Missing Spring

          This could be taken two ways:  I miss Spring, the season, in that it really isn't here yet, or, I probably won't be around my home this year when Spring comes and thus will miss the start of the season.  I am meaning the second part here.  In the three plus years we have lived in this house, I have been diligently planting spring flowers.  The first year, in my misunderstanding of the British countryside and wildlife, I planted around 100 tulips, all of which made the local deer quite happy and me quite miserable because I ended up with 3 stalks and 2 tulip flowers at the end of it all.  While I was exclaiming proudly to my new neighbor, who had great experience in this matter, she informed me that the tulips would not see the light of day as the deer would eat them all.  Yep.  At least I had also planted daffodils and some lilies and those all grew and were lovely.

          So each year, I planted more and more daffodils and added crocus, more lilies, and anything else that looked like it might be unappetizing to deer (getting the lowdown from my neighbor).  I say, "I planted" as if I did the actual work but the house came with a gardener and I would get the bulbs and he would plant them where i said, "they would look good there, don't you think?".  Of course, he always agreed with me.  And more and more bulbs went into the ground.  

          As the house garden came already planted with some lovely rhododendrons, various grasses, some of which flower, some camellias, some fuchsia, some azaleas and a couple of lone rose bushes, my garden was looking more and more lovely each spring.  Plus there are plenty of different varieties of green bushes around and some red bushes, black bushes and other stuff that my gardener knows but I still have no clue.   Now I have to ask my gardener "Is there room" and I have not purchased any new bulbs for this year other than some tulips (yes 20 tulips - all in netted pots so no deer can eat them).

          So Spring comes, starts early, green shoots start coming through the ground, all over the garden, sometimes a bit early and then get covered with snow again, but they keep coming.  As we walked around the garden this weekend, I realized that almost all my daffodils have pushed through the ground.  The crocus are about to burst into bloom.  The rhododendrons  and camillas  and several other bushes have plenty of buds, and the roses are retaliating as well.   My garden is so dang beautiful when all these flowers bloom.  

          And then it hit me.  We are going on holiday soon - a slightly longer than usual holiday - actually leaving my daughter at home for once, instead of the other way around when she jaunts off to work in Africa and leaves us behind.  AND there is a very good chance that I will miss the blooming of the garden in a big way!   I am sure that everything will not bloom and die during the time we are gone but I am also fairly sure that most of the daffodils and crocuses will be up and well on their way to being gone by the time we return.   How sad for me!!!  

          Spring is such a joyous time here because it comes after such nasty winters, whether there was a lot of snow and rain or just cold weather.  Everyone here loves Spring.  You can hardly get into one of the local DYI stores or gardening stores because everyone is there getting ready for Spring.  When we lived in Houston, wasn't such a big deal.  There were flowers blooming all year-long so nobody was overly excited for Spring.  But HERE, it's a lovely occasion to celebrate the season, watch the glorious colors and plants come to life in your garden, shake off the winter doldrums, and start being outside a lot more.   I have fallen into this category of being delighted when spring arrives but this year I will be in the tropics, in a rainforest, and not staring at my garden, just delirious with joy at all my daffodils and crocuses and tulips and rhododendruns and such.  Not the best of planning on my part.   Well, luckily, we will probably be here for next year's spring as well.  I think I'd better go get some more bulbs.

Death and Destruction in the Garden

Death and Destruction in the Garden

            I love my English Garden.  It has numerous plants in it I haven’t even identified yet and they delight me when they suddenly bloom at odd times during the year.  Also, I have spent a good deal of time in the garden putting in new plants and working on the old ones and doing general gardening type things, EXCEPT the weed pulling and cutting grass and raking leaves which I hate and for which we have a gardener.  Love my gardener too as he lets me know which plants are weeds and should be removed or when to put in bulbs of one kind or another.  That said, be advised that I have a very dark brown thumb, almost black, in that in other locations we have lived, my garden has never prospered or done well and I am very good at killing things, like the very plants that are now blooming voraciously.  Now that this dark secret about me is out in the open, my English garden seems to forgive my dark brown thumb and things grow in spite of it so another reason to love it.

            Last week I found some dahlias on sale at the local nursery and couldn’t resist getting a 6 pack and sticking them wherever I could find an empty spot.  They were doing quite well last week in their new homes.  However, this week, it looks as if war has been declared on them.  Every blossom was gone and every leaf eaten clean away.  I have a green stick with smaller green sticks sprouting out of in in each place where previously there was a nice dahlia blossom.  And the destruction did not appear to be limited to the one species.  Some of my lilies looked to have some munch marks on them and the potato vine.  As I walker further around my house, I could see the hop plant had a few signs of destruction too.  Some killers stalk my garden.

            I have the means and technology and money to spring for the best to get rid of   these monsters of death.  Normally, I like to live and let live but when it comes to my garden, I am going to blast away the slugs and snails that come to feast on my hard work.  It’s not easy keeping things alive with a dark brown thumb and I don’t need the help to kill something.  I’m sure that the slugs and snails have a purpose but I haven’t figured out what it is yet.  So out comes the slug killer and I sprinkled it around my plants yesterday while evilly thinking of death to the guerrillas.

            YUCK.  I am the dispenser of death to these slugs but I don’t want to see it.  I am faint of heart when it comes to the actual visual effect.  I want to kill in the darkness and have them tidily slither away to die in a dark corner and fertilize my garden.  So I was less than delighted when I came home from dropping my husband off at work and found two huge banana slugs (not sure what they are called here but they are big and evil looking and nasty looking and BIG and slimy and nasty) that had crawled out of the garden and onto the brick wall, probably hoping to evade death and destruction by escaping the pellets of poison.  It was too late for them though and they were busy releasing their slime on my brick wall as they crawled to their death.  It is their death curse to release as much slime as possible.  Ugh.  Several of their smaller cousins were there too.  Take that to me they seemed to be saying!  Kill us but we will slime to the final end!  I managed to scoop them all onto a paper and stomped them to ensure their immediate death.  I didn’t want them to suffer long agonizing death throes.  I am not a monster after all. 

            The deed is done.  I put out more slug killer in case I missed a spot.  But now my brick wall is slimed and I have no clue how to get it off of the bricks.  The slime seems almost permanently adhered to the bricks and it’s thick and gooey and just all around ugly.  I am not touching it at all.  This is England, after all.  It will rain a lot this week or next and hopefully Mother Nature will forgive me for slaying some of her noxious creatures and clean my brick wall for me.

            The war continues I know.  Some will escape and come back for the next round of munching on my precious plants.  The scents must call to them and they probably come marching up from the golf course and the woods to the lure of my plants.  I’ll get them though.  I’ll get them.

I've Lost My Bee

I’ve Lost My Bee L

            Every morning when I go out to the garden to do the peanut thing and bird feeder and fish feeder and such, I check on certain plants.  I know you are supposed to pick off the dead blooms on a lot of plants so they will keep putting their energy into making new blooms.  So I was always stopping by my fuchsia and picking off the dead blooms.  Every day there was a huge bee that would fly up from around the bottom of the plant to see what I was doing messing with his blooms.  After all, he is making honey and doing grand things like that and I’m just taking away his pretty things.

            I learned last week at Highgrove gardens that there are brown bees and black bees.  I think we are supposed to want the black bees as they are hardier, sting less often, and are not the bees that are endangered.  Supposedly the bees in the United States that are disappearing are the brown bees.  I hope I don’t have it backwards.  Think I’ll need to look it up again. 

            Anyway, I thought I would check the next morning to see if my fuchsia bee was a black bee or brown bee.  He wasn’t there!  It was the first time in over 2 weeks that he had not come flying up to see me and check out what I was doing.  OK, maybe I was there at a bad time for him and he was off checking on little bees or something.  Next day, nada.  Next day, zilch.  Next day, un uh.  Are you getting the picture?  It has been a week now and I haven’t seen my bee in all that time.  Drat.  Is there something wrong with my fuchsia that he doesn’t like it anymore?  Can a bee suck all the goodness out of a flower and then move on and not come back?  Do bees find new areas of interest and get tired of the same old plant?  OR has he just gone through his life cycle?  Apparently he could have reached the end and I will never know what he was.  I miss him.  Think he was teaching me not to be afraid of bees and he had not finished his instruction yet.  Maybe one of his relatives will come and finish the course.

Chelsea Flower Show

Chelsea Flower Show

May 26, 2012

            While we are living in England, we want to be sure and do all the quintessential English things.  Things that the English people do and not necessarily the tourists do.  Things that you read about the Brits being all over an event and a big deal and such.  Things like the Chelsea Flower Show which we have heard about for years and years as being such a big deal.  So naturally I got tickets to attend and according to some of my ex-pat friends, I was lucky to get them.  I did join every organization possible like the Royal Horticultural Society so I got my tickets through them.

            Haven’t quite figured out the timing yet of special events as to when the Royals go and the Beautiful People and the Rich and Famous.  So far, we have managed to miss them by a day at most of the events.  We attended the flower show on the last day.  Missed the Royals by a mile this time as they went on the first day.  OK.  I’m making notes for next year on the timing.  So far we have only managed to see The Earl of Wessex otherwise known as Prince Edward and we might possibly have seen the Duke of York, otherwise known as Prince Andrew but we needed binoculars to see if it was him for sure so not sure he counts.

            Back to the Chelsea Flower Show.  We had to schedule an event on top of it, naming taking our driving theory and hazard perception tests that morning.  Very happy to say we passed.  Could have been a really dreary day at the flower show had we not passed.  So we did not get there at the opening but wandered into the show sometime around 11 a.m. or so.  We have discovered that events, like many in most countries, are a good opportunity for vendors to sell stuff.  Usually it is related to the theme of the event, such as selling boots and saddles at the Windsor Horse Show and selling tractors and garden tools at the Chelsea Garden Show but it is a place to buy and sell and sell and buy and buy and buy.  Being the good ex-pats living in country that we are, we support the local economy – a LOT.  At the Windsor Horse Show, I bought a pair of boots.  At the Chelsea Flower Show, I bought a hat.  See how good we are!

            After we waded through the first rows of vendors, we finally got to some exhibits of flowers and carefully prepared designs of gardens.  It was quite difficult to get close enough to see it very well and so it continued on down the row.  My husband and I are having an ongoing debate now on what exactly is an English garden.  Is it well-manicured and flower beds just so and everything maintained and clipped and trimmed and in its place?  Our next door neighbor has a yard like that.  Or is it a higgledy piggledy hodgepodge of plants that seem to have no pattern but just grow and grow and there might be paths through the hedges and flowers and there might not be but just a riot of plants haphazardly growing happily in the brief spurt of sunshine.  Our garden is kind of like that but we don’t know if it is because it was supposed to be like that or because there were renters in the house before us that didn’t care about the garden.   The designs we saw at the flower show could have gone either way!  So the debate continues.

            We finally got to the big building of plants and went in to see what they had.  Wow, first we came upon the carnivorous plants.  Ohhhh, I want some.  I could really use some in my house for the flies that get in whenever the windows are open.   They were wonderful.  And then we wandered around the building seeing a lot of familiar plants but in more glorious colors and blooms than usual plus a great many plants we didn’t know.  That part of the show was wonderful.

            Finally we needed to get something to drink and decided we had to have a Pimm’s as it is also the English thing to do.  Got our Pimm’s and then there is nowhere to sit.  People are hanging onto chairs and tables as if their lives depend on it and others are seated on the ground which there is no way my arthritis will allow that and be able to stand again.  My husband is sure he read there is pizza somewhere so now becomes the Chelsea Flower show Pizza Hunt Marathon.  We finally track it down long after our Pimm’s is gone and by then we have traipsed from one end of the show to the other.  Luckily there was a place to sit and eat the pizza and then we had the opportunity to see the other end of the show as we came out of the food court.

            We were only there a few houses and decided we had really seen most of the exhibits and most of the flowers.  We had oohed and ahhed at the exhibits, exclaimed over the sculptures, slavered over the wind chimes and bobbin’ robin’s and drooled over the insect eating plants so time to leave.

            It was a good experience and a good show but I have to say that it wasn’t as spectacular as I had expected from all the hype.  A good day at any flower show would rival it.  Now I’ll probably lose my membership in RHS for smashing it but I am glad we went and we’ll go again next year if just to drool over the carnivorous plants again.