For about 10 years, I’ve been plotting to get rid of the Japanese Yew (Taxus cuspidata) in a corner of the Back Garden. Clearly, the plot has been unsuccessful so far. There are 2 reasons for this. First, I suffer from GFS (Garden Fretting Syndrome), whereby the afflicted experiences intense anxiety when faced with making choices about the garden. And second, what would the replacement be (asking this question is a symptom of GFS)?
So there was this time I stole a car. I’m not proud of it. But now that there’s not much in the garden to write about and I’ve covered our summer vacation, it may be time to come clean.
For a long time, copper was a big part of life in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Though the mines are closed today, copper inspired a rush of white settlers starting in the 1840s. Before that, indigenous people mined copper here for hundreds of years.
OK, here’s another post about our trip in July to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. One day we decided to see the Lake in the Clouds in the Porcupine Mountains, about a 45 minute drive from our cabin. We found parking at the trail head, and then it was a short walk to an escarpment with a view of the lake.
The closing of Anton’s, a neighborhood plant nursery, threatened to plunge our garden into crisis. I loved Anton’s for a lot of reasons, but particularly because it was the only place where I could buy one of my absolute favorite plants: Mexican Sunflower (Tithonia rotundifolia), a stately annual with dazzling orange daisies.
Now, it is possible to order Mexican Sunflower seeds. However, in our climate you really cannot sow them outdoors, and I was completely unprepared to start seeds inside.
So it was with a sense of crisis averted that I got hold of a copy of Starting and Saving Seeds, by Julie Thompson-Adolph. Julie sells an extensive variety of organic plants (mostly vegetables) that she grows herself from seed. She also writes on gardening for her own blog, Garden Delights, and a variety of other outlets.
Our neighbors across the street used to have a magnificent Weeping Willow (Salix babylonica) in their yard. Over the last few years, the tree has sustained storm damage several times. After our most recent storm, though, there really isn’t enough left to be worth saving.
After the snow, came the rain. Day after consecutive day of rain. Eventually, the snow was washed away. Today the rain stopped, and I took advantage of the break to move the Tulip pots into the garage.
Why move them into the garage, you may ask. Really it’s to limit the amount of moisture that gets into them. Moisture is more of a threat to most bulbs than cold. The pots are thoroughly moist right now, but not wet.
Of course, now I’ll have to keep an eye on them to make sure they don’t get too dry. There should be a hard freeze tomorrow, which will slow any dehydration.
In the midst of all this November bleakness, I thought it would be good to think back on the green days of summer. More specifically, to our July trip to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. For more information, you can also look at this post.
Yesterday morning we awoke to see the season’s first real blanket of snow. It wasn’t the blizzard that had been predicted, but still a solid 5 inches or so.
Continuing my recent post on books I’ve read or listened to this year, alphabetically by author.
Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. Non-Fiction. The
story of how Lincoln came to issue the Emancipation Proclamation and push the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, through Congress. Though against slavery, Lincoln shared many of the racial prejudices of his day and was no abolitionist at the beginning of his presidency.
However, he learned from interacting with African-American leaders like Frederick Douglass, from the war itself and especially from commanding Black troops in that war. He brought to these experiences a capacity for deep reflection (the contrast with our current President is too painful to contemplate), and came to understand that the Union could not be saved unless the Civil War became a war on slavery.
gardeninacity 