Magic Morning Musings

He almost didn't do it.   Yesterday was ProfessorRoush's 66th birthday, and it was packed so busy that, at first, he nearly didn't notice the world outside.   It was Commencement day at the College, and I had time for only a full day of work, graduation ceremony, receptions, and plans.  I woke early, too early, checked in online for the news and was heading for the shower when I realized that it was light outside and the sky through the skylights was PINK.  Already starting later than I planned, I hesitated and debated and shut down the Critic and the urgencies of the day and listened, for once, to the voices that I so often ignore.  

The voices I heeded were the Writer & the Photographer & the Philosopher, all in agreement and demanding that the call to go outside could not be ignored.  The Writer anticipates and collects and records special moments in the garden.  The Photographer understands the magic of diffused morning light and demands its capture. And the Philosopher always advocates for the feel of a fresh breeze on still-sleepy skin, and clean air filling the lungs and the waking sounds of life across the crisp, cool prairie.

Oh, what awaited!  As the sun barely broke the horizon, my senses were bombarded with life and all the promise of a new day.  The pink and oranges were quickly receding from the sky as the sun rose and I took these pictures all within a few brief minutes, catching the roses opening to the kiss of sunlight, before the low clouds could steal the magic and drain away the last of the colors.  

The act of garden photography, of itself, is an invitation to morning meditation and especially helpful to hyperactive and time-driven unfortunates like myself.  Hold perfectly still.  Calm your breathing and heartbeat. Frame the subject. Check the edges.  Focus.  Check the background.  Adjust depth of field. Look for distractions in the viewer.  Make sure vertical and horizontal lines in the photo are squared up.  Take the photo.   Assess and start again, breaths slowing, heartbeat dropping, soul quiet.  And the result?  Not a single photo here is cropped or enhanced or edited in any way, their natural beauty on full display.  There are rewards for a detail-oriented psyche.

I hesitated again, feeling the pull of the Critic, knowing I should be moving on, but I listened instead to the Artist insisting that I take just a few more seconds to capture the sunlight on the colorful irises. Had I not, I would never have experienced the moment and joy captured by this photograph and never felt the impertinence of the brave, brooding, deep purple bloom on the left or the cheerfulness of the yellow irises in the center.

Listen to the Voices my friends, not the voices of Schedule or Despair, not the misdirected urgings of Greed or Vice, but the wisdom of the Child, the passion of the Lover, and the vision of the Faithful.  Life gives us few enough gifts and we must cherish and recognize and grasp those we are given with our hands and hearts and minds and hold on to them in memory and gratitude.   

And I'm forever grateful for these captured moments, on this, my 66th birthday.

Morning Vistas

A "Vista" is defined as "a pleasing view, especially as seen through a long narrow opening."  This morning, ProfessorRoush was simply content to take Bella on a walk around her garden, and taking photos of the broad pleasing views of his garden through his narrow (phone) camera lens.  I'm not going to write a lot about these pictures today, I'll just note a few of the particular roses visible in them and leave them to speak for themselves.  Before you blow them up to look closer, you must promise not to feel smug about all the unpruned deadwood in the roses and the weeds at their feet.  A gardener only has so much time and Spring came at me fast this year.

Roses, from left to right, are tall 'John Cabot', crimson 'Hunter', pink 'Konigan von Danemark', and fading 'Marie Bugnet'

The irises are spectacular this year.  You can see Bella running ahead to the right, sniffing the ground.

Peony 'Buckeye Belle' sits maroon-ly at the feet of bountiful 'Blizzard' Mockorange

One view of a rose bed looking east as the sun rises.  The near border, left to right, is 'Leda', 'Rosalina', and 'Blush Hip'.  The nearly red rose just behind those is 'Duchess of Portland'.

Front to back, these roses are pink 'Duchess de Montebello', bright red 'Survivor' with 'George Vancouver' to it's left, and behind, tall, and pink 'Lillian Gibson'.

I have been hacking around and reviving this bed and 'Lillian Gibson' looks about as poorly as I've ever seen, but I still think she deserves a photo all to herself.

As does this second 'Survivor' specimen, with mauve 'Hanza' and single 'Fru Dagmar Hastrup' following behind it.

Showing the Crazy

 ProfessorRoush has missed posting a couple times this week.  I have not been entirely idle in the garden but there didn't seem like there was much to tell.  Some early henbit needed mowing, so the lawn mower was fired up and the mulching plug put in.  I loaded up the trailer and brought home 16 bales of straw to use as garden mulch.  That seems like a lot, but there will be a lot more this year since I'm mulching everything with straw and putting the lawn clippings on the dusty lawn.  And I noticed my Paeonia tenuifolia is blooming and snagged the bumble picture at the upper right.  Notice how full his pollen basket is and yet, he continues to harvest the bountiful yellow pollen in a bee-frenzied fit of gluttony.

Yesterday, I also did the craziest thing I've done in the garden in ages.  While purchasing the straw at a local garden center, I couldn't resist the swan call of these two plants, a Crimson Sweet Watermelon, photo at left, and the Ball 2076 muskmelon pictured below.

 Normally, I plant these from seed sometime in June, but they begged me incessantly to take them home.  I checked the 10 day forecast, saw no nighttime temperatures below 42ºF, and so decided that this year, if by some miracle they survived, I might be able to beat the local markets for homegrown melons and thus not be too late to gain Mrs. ProfessorRoush's admiration and gratitude.  Previously, by the time my seed grown melons are ripe, she has already bought several at the local markets and is sick of them, leaving me dejected and without praise.

Some of the straw went to mulch the garden all around the melons; at least the ground around them will stay nice and moist and cool all summer and I'll be able to avoid weeding among the vines.  If I'm lucky, the straw will also make it harder for the rabbits to find these melons.

Early bloomers continue to pop up everywhere in the garden since the frost has stayed away for a week or more.  My Red Peach is a bright beacon in the back of the garden, a standout in the evening sun.  Alas, last year in a storm, I lost the red peach tree in front of the house, pictured in the link, but this one is doing just fine.

And, to my surprise, I noticed this iris blooming (here, right and below, left) yesterday.  I have it planted in a corner of the vegetable garden, an experiment from when we just moved to the prairie which I never got around to  transplanting into a perennial bed.  I don't know it's name, but here it is, in a hurry to be the first, several weeks ahead of my other iris.

Viburnums are blooming too; at least some of them, but that's another story for a later time.  Check back here soon and I'll tell you that tale just as soon as I solve the mystery of why some are MIA.

Snake Ninja

Well, that respite didn't last long.  My winters in this Kansas garden seem long and harsh, but I number among my few blessings that the winters here are also relatively snake-free.  I say relatively because there is always the chance that lifting a rock might expose a hibernating little milk snake.  I actually saw my first snake this year, a small foot-long, pencil-thick, rat snake, about a month ago when I picked up a bag of mulch that had been lying in the yard in the sun for a week.  That one was pretty sluggish on the still-cold ground, although I presume it had taken shelter under the bag because the plastic-bagged mulch was warmed by the sun and beginning to compost.

 Two weeks ago, however, I spotted this rather large common garter snake (Thamnophis sirtalis) stretching out in the open grass while I was out with Bella.  It was interesting that my nose-driven, curious and crazy dog did not notice this snake at all, dancing oblivious within several feet of it before I called her away.   Can dogs not detect the scent of snake?  I've seen Bella follow the exact track of another dog through our yard more than a half hour after the dog ran through it.  But she can't smell a snake several feet away?

If you've read this blog for any long period, you know of my snake phobia.  I hate them, but since I hate rodents more, I don't kill the snakes.  Well at least not the non-poisonous ones and I have yet to run across a poisonous snake in my yard, although I'm sure there are plenty of Copperheads and Rattlesnakes in the vicinity.  Thankfully for my mental stability, I most often find either rat snakes or these pretty orange-black-yellow Common Garters.  This guy is likely an old one.  Wikipedia lists their maximum length as around 54 inches and although he didn't stand still for measurement, he was at least 48 inches nose to tail.  Based on my reading, he may be a Kansas record, but now I'll never know.

As I've noted before, frequent noxious exposure has conditioned me to moderate my response to the sight of a snake and I was calm and collected as I spotted the snake and got the clear picture above.  As I went in for a closer shot of the head, however, the snake moved with ninja-like reptilian swiftness and I found myself looking at a coiled, ready to strike, four foot long snake from about 2 feet away.  Mildly startled, I produced this moderately blurry image from an elevated position of spontaneous levitation.  The snake was not moving, but I certainly was.  Or perhaps the image is just blurred from my heart rate, which went from 60 to 200 faster than an Indy 500 race car.  My primitive brainstem doesn't seem to care that my highly evolved human cerebral cortex knows this snake is nonpoisonous.

Discretion being the better part of valor, I chose at that point to stand still and watch from about 10 feet away while the snake uncoiled and swiftly slithered across the yard and disappeared into the irises, leaving me panting, and at the same time, a little sad.  I had great hopes for the irises this year, but now they'll just have to survive summer as best they can on their own.

Queen of the Irises

ProfessorRoush has a favorite iris.  Hand's down, no question about it, a definite favorite.  I grow all colors and types of irises.  I maintain approximately forty different varieties that still survive my neglectful gardening.  I'm partial to the purples like 'Superstition', so deep they are almost black.  I fancy the bright sky blue irises such as 'Full Tide'.  I love the soft pink refined splendor of 'Beverly Sills'.  But it is bicolored and vivacious 'Edith Wolford' that holds my iris heart.

I fought long and hard to obtain 'Edith Wolford'.  Every year at the local iris sale I would rush to her spot in the alphabet first, only to be beaten to the spot by a purse-swinging senior lady or to find that all the divisions had been sold privately before the public sale.  A friend finally took pity on me and set aside a fan for me.  Or, as a second friend pointed out, I acquired 'Edith Wolford' by cheating.  A gardener can only sustain the bruises from heavy handbags and bony elbows a few times before he must take preemptive action to end the abuses.

'Edith Wolford' was a 1984 introduction by the late Ben Hager,and she has received all the top American Iris Society awards including the Dykes Medal of Honor (1993), the highest award given.  Hager was the owner of Melrose Gardens in California, and he also hybridized the above-mentioned 'Beverly Sills' (1985 Dykes Medal of Honor).   'Edith Wolford' is the perfect contrast of soft yellow standards and gentle blue falls.  Her beard is a brighter yellow, a beacon to the insects who would steal her pollen.  She even occasionally reblooms.  'Edith Wolford', however, does not always photograph well since cameras tend to make the soft blue falls more purple than they really are.  For example, the top picture on this page was taken on my "good" Canon camera, and the picture at the right was taken on my iPhone.  Both are a little purple-tinged, although the top picture does more closely capture the quality of the canary-yellow standards.

I won't entertain negatives in regards to 'Edith Wolford' in my garden since she grows so well here, but to be fair, other gardeners dismiss her as sickly, sparing of her blooms, slow to grow, and prone to rot.  To those who would be her detractors, I will mangle a quote from the The Hunger Games and suggest, "May your odds with irises be never in your favor." 

Mowing Bedlam

If my regular readers suspect that they have begun to determine a pattern in the "Roush Gardening Method," today's blog will remove all doubt and expose me for the gardening charlatan I truly am.  I know that some might apply the words, "cynical," "skeptic," and perhaps "shameful" to many of these blogs as I discuss emotionally-charged subjects such as Global Warming, organic gardening dogma, and WEE (Wild-Eyed Environmentalists).  Yes, I fully admit that I am sometimes unable to resist poking the Birkenstock herd as they meander across the garden drinking the Kool-Aide.

But truthfully, for all the "low-maintenance" hype I spew about my garden endeavors, the core basis of the "Roush Gardening Method" is simple laziness.  I don't aim for low-maintenance, I aim for "low-work," however that result can be obtained.

As an example, I resolved a few years back to limit the annual maintenance of my two mixed daylily and iris beds to the simple technique of mowing them once in the Fall or late Winter.  As you can see from the picture at left, the resultant bed has a nice clean look that took about 10 minutes to create at the end of the last growing season.  Please go ahead and ignore the variably-sized limestone edging that keeps the prairie fires out of my beds. Doesn't it look like a knowledgeable and dedicated gardener has been hard at work clearing this bed of plant debris?  I did not, as recommended in numerous books, take some nice hand scissors out to carefully and individually trim the iris into angled fans, nor did I remove the previous foliage from the daylilies.  I simply mowed off both at a height of 3 inches with a mulching, riding lawnmower (gasp!).  This resulted in a nice 2-3 inch layer of chopped mulch that matted down nicely and didn't blow to the next county over the winter.      

As you can see from the 2nd picture, the result, pictured during early daylily season in the middle of a hot summer, leaves little room for complaint, at least by me.  I get two solid seasons of bloom, iris and daylily, out of this bed, plus a little third bloom season due to some daffodils that pop up and cycle before the daylily or iris foliage is evident.  Yes, it is not a varied shrub border, but I have those in other places and they bloom in their own time and space. No, I wouldn't do this to a formal rose garden.   My daylily and iris beds are intended only for full colorful climax at the height of summer.  It is also important to know that I have not yet seen any disease nor detriment to the practice.  In fact, the disaster of the late Flint Hills freeze of 2007, which reduced the majority of my irises to soggy and very dead plants, will likely not be repeated as there is not much green growth yet to freeze.  KSU's advice in 2007 to "not-cut-back" the irises after the freeze, which I now believe was a mistake, will be moot for me in the future;  I don't have any iris foliage at this time of year to freeze.

I'll tell you a secret;  I also did this mowing technique on my peony plantings last fall and I'll show you those pictures in a later post as the peonies bloom.  Yes, it's true that my garden design is in some danger of becoming a set of display beds of various plants without architecture or form, but I'll make sure to keep some mixed beds around and there is always the formal rose garden and the shrub rose borders.  Anyway, I prefer to think of my garden as a symphony, with a set of sax notes here, a refrain popping up over there from the violas, and later a flute taking up the melody from the background.  As opposed to creating a jam session of uninhibited jazz players, if you'll allow me to continue the metaphor...

The success of this quirky methodology is encouraging me to try a different type of bed this year.  I'm planning a large garden bed of self-sown annuals that I'm going to try to keep the prairie grass and weeds out by hand, but to just mow down each fall to re-spread the mature seed heads.  We'll see, we'll see.