Gravel down

Remodeling has its stages if not quite its finales.  No, mine’s not done – yet, but it will be.  I have hopes for April arriving here, too, but more than anything I’ll just be glad when February is gone.  Quite surprisingly (at least to me) the two nights in the 20’s that we had a week ago did hardly any damage – except to brand new canes. They’re toast, but all the early-spring foliage is fine. That’s a relief.  In fact, looking in the rearview mirror, it was almost much ado about nothing, but then panic and worry is part of the human condition, isn’t it?


The gravel isn’t two colors.  It’s just dry and wet.  I hosed it down to settle the granite dust and compact the gravel, locking the cut stones together and making it less squishy under foot.  ‘Louis Philippe’ at the top left finally got his trimming today. He had gotten wide, and with so many side-shoots coming off thin canes he was hanging so low that you couldn’t see the daylily on his right.  He was also invading the path.  So I trimmed off bottom canes where they came off the older cane, lightening the load and allowing the canes to return to vertical.  Trimming continued, taking off dead stuff and whatever would run head on into the fence.  I did not shorten or thin him, my reasoning being that everywhere you cut Louie three or four new sprouts happen, clogging up his structure bigtime.  So right or wrong I kept the cuts to a minimum.  We’ll see how he does.
  

‘White Pet’ (center bottom)  is leafless still, never having acted like he thought it was spring.  Very smart of him, eh?  To his left is ‘Borderer’, fully leaved out and oblivious to those mid-20’s temperatures.


‘Leonie Lamesch’ at the bottom center is now leafing out, and I’m waiting to see if any basal breaks utilize the camouflage offered by the snapdragons and dianthus planted at her feet which, of course, have to start growing real quick.  The ‘Souvenir de la Malmaison’ on the left in the island isn’t as well leafed-out as her sisters in the front garden, but she’s pretty large at six feet across (but oblong).  My new shady sitting area by the tree swing came about as a result of dumping rejected crappy soil from the new ‘Mary Rose’ bed and the ‘Mme Abel Chatenay’ renovation.


Here’s the view from the swing area.


And here’s the swing area waiting for another half yard of gravel to complete it.  This is at the top of sloping ground and piling the dirt raised the area, requiring a bulkhead of sorts and a wavy one at that.  I’m really happy with it since it neatens up the garden nicely.  Going to have to invest in a string trimmer though.  That St. Augustine will be a bear to mow up to the edging.


I have visions of a bistro table and chairs over to the left… someday.  The poor, beautiful white camellia was relegated to the pot for lack of suitable camellia-soil in my garden.  It hasn’t grown a millimeter, but at least it’s alive.


The medallion of broken paver blocks is buried. I was going to remove them because the area puddles and then raise the level of the crossroad with extra gravel, but after seeing how un-far a ton of gravel goes, I decided to leave the blocks where they were as filler.  Can you foresee the bed on the left ever being widened?  I sure hope not!

That’s Louie on the left.  The daylilies had become so green and strong in the false spring. Now they’re all  pale and limp like frozen lettuce. I was thinking tomorrow might be the day they all get cut back.

I like this view.  One might get the impression that I live on a huge country estate instead of the postage-stamp sized lot hemmed in with fences.  I’ll have to somehow incorporate this view into the garden more.  I wonder how.  Did you notice that the tree previously designated for removal (extreme right) is still there?  I’m saving my pennies.


This is ‘Arcadia Louisiana Tea’.  She hasn’t really done much since being moved to this spot more than two years ago.  Believe it or not, her first year there leaf-cutter bees deleted so much leaf area that she started to decline, and I thought I would lose her.  Since she was the only one attacked, I attributed the attraction to the wax begonias I had planted all around her.  I have no proof, but I haven’t used them in the garden since and there have not been anymore leaf-cutter bee attacks.  Maybe this year she’ll impress me.  To her right on the arbor is ‘Jaune Desprez’, supposedly a huge Noisette climber but a snail-paced grower.  It’s all of five feet tall after two and a half years.  Again, maybe this year it will begin to do something… and maybe not.


On the inside of the left leg of that arbor is the pink hollyhock that came in a bag from Walmart.  I hope you are duly impressed.  I’m hoping it’s baby pink.


Here’s Louie again in all his slenderness.  I was amazed at the thinness of his canes since he’s been there since February, 2007 – one of my first five roses.  He’s more than six feet tall.


Daylily Point planted with ‘Inherited Wealth’ and ‘Marietta Dancer’.  Across the path is a baby ‘Mary Rose’, a David Austin rose that I am incredibly excited about.  Interestingly, a neighbor gave me a couple of old magazines recently because they had roses in them.  Imagine my glee when there before me was a cluster of luscious blooms of ‘Mary Rose’.  Oh, my goodness!  I can’t wait.


Of course, that’s exactly what I’ll have to do since here is all twelve inches of ‘Mary Rose’.


A postscript:  Recently moved 'Mystic Beauty' is looking really bad - like almost dead. I can't understand what the problem could have been.  'Baronne Prevost' on the other hand is a definite dead.  At the time I moved her into the big pot she had five canes.  Almost immediately they started dying.  Today she had one and a half good canes.  It took almost no strength to pull her from the pot, and she went to the pile of Louie's trimmings.  And now I'm wondering which roses will go into their places.  I've been dreaming of 'Maggie', but she's a big rose bush. (Groan) ... more digging and rose-moving in my future, I guess.