So, if you think this blog entry looks messed up, you're correct. Google Blogger made a "new" blog interface and it took me hours to figure out how to wrap text around photos...and it still ain't easy. And I can't figure out now how to just left align the fourth paragraph. I can center it, right align it, and justify it, but can't left align it. Who makes a text editor so bad it won't do that? And now, if you click on a photo to enlarge it, you can't get back to the post by "esc". Google needs to fire its Blogger staff because it probably, based on the feedback I've seen, just ruined this portion of the business. Time will tell if I can stay here or need to start over.
ProfessorRoush surrendered his garden to the fates yesterday. It is time, past time, that cold weather comes in and puts a stop to this madness, the tangles of Knautia macedonia, morning glory vines, and stiff daylily stems, the decaying leaves of summer clinging desperately to the trees, and the creeping crabgrass trying vainly to slip past the gardener. I've grown tired of 2020 and dream of renewal, of the clean slate of snow and the crisp air of winter. My garden remains only in spirit and the color of a few futile sedums, vainly trying to seek the last rays of a dim sun.
These sedums, two among many, caught my eye yesterday while mowing, a shorter bright pink foreground Sedum spectabile 'Brilliant' against the backdrop of a taller sedum that I have on my garden map as Sedum telephium 'Arthur Branch'. Although the latter lacks the reddish-leaves characteristic of the variety, I don't doubt its identity; it's the right height and early enough in the season that the red coloration is yet hidden. Both are long-term garden survivors for me, 'Arthur Branch' planted in 2000, the second summer of my garden, and 'Brilliant' in 2001. I already knew, even in those early years on the prairie, that sedums would stand the test of time and carry me into winter, and so they have, each year. I have 8 or 10 varieties that take the flowering place of the fickle fall mums in my garden.
It seems easy enough to understand how 'Brilliant' got it's name, but I'm at a loss to explain 'Arthur Branch'. It seems sure to be named after a gardener, but Google has failed me in my quest to find an origin, providing only a criminal in New York and the fictional Law and Order character played by Fred Thompson, the latter possible since Law and Order first aired in 1990, but neither very likely or satisfying as provenance for a plant name. My library isn't helping either, Alex Pankhurst's Who Does Your Garden Grow? and other sources failing me. If anyone knows of the naming source, please let me know so I can add it to the other useless brain tracks in my ever-active curiosity center.
Sedums aside, I essentially put the garden to bed yesterday, removing peony stakes and garden markers, draining and putting away hoses, sweeping out the garage for winter, pulling up weedy grasses in the garden beds, and finishing last-minute chores such as repainting some peeling trim on the barn. If it snows tomorrow, I'll be unperturbed, my garden secure and ready for the moment.
In fact, I think all of us, brother and sister gardeners on the planet, are ready for 2020 to end. The pandemic, the endless election twattle and sports much-ado-about-nothing, all combining to create an early fatigue, this year preceding the color change of leaves. The death of RBG this week can only make it all worse, the din of both sides in an endless cycle of accusation and reprimand. Even the sun has dimmed here in Kansas, yielding to the pollution from the relentless California wildfires, 1500 miles away. Normally, ProfessorRoush laments cold and snow, dreading the onset and the duration, but right now, a little brisk, clear Artic blast seems like just the right prescription to put 2020 out of our misery.
