Still Stargazing

Yesterday was another fantastic day of beautiful weather, so I decided to lengthen the weekend by spending one more day at home. I ended up gardening, which is a very satisfying task for me; to actually see the end result of hard work is edifying (something that the tedious hours in a gray cubicle day after day does not supply).

It was topped off by my being able to spend the day with someone that I love to death! My brother came over and I was thrilled; he is one of my all time favorite people on Earth! I gave him a few starts of some plants, not as many as I'd liked to have given him, but hopefully these will be beautiful in his landscape when they mature.

While I was outside trying to keep out of direct sunlight, because I'm currently on antibiotics as a preventative measure for a deer tick that was found embedded in my arm (not certain how long it was there). Anyway as I was weeding along a shaded spot the fragrance of the stargazer lilies was an overpowering scent, talk about fabulous!! Here's another picture of one of the plants in bloom. It stands about four feet high and is loaded with blooms. I wish I could share the sweet scent of these as well.



CD~

Daylilies are a poppin'!

Just a quick post to show you some of my daylilies starting to bloom. Ahhhh, I love this time of year!

The first one is 'Fairy Tale Pink', and the second one is (unfortunately) a NOID. But it's such a looker I don't care that I can't identify it.






CD~

Sunshine on my shoulders makes me...sun? What sun?

We've had a lot of rain during the month of June, and the report is that we're in for more today and tomorrow. Sigh, I think I'm begining to grow mold!

Haven't had time to go out and take pictures of what's blooming this week, so I went through some of last year's photos and found this cheerful sun[flower] for this gloomy gray day. This was a 'volunteer' planted by some talented bird.



Hope you have a bright and sunny day in your part of the world!

CD~

Crowns in the garden

Okay, maybe it's a stretch, but that's what some of the blooms of the columbine flower look like to me. They are unique and profuse, just a mass of color.

Like the foxgloves in my yard, they grow in the oddest spots. Where ever the seed lands the plant develops and flourishes. If I transplant them they don't mature nearly as nicely as the "volunteers" throughout the yard do.

Here are a few pictures of some throughout our landscape. The first one shows the mass of blossoms along a wall behind the clematis.






Crown me with many crowns!

CD~

Well...the weather outside is frightful...but the fire is so delightful...

Okay, so it's not really the time of year to be singing "Let it Snow", but the weather does make it seem like we're closer to Christmas than we are to the Fourth of July. It has been cold and rainy for the past month, I don't remember what a sunny blue sky looks like anymore. It feels more like early spring than it does late spring/early summer. Don't get me wrong, I am very thankful for the water and how it replenishes the earth, for the past eight summers we're had a deficit in rainfall, and this change to a wetter spring isn't really all that bad.

All that being said, just thought I'd share a couple of photos of some of the spring blossoms that I was able to capture with the camera this year.






Something to brighten your rainy day.

CD~

Romeo shouldn't climb this, leave that to Jackmanii

Yesterday I posted photos of the clematis ‘Jackmanii’ on a trellis that I had designed and thought I’d share the directions for it [just in case someone wanted to try and replicate it]. The trellis was something I came up with because I was sick of rotting wood and rusting metal. What the garden centers had in stock was really high priced, and even if it was affordable it wasn’t anything I wanted to put in my landscape. Just a word of warning, although it is an easy concept, if you don’t know how to figure a forty-five degree angle cut and don’t use power tools, you might not want to attempt this.

~To buy~
PVC lattice (whatever size/color you want, I used a white 2’ wide pre-sized piece, made it easier)
PVC lattice edging (enough to frame the piece of lattice)
At least a 30” length piece of 1” PVC pipe (for 6-5" standoffs-I used white to match the lattice)
Six 6” lag bolts (stainless steel, non rust)
A small can of PVC glue

~Tools~
Hand saw to cut edging and the PVC pipe
Builder’s square to figure a 45 degree angle, or a miter box if you have one
Rubber mallet/dead blow mallet
Drill
1” paddle bit and a 1/8” drill bit [some small sized drill bit to drill a pilot hole]

1) Cut and miter the corners of the edging. I honestly don’t know how to put it into words on how to figure the lengths, so that once you miter the corners and slide the edge on it fits snugly and there are no gaps at the corners [my nephew and dad were geniuses at this stuff]. Measure a few times before you cut, and take into account that the lattice sits in the channel on the edge. I’d fit a piece, then mark the next piece with pencil and then cut it.

2) Hammer the edging on using the rubber mallet. I had my nephew do this, because it was so difficult and needed a really stronger hand. It worked best to hammer it on by starting at the corner and sliding it on. It fits so tightly you won’t need any glue, the edging won’t go anywhere once you’ve got it in place. Again, this was tough.

3) Cut six 5” lengths of the PVC pipe, these will be used as stand-offs to keep the lattice away from the wall.

4) You’re going to now figure the placement of the stand-off pieces along the edging. You need 6 of them total along the length (3 on each side), one at the top, the middle and the bottom (top and bottom at least 4 inches from the top and bottom edges). If you were making a wider piece you would of course use more standoffs for better stability. Mark the spots, centering them on the edging. Then using the 1” paddle bit, drill a ¼” depression for each (DO NOT DRILL ALL THE WAY THROUGH). You want the depression deep enough to hold the standoffs in place, but not too deep to ruin the integrity of the lattice. The reason I thought to do this was, because they help seat the 5” pipe lengths perpendicularly and once glued they’ll stay in place, and not snap off.

5) Next dry fit your PVC pipe pieces and make certain they sit perpendicular to the lattice. Remove pipe pieces and set aside. Then using a 1/8” drill bit, drill a hole at the center of each 1” hole on the lattice, going all the way through. These are pilot holes to screw the lag bolts through from the front, makes it easier to get them centered if you do this.

6) Using the PVC glue, glue the pipe pieces into the holes. If there is any blue marking on your pieces, face the marking to the center of the lattice, you don’t want this to show once it’s hung. Let this dry as per the directions on the glue can.

7) Now you can lag bolt this to your house, barn, tool shed, brick wall, etc. I recommend that you use two people for this. It was tough getting it in the right spot and level. I had my nephew hold it for me, while I checked for placement and level.

I know a lot of people are purists and want cedar lattice, well I don’t have the time or the inclination to repair/paint these every year, and my creation looks as clean and as new as it did when I first put it up a few years ago. Very crisp and clean, love the white on the yellow house.

CD~

Reaching for the stars

There is a clematis growing up the western side of our house that is pretty common, but is a workhorse and should be incorporated into everyone's landscape somewhere, even if only to climb freely up into a shrub. It never fails to perform and has been a profuse bloomer for me for the past 25 years.

This is a picture of Clematis "Jackmanii' growing up a trellis I put together and bolted to the side of the house.

Although you can't tell from the pics I have it climbs to the roof line, definitely a showy vine.



For anyone wanting to check out the different clematis available, there is a great website that is very easy to navigate. It's a UK site named Clematis on the web and the URL is http://www.clematis.hull.ac.uk/ Found this to be a very informative site, details the pruning groups, diseases, searches by name and color. Check it out.

CD~

Sunshine on a rainy day

We've been inundated with rain for the past month. Everything is lush and green, and the flowers are blooming despite the gray days. The blossoms are totally oblivious to the depressing environment, which is a wonderful thing.

Here are some peonies, the yellow one from my tree peony. It's blooms are scented with a light lemon fragrance. The pink ones are bushes that were with the house when we bought it. The young boy that lived in the house worked for a farmer one summer and was paid in peonies. That was over 80 years ago, and even though that lad has long since grown up and moved on, the plants are still going strong.





CD~

Ode to a rose...

Don't you love roses? I do, they're such a contradicton with their woody stems, thorns, then they have symetrical leaf sets, and wonderful fragrant flowers that whorl around protecting the delicate center of stamens. Such a nasty shrub, and yet such refined and delicate blooms.

Here's a photo of the candy stripe rose in bloom in my garden.



CD~

Blood, Sweat and Beauty [no tears this time]

There's nothing more rewarding to me than to see the plants I've toiled over year after year reward me with a flush of flowers.

Sigh, the rain is a blessing, but I can't wait for them to abate a bit so I can sit outside with my coffee in the morning and absorb the peacefulness. What a way to start the day!

Here are two more clematis in bloom,




CD~

More flora

Here is another picture from my garden. This is a clematis I've had for a few years now, it's 'Elsa Spath'. The first blooms are between eight and nine inches in diameter.

The world is abloom!!

Just thought I'd share some of my world with you. Some iris pictures from my garden. All the April showers did bring the May flowers. Enjoy!







CD~

Winner, winner, one sea pod!

Are artists collectors or are we simply glorified packrats? As an artist I’ve collected enough “stuff” to keep me occupied even long after they put me in the home! I’ve amassed piles of reference materials and all the different medium that’s necessary to create everything imaginable. Paper, oil paints, watercolors, ink, pencils, charcoal, clay, papier mache, etc., you name it and most likely I have it.

Have you noticed that quite a few stores have gone out of business in the past decade or so? I’ve, in most cases, let the packrat in me override the sensible part of my brain when I go to check out what’s left on the shelf at those wonderful rock bottom prices. Its almost as if a tiny voice in my brain cries out in the midst of a sale "LOOK, LOOK, LOOK", “You never know when you may need this!!”, and “BUY, BUY, BUY!!” Albeit some things are necessary, like tee shirts and underwear, but there was the time I went to one of these closeouts and bought, bag after bag after bag of silk flowers, I wondered if I had a problem. But in my defense, it was too good a deal to pass up, items were marked down to 95% off, and I only ended up spending $100.00!

There was another chain that closed shortly after that which carried a side line of artist supplies along with their seasonal inventory. They had everything you needed to do any craft devised by the human mind. When they went out of business I made daily trips to the store on my lunch hour and bought massive quantities of water colors, pads of paper, beads, jewelry findings, skeins of yarn, embroidery floss, piles of felt, and the wax, dyes and stylus to create those beautiful Ukrainian Easter eggs. The savings were phenomenal, but I was so embarrassed by the amount of things I’d bought that after the third trip I left all of the “finds” in the trunk of my car (some of them stayed hidden there for over a year), besides, my room is to the point that it can’t handle one more bag of anything, it‘s ready to implode.

Sigh, what fond memories of these final sales. And as I think back it was at one of these shopping episodes that my sister and I started a friendly competition. It very simply boiled down to whoever spent the most money won. Now keep in mind that she and I are really frugal, so we never really spent a lot of money, but regardless of the small amount expended invariably, for some odd reason, I always seemed to win!

I thought about this a few Saturdays ago when I went to a ceramic supply store with my brother and our friend. We had a great time! I bought little odds and ends, ribs, texturing tools, sponges, a rasp, ribbon tools, trimming tools, a dozen bottles of underglazes and 50 pounds of a low fire porcelain. Now because the place was only open to the public one Saturday a month, they gave everyone a 10% discount. I was in my glory so to speak, because all of the items were discounted between 10 and 50 percent, nothing was full price. It was a heady experience, until much to my dismay I paid the gal and realized that the $170 I’d spent only amounted to half a plastic grocery bag of stuff and a 50 pound box of mud. I screwed my face up into an inane smile, looked at my brother and said, “I win”. Well of course he laughed, and then thankfully he took me to a terrific Indian restaurant afterwards to assuage my sorrows. Ah, the nan and that hot cauliflower dish, to die for!! But that’s another post altogether.

Although I felt like I’d lost at the checkout counter on Saturday, during the following Thursday pottery session the tools I’d gotten turned out to be fabulous and I realized I had won. Once again I’d sculpted something very organic, but this time it had a textile quality about it. Proudly I twirled it on the banding wheel. The teacher loved it and I was very pleased indeed! It was definitely sci-fi, and worthy of being considered a sibling to the Audrey sculpture I’d made the week before, but sadly my brother once again put everything into perspective and compared my masterpiece to Sponge Bob squarepant’s pineapple. Then much to my dismay he heartily sang the accompanying tune. Sigh, $170 to make a pineapple from under the sea! Oh well, I can’t wait to hear what he likens the next creation of mine to. I must say he does have a creative mind, which of course dictates that he’s a packrat too, so he’s not all bad and that’s probably why I love him as much as I do.

And so in deference to everything subsea that inspires us and to my beloved brother we all break into chorus, "We all live in a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine...!" LOL!

CD

Confessions of a Fake Flower Aficionado

Today is an exceptionally grey day, its cold, rainy, and of course I’m stuck in a drab grey cubicle, which just seems to heighten the oppressiveness of it all. I’ve tried to soften the utilitarian look by hanging up framed pictures and photos, putting a lamp on the desk and adding a couple pots of silk flowers. Many of my co-workers have commented on the orchid plant and the tall square vase of yellow tulips on the book case. On a glum day like today they really do brighten up the place.

A few weeks ago one of the engineers asked me if the orchid was hard to take care of in this plant hostile environment. That gave me such a chuckle, I love that they look so real. This brings to mind all the silk flowers I’ve amassed over the past 10 years and how pretty they are. Then I thought you know, I’m probably the only person in the world with a silk flower collection. As I think about what I have squirreled away up in the attic its probably a good thing that I’ve stopped buying them. I must have spent a small fortune on these faux blooms, at least they’re all safe and sound. Thankfully Rubbermaid has those stackable storage bins, what would I ever have done without them? There are 10 or so up there. Should have bought Rubbermaid stock, who knew? Then my mind wanders back to the flowers and I wondered why it was I had stopped buying them and came to the sad realization that it’s because the stores that I frequented are now out of business. I’d go to Rag Shop, Frank’s Nursery, The Pink Sleigh, Treasure Island, McCrory’s, and Sterns. Sigh, so sad.

Now I wouldn’t pick up any old stem, it had to look real, and let me tell you there are some stunning flowers out there. Then there were the arrangements I’d put together. My favorite was a massive piece over three feet high that looked like something out of a 17th century Dutch still-life oil painting with all the different varieties of tulips and Spring flowers, it was sumptuous.

It all started years ago while I attended a tiny church, I volunteered to put flowers in the sanctuary every Sunday. That was soooo fun! I’ll never forget one instance during a very hot Summer (no air conditioning) when I simply put zinnias and marigolds together in a hand thrown stoneware pitcher, it was fabulous! After the service I watched as one of the women in the church picked up the pitcher and carried it out of the sanctuary. I hurried after her and asked her where she was going. She said they always took the fresh flowers to the local nursing home so that the flowers weren’t wasted. Well, I told her the flowers were silk, not real. She argued with me, and even sniffed them to prove her point. I simply pulled a flower from the bunch and showed her that it was fake. Boy was she shocked. Well, that cured her from trying to walk off with my flowers! LOL! Oh, and I almost forgot my silk flower arrangement goal, which was to have the flowers so tall on the communion table that their height would block the speaker in the pulpit. Sigh, only once did I come close. Later the pastor said he felt like he was peeking out of the jungle like Artie Johnson from “Laugh-In”. My mind excitedly shouted " Success!", as I gave the pastor a innocently surprised look. Sigh, those were the good old days. I’ll have to pull the bins out and put something together. After all, Spring is only three weeks away! Yeah!

CD

Unfair Advantage

My weekdays are spent working in a place that has an overabundance of PhD’s. From my perspective most are mired in an excessive amount of arrogance, although I’m often told that they are brilliant, which I guess is supposed to make up for their lack of social skills. So I thought “brilliant?” “really?” Hmmm, I reached for the dictionary where the first definition of brilliant states that it is an adjective meaning; Full of light; shining. To be fair they are brilliant intellectually, which is the last definition of the word by the way, but as it relates to their personalities unfortunately they’re not the brightest crayons in the box.

In any event, last week was “Engineer’s Week” and one of the things they tried this year was to delve into people’s personal lives to see what makes them tick. So they opened it up to include everyone and asked for submissions in the form of a slide show presentation containing 50 photos or thereabouts of what you love to do in your spare time. I thought well, I’m not an engineer, but I have a life, I’ll send in some of my colorful garden photos, brilliant! And of course I raised my hand and committed to participate.

Then a few days before the deadline I started to pull everything together, plenty of time I told myself, but this became a real pain in the neck, because for the past year my computer has had this problem and I’ve been too preoccupied with life to take the time to buy a new one, I haven’t been able to download or upload photos, instead I’ve been buying new flash cards for the camera, they’re so cheap. Well of course I forgot about this little problem until I attempted to burn a CD (not so brilliant). I tried to outwit the thing, I put a blank CD in the drive and then dragged and dropped the files from the folders on my hard drive onto the CD. It was hit or miss, out of four attempts only one CD actually burned photos. Talk about heightened frustration, I wanted to throw it out the window!! Ultimately I scraped 50 photos together of flowers from last season, put them in the required file format and sent them in.



The response from the employees was very robust. Then unbeknownst to me and the other participants the organizers decided to make it a contest, with prizes no less, so of course more entries poured in. In the end we all sat through two lunch hours worth of photos projected on a huge screen. It was a lot of fun actually, most of the folks had traveled and presented their trips from all over the world, some boring, some breathtaking. Then came mine, and they were more beautiful when they were enlarged to that size if I say so myself. When the following photo of a bee on a phlox bloom flashed up on the vast screen everyone said in unison, “Oooh!” as if it was scripted. Very funny.



Then once it was all over, we were asked to write our choice on a ballot and pop it into a box. Of course I voted for myself! The next day the votes were counted, the winners announced, and there it was, I won first prize. I found that I liked winning, especially given the IQ of the competition. But it really wasn’t fair, being that I'm an artist my photos stood out from the rest. But as a result of the photo essays many of the self-centered brainiacs now speak to me, so I guess they aren’t all socially inept after all, I think they are just shy. Go figure.

CD