Hot Weather Makes Me Ill

Tuesday's High: 99
Wednesday's High: 101
Thursday's High: 102

Rain Since June 1st: 2.5"

(Linguistic Note for Non-Southerners: In common parlance down here, "ill" is synonymous with "cranky, irritated, and generally pissed off." It is pronounced with two syllables. A person in this state should not be trifled with.)

Every day that I arrive home before dark, I walk around each of my flowerbeds to see how things are doing. On Tuesday, the rose looked fine. Today, I go out and find every leaf brown and brittle. This is a rose that has thrived on neglect for years in the hottest part of the yard. Was this week just the final straw?

Weather like this makes me wonder why I even bother. I come home and find my plants dead or dying because I lack both the time and the money to soak them with water every day. Then I spend what few hours I have between work and bedtime standing out in the jungle heat, holding a hose and getting bitten by mosquitoes that are probably carrying West Nile virus, just so I can keep my few remaining plants that look like this...

from dying.

Maybe I ought to just give up gardening, cocoon myself in air-conditioned comfort, lie on the sofa eating Chee-Tos and watching stupid television shows like the rest of America, never setting foot outside except to go from house to car to Wal-Mart. A lot of people seem perfectly happy doing that.

But no, I'm that idiot with the watering can, trying to coax plants back to life, promising them, swearing to them that if they can just hang on a bit longer, a cloud will appear in the sky and their roots will again know the taste of rain. They no longer believe me.

Problems in the Garden

A while back, I wrote about the ugly parts of my garden; today, I want to show you some particular plants that are giving me trouble. If you have any suggestions as to what's causing the problems, please let me know. (Click on each photo to see a larger view.)

OK--I know the solution to this one: Move the plant, stupid! Every summer, this astilbe gets dry and brown because it sits in the sun half the day. A similar plant, five feet away, but in shade, does fine. Add one more thing to my list for fall.



The sun may be the culprit here, too. Several of the leaves on this camellia look sunburned. In addition to that, though, the plant's color just doesn't look good. Possible causes: lack of some nutrient, (iron? nitrogen?) poorly drained soil, gardener's incompetence???











These "Red Fox" Veronica (Veronica spicata) are growing nicely, but haven't put out the first bloom. The tag said they bloom in late summer, but I wonder how late...if you have some, when does yours bloom?









Compare the leaves of the red maple on the left with the one on the right. I wonder if this tree is suffering the effects of being dug up and moved last winter, then having to endure two months with only an inch of rain. Lesson here: be sure you know where you want the tree before you plant it.








This spring, I planted several Japanese Hollies (Ilex crenata "Soft Touch") in my front bed. One promptly died; the other looked like it was dying, but I cut it way back and it seemed to recover. Now it looks like half the plant is dead, and whatever it is seems to be spreading. Wonder if Voldemort put a killing curse on it? Where is Neville Longbottom when you need him? (Note: don't click the links if you don't want to know how Harry Potter ends.)

I took the dead one back to the nursery to exchange it, and felt kind of stupid because killing a Japanese Holly is like killing ivy--you almost have to try to kill it. I made sure to emphasize that I had five more planted in the same bed that were doing just fine, so the problem was obviously with the plant and not the person who planted it, but the clerk looked dubious. Maybe I should bring photos of the good ones if I have to return this one.


It's always something, isn't it? Of course, I'm thankful that these are the biggest problems in my life right now. Could be a heck of a lot worse. Happy Gardening!

What's Working and What Isn't

Mid July is a good time to take stock of what is working in the garden and what isn't. Primarily because it is too hot to pull weeds and too dry to plant anything. Plus, it occurred to me that the photos I post on Leave Me Alone, I'm Digging are carefully selected to show my garden in the best possible light. In other words, there's a LOT that you don't see here.

Serendipitously, I came across this post from In The Garden Online where Colleen challenged garden bloggers to post "The Good, the Bad, and The Ugly" from our gardens.

"How daunting it must be," she writes, "for someone just starting out as a gardener to see those perfect images in Fine Gardening, those immaculate instant landscapes on HGTV, and, dare I say it, even some of the photos we present on our garden blogs, showing our blooms at the peak of their beauty, the veggie garden only after it's been thoroughly weeded, the perennial garden only after all of the toys the children have strewn there have been picked up..."

So, it is in that spirit that I offer you the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly from my own garden:

THE GOOD
About the only part of my garden that looks good right now is the Butterfly Garden. It is one of those totally thrown-together looks that actually works: Lantana, Butterfly Bushes, Coneflowers, Shasta Daisies, and Daylilies.





THE BAD

This section of my front bed (top) looked nice in the spring (right) when it was filled with bright yellow daffodils, pink creeping phlox, and pansies. For the past couple of summers, we've planted impatiens here to provide color throughout the hot months, but we decided that rather than spend ridiculous sums of money for annuals that would last a few months, we would spend ridiculous sums of money on new paint and carpets. I had vague intentions of planting some perennials there (maybe some balloon flowers to contrast with that lone clump of coreopsis) but somehow haven't gotten around to it yet. It actually looks worse than in the photo.


THE UGLYThis is a section of my back border that I recently expanded to make room for daylilies from my grandparents' house. I haven't been able to buy mulch for this area (see above re: paint and carpet) so the weeds and grass have marched right in and are waging guerilla warfare against the daylilies. Our new yard swing looks like it was just plopped down half way in the flowerbed and halfway out. The reason for this is that we plopped it down halfway in the flowerbed and halfway out. One day this fall I'm going to mulch and plant around the base of the swing so it doesn't look stupid. (I'm looking at my to-do list and fall is shaping up to be a mighty busy time!)


Finally, the hole in my fence, and what will be a hole the next time we have high winds.

This is the first year that I've really paid attention to when things bloom. The first couple of years here I was more focused on simply getting beds and borders laid out and plants in the ground (and not necessarily in that order). I'm finding that I need to keep an eye out for things that bloom later in the summer, toward July and August, and can go for millenia without water, since every summer we seem to fall into a drought and find ourselves praying for a small hurricane.

"Perfection, " Colleen says, "is a total waste of time, not to mention an unattainable, energy-draining goal that leads to frustration." My garden is never going to be perfect. Once I get all the sequence of blooms, bed layouts, contrasting textures and such the way I want them, I will find that something else needs work. A tree will have died, another one will have grown somewhere else, and I'll have to rethink my plantings to take into account the changed patterns of sun and shade. Or maybe I will have grown peculiar like some people I know and decided that I cannot abide anything red in my garden. The best any of us can strive for is as Henry Mitchell says in my sidebar, "gardens that we are pleased with, more or less." In the end, it's not really about perfection, it's not even about achieving a particular "look." It's about a place, right out the back door where we can find some sanity and beauty in a world that has gone terribly wrong.

A rabbi asked his young son why he always went to a secluded corner in the garden to pray. "Don't you realize that God is the same everywhere?" he asked.

"Yes," the boy replied. "But I'm not."