Spring Planting

Herb & Butterfly garden

Beat the rain this morning and got all my new planting done, all 63, tiny, 6"-ish tall plants which I ordered from Bluestone Perennials, a nursery in Ohio.  They included plants from their pre-planned Butterfly Garden, 6 herbs (basil, sage, chives, rosemary, tarragon, and lavender), and a few shrubs and groundcovers to fill in some gaps in the existing garden. The soil was moist and responsive to digging and tamping, like well kneaded bread dough in one's hands.  

Starter Garden

This will be my second gardening experiment since we moved to Bloomington.  The first was the "Starter Garden", also from Bluestone, which I put in the bed off the Sunroom last September.  It consists of 57 plants in 23 varieties of easy to start, foolproof, perennials which are guaranteed to thrive - an encouraging thought to gardening newbies.  Even though they seem to have come back alive with the advent of spring, they are far from resembling the full-grown plants with colorful blooms as shown on their website.  I'm not sure how long it will take before that happens but I guess I must learn to be patient; plants have their own 'plant time', not to be equated to human time.


Kirk and I have become seriously concerned and alarmed that the wisteria vine is perhaps dead!  What a ghastly thought!  Dead, after 45 productive years!  Here are two pictures of the pergola in our backyard, one taken on 4/25/2010, when it was densely covered with purple wisteria, the other on 4/27/2011, around the same time a year later, completely barren and dry, showing no sign of life. 

Then

Now

Don't you agree there is
cause to be alarmed?

Spring Showers

Continuous spring showers in the last couple of days have infused the landscape with a fresh coat of minty green juiciness. The atmosphere is heavy with moisture, not the kind of sticky humidity that sends you fleeing into air-conditioned space, but the kind that makes you feel as though you were floating in a clear, dewy, breathable bubble. Here is a video documenting the sight and sound of this Easter Sunday.  Do you hear the birds chirping in the background?

Here is a picture of some deer who were lounging nonchalantly in our backyard; they were not a bit intimidated by me as I approached them with my phone camera pointing at them.

Michel de Montaigne

I finished reading the book of Montaigne's essays a few days ago and proceeded to do a sketch of the man modeled after a portrait of him I found on Google.  The big challenge was to capture that slightly sarcastic expression (smirk?) of his.  I'm not sure why I think there is something like that there, in the muscle tension of his face, perhaps.  Or, is it just my imagination?   And, as always, I manage to age my model, whoever he/she may be.  I had originally made his forehead too wide, as Kirk pointed out to me, but I found an easy fix - turning the excess portion into his hat.  Voila!

I was wondering if anybody is going to take up Joseph's invitation to attend his 50th birthday in France.  If so, I think, it's time to start brushing up your French.  No? 

Spring Fever

Kirk and I have both caught the spring fever brought on by the delicious warmth of the sun and intermittent days of thundering showers.  We have been marveling at and documenting the daily transformation of our surroundings which spring has wrought.  Trees and shrubs are coming alive with new green buds and some are bursting with flowers, pink, yellow, and white.  Like everyone else, we have been patronizing the local hardware store almost every weekend; gardening projects seem to be on everyone's mind. 

Fern Fronds

Fern unfurled

For our first spring season in Bloomington, I plan to turn the raised-bed area in our backyard into an herb and butterfly garden.  I have been pouring over gardening catalogs and websites and have since placed my order for new planting.  Last Sunday, Kirk helped me turn up the soil in those boxes and mix in some new topsoil. They will be ready to receive new plants as soon as they arrive.  While turning over the soil in the boxes, I unwittingly and ruthlessly uprooted some yet-to-be unfurled fern fronds which had been growing in the lower boxes, planted there by previous owner of the house, Ed Cohen.  I had no idea what they were; they looked kind of ugly and I thought they were weeds coming back to infest my garden boxes.  Not until I chanced upon a picture of fiddleheads in the Slow Love Life blog by Dominique Browning did I realize what I had done.  Luckily some of them survived.

Mulan Magnolia

Also in our backyard are some flowering trees, one with large pinkish flowers, the other with white blossoms.  I think the former is Magnolia liliifora, also called Mulan Magnolia or Tulip Magnolia.  The latter, I believe, is Japanese Cherry tree, Prunus serrulata.  The white blossoms look similar to the plum flowers I remember from Taiwan but I guess plums and cherries are not exactly the same.

Cherry Blossoms

By the way, I was told by Ed that the Wisteria vine at our Pergola in the backyard, for which our house is named, is not guaranteed to bloom every year.  It will be such a shame if it doesn't this year!  Alas, it is not showing any sign of blooming so far.

Hyacinth toppled over
of its own weight

The bulbs I planted in the fall are coming up nicely.  Here is a picture of my hyacinths weighed down by their own blossoms.  
They looked like drunken sailors in a row; I had to prop them up with sticks.

Played Truant

For full disclosure, Kirk and I didn't make it to the IU Mini Marathon the past weekend.  Not having properly trained for the event was the main reason for our playing truant - the result of having underestimated the difficulty of running outdoors in the often bitterly cold weather of the past three months.