public garden, private garden
 
a summer garden’s winter
Monday, February 5, 2007
Jo’s summer garden abounds with lovely details
 
Something that has been preying on my mind every time we drove up Ocean Beach Boulevard in Long Beach was the mess two small areas we call “the little popouts” had gotten into….due to continually running out of city work time before getting to them. They had been charming when first planted, so I was gratified to come up with a winter project of cleaning them up. One is now complete except for mulching with some manure. A simple arc of Sedum ‘Autumn’ Joy’ along the edge will do, and is free, and later I might add some more colour. Then we answered the call of Jo, who had rung this morning with a request for some midwinter clean up of her cottage garden in Long Beach. I have never seen so many pine needles in her garden…must have been because of the huge windstorm we had in December. A thick fog had rolled in overnight and lasted all day, and I kept hearing a disembodied whiny voice saying things like “I’m so sore!” and “It’s too cold” and eventually realized said voice was, regrettably, mine. Eventually, I became absorbed enough in the moment of gardening that I forgot my complaints. Allan raked the garden free of pine needles while I pulled out dead pelargoniums (annual geraniums) from the window boxes and then did an extensive removal of small weeds. winter 2007 and...........................a flashback to three summers ago Jo’s garden has almost no winter interest other than the attractive fences and arbours and a few shrubs. She likes all the perennials cut down neatly in the fall, and prefers to save the room for an explosion of colour in spring and summer rather than tasteful winter evergreens. Her garden now looks quite bare but in summer is so beautiful that you would practically weep with joy to walk in the gate…Indeed, a friend told her last year that the beauty of the garden did bring tears to her eyes. It is the most exuberant and perfect-in-each-detail cottage garden that I have ever seen or had the pleasure of weeding. I got to pet two charming dogs, one a Yorkie named Cinnamon who was walking past our trailer with her owner, and one a fat white-muzzled black lab mix named Katie who kept escaping from next door and running up to me in Jo’s garden. We wonder about ToMo, one of our favourite walking-by dogs who we see sometimes in Long Beach…a friendly Akita who drags her human over to us! ToMo is getting old and we have not seen her yet this year. As is often the case, I know the dog’s name but not the person’s. (My trick for remembering ToMo’s name…which is Japanese…is “She’s a big dog; she can tow mo’.”) My friend Sheila has hurt her back, and I feel much sympathy as she was looking forward to a vigorous post-Mexico return to her Oregon garden next week. And those Phormiums I gave to our city friend were responsible for her back being out of whack today....so do be careful, sister gardeners! Oh, and we got the car stuck in soft ground at the City Works dump site….Allan had to unhook the trailer to get us out of there…It would have been embarrassing to have to call a city truck for rescue. Visit our website at tanglycottage.com http://www.tanglycottage.com/SecretGardens/Jo/SecretGardens_Jo.htmhttp://www.tanglycottage.com/SecretGardens/Jo/SecretGardens_Jo.htmhttp://www.tanglycottage.com/SecretGardens/Jo/SecretGardens_Jo.htmshapeimage_3_link_0shapeimage_3_link_1shapeimage_3_link_2