My garden feels abandoned

And so do my readers, I think.

There was a time when I could not imagine losing interest in my garden and in the blog that described it. Alas, life is full of curveballs that we don’t see coming. Mine was stress. Stress from caring for my much loved senior dog, Ellie, and stress from my job and my inability to keep the house presentable. In mid-August I decided to retire effective September 21st, and with broken hearts DH and I had the vet put Ellie to sleep on August 30th. If you’re a pet lover, I don’t need to tell you about the grief that ensued with the loss of my baby after sixteen and a half years. So here I am. In some ways better, and in some ways not quite there yet. The positive thing about having an ugly, weed-infested garden staring at you everyday – well, not everyday since without Ellie I have no reason to go outside – is that I have the rest of my life to make it beautiful, so I don’t have to rush or stress over it. Except that it really is ugly.

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Spurge has overrun my gravel.



And has even invaded the beds where I was always johnny-on-the-spot to pull the little weed seedlings before they took hold.



But there are things about which I am hopeful. This is my newest acquisition, ‘Stephen’s Big Purple’, an audacious rose to place on Ellie’s grave. This photo was taken two weeks ago, and now SBP has two flower buds.



‘Hermosa’ was suddenly sprouting new canes two weeks ago and is now nice and leafy green and blooming.



The ‘Purple Coneflowers’ are still setting flower buds, amazingly. They really have been bloom machines all summer and now in the fall.



One of the ‘Clotilde Soupert’ bushes is lovely, green and blooming in spite of my neglect. The other one isn’t.



I have tons of seed heads from all the echinacea plants that dominated the garden this year. I’m thinking they’d make great Christmas presents for half the world.



There are several rose bushes in this photo, but you don’t see any roses, do you? Even accounting for my neglect, this was a very strange summer for the roses with all the rain we had. Maybe the roses were stressed, too. And maybe a little sad with me.



It was a great summer for butterflies and bumble bees. Funny thing… yesterday with a bunch of weeds in my hand I felt an odd vibration going through my hand. After several moments of confusion I thought maybe I should drop the weeds. There on the gravel was the bumble bee I had picked up with the weeds. A very strange sensation that was.



The Pentas performed beautifully on the front edge of the ‘Le Vesuve’ bed. I chose red for the sake of the butterflies, thinking it wouldn’t clash with the pink blooms of ‘Le Vesuve’ since the buds are red. Well, they did clash to my eye, but they were beautiful anyway and still are.



‘Le Vesuve’ had a gorgeous bloom this day, but he has not had a good year. So much dieback and so few leaves and flowers. I wonder if I need to dig him up like I did ‘Mme Abel Chatenay’ and deeply re-excavate his bed. I fed him good yesterday and sprinkled him with fish. A bit of advice for you: do not apply fish emulsion and stay in the immediate area for several hours afterwards. Man, that is an obnoxious smell!



The most wonderful addition to the garden this year was this dahlia, ‘Le Baron’. The two rhizomes I planted in spring grew big and beautiful, and they are still blooming! Through the heat and the wet of this monsoon summer their flowers never seemed to mind. One thing I’ll do differently next year is to place cheap tomato cages over the young plants, because they got so big they fell over onto ‘Full Moon Rising’ and baby ‘Maggie’. Fortunately, falling over didn’t seem to bother them though. They just sprouted new growth upward from the thick horizontal stems. If I can keep them tidy, these will be beautiful throughout the garden. They’re a deeper purple than my camera captures.



So I’m off and running on this blog again. Thank you, Sunnync, for posting today on the Antique Roses Forum that you missed me. There’s no tellin’ how long I would have continued to procrastinate on this new beginning. Some of the upcoming topics I foresee in our future are weeds, making the decision to expel roses, rejiggering the garden (again), weeds, and probably more weeds. There's a lot of weeding ahead of me!

I long have believed that everything has a reason, so I’m thinking that someone out there is in this boat with me… not wanting to face up to a wreck of a garden and maybe even a little sad to boot. So lets see if we can’t squeeze a little (or a lot) of joy from this gardening thing and get the love back. Together I think we can do it. The keyword being together.