’ dogs to our yard for hours of garden destroying play time. Finn needs a fenced in yard and I need a fenced in garden.

This little one is sneaky about getting in the house and heading for the food bowl.

In the meantime at the farm….. Six geese landed in the pond for a short rest as they migrated north. It was such an encouraging sign of spring’s return that Mac had to call me on the phone to announce their arrival. We worked during a one day window in-between wind storms and the rain showers that arrived this morning.

I tilled a patch for spring salads. I added lime, manure and a bit of organic fertilizer, raked the beds into a four square pattern and actually had the will power to put off planting for a week. My usual tendency after a happy day preparing a bed is to immediately plant. Even though I know it is best to give the soil additives time to harmonize before planting, I usually want the satisfaction of sowing seed after all the digging edging and breaking up of clods. Perhaps I am maturing.

I am also curious to see if waiting to plant will look different to me when the plants do emerge and grow. This will be the plots second growing season. It was last season’s corn patch. The soil worked up easily and is darker in color now. The straw mulch from last year has broken down and added much needed organic matter to the plot.

The remainder of last years straw mulch was raked onto the paths. Today’s rain will activate the lime and fertilizer nicely. It looks tidy.

Mac completed his dam on the creek where the big garden will soon be. We’ll see how it does with today’s heavy rain. He installed drain pipes for the overflow. A pond quickly formed. This will be handy for watering the big garden if needed. Last year it was more of a bog seeded in by birds filled with Sweet Flag.

The dam will also provide a way to get the fencing across the creek so Finn can have the run of the farm. We observed that the whole time we worked, Finn stuck close by. His usual farm behavior is to run & visit the dogs on the farm next door. He was a good farm dog.

It was a perfect opportunity to get these things done. At the end of the day we were a bit stiff and sore.  Mac sang ‘She thinks my Tractors Sexy’  while I made dinner.  He is a farmer with a great sense of humor.

Before I leave for Virginia, and the birth of baby garden goddess Barrie Ann Walker…I have gardens in Blowing Rock to attend to. This year I will have help. I am joining forces with a gentle gardener from Brunswick, MD that I worked with a bit last year. He moved to North Carolina for the same reasons I did… excellent hiking and music. We realized last fall that we have mutual landscaping friends in Virginia. I look forward to what we accomplish together and love the synchronicity of how I tend to meet just the right folks around here.

Time is short. Barrie seems to be eager to get here. The due date has been bumped up to March 15^th. Morgan is getting frustrated with her big belly. It is impossible for her to reach under the benches and maneuver her body in the narrow aisles of the greenhouse. She is making copious lists and notes for me to follow when I get there to work. Morgan is an efficient gardener, as this will save us all from guessing her wishes and complicating spring, which is plenty complicated even when baby’s aren’t arriving just as we begin the season.

Our intent is to make it easy for Morgan to enjoy the magic of her new daughter for a few private weeks. I feel double gifted…I get to bathe myself in the green tropical heat of the greenhouse that I love so much at this time of year as well as get to know my new granddaughter.

This is an interesting time for sure; I am straddling a few worlds. It is hard to wait for the 15^th of March, yet I want all the time I can have here as well, to get gardens ready for what is sure to be a wonderful year.