Spring is Here!

Journaling:

Spring is here and my garden is coming to life. Small signs of rebirth are good for my soul.

Hosta - Have gone from purple nubs to pale green spears. Plant marker made from mini-blind slats.

Dianthus - Mother-in-law calls them 'pinks.' These bloom in the heat, cold, wet, dry, sun or shade; and bloom from frost to frost.

Loropetalum - Blooms long spears filled with delicate spidery magenta flowers. The foliage is a deep purple.

Creeping Phlox - Fluffy mounds of tiny delicate flowers. My great-grandma had this in her garden. They are actually a soft pink color. I got carried away with the magenta paint.

Sweetheart Supreme Azalea - Six bushes, all on the verge of blooming. One more warm sunny day and they should be glorious. Keeping fingers crossed that we don't have another cold snap.

I wish all my sketches were as light and airy as the azalea one. I tend to overwork. :(

Nekkid Dirt

Journaling:

Today was gloriously warm & sunny, so Hubby & I worked in the front yard all day.

I cleaned out the flower beds and he raked up the last of the leaves. Now we have a bunch of nekkid dirt that makes me uneasy, but there's lots of work to do before we can mulch. I have a glorious garden planned in my head, lots of changes to make, cowpoo to till, and trips to the nursery.

Hope springs eternal in the heart of a gardener that *this* year will be better than the last, and *next* year will be even better than that.

Garden Analysis: I think the male Mexican fern made it through the winter. It still has a frond of green on it. Found little purple nubs where the hosta are poking up. Lost all the mums except for two; can't say that I'm too disappointed.

Gave up on half the dianthus and pulled them up. They were scraggly looking last year. The rest will get moved to the canna bed as a border. No periwinkles in the canna bed this year I've decided. I'm tired of them even though they are great performers.

The main part of the garden (the middle bulge) is in the deep shade until 11:00 am, then get scorched by full sun until 1:00 pm, then goes back into deep shade again. It's a little too sunny for shade-loving plants, and not sunny enough for sun-loving plants.

Every year I go to the nursery hoping there will be some new, colorful shade-loving plants. Every year I am disappointed. I'm so tired of impatiens and begonias but they're the only plants that seem to like it in there.

Sigh. I need some miracle plants.

Flowers in November

Journaling says:

This was the 25th Annual Worldwide Sketchcrawl, but it was too cold and nasty for me.

Found these potted plants in the garden thriving in the cold gray of November. The pentas I planted back in May and ignored through the drought of summer and monsoons of autumn. They're still putting out blooms.

The other pot had seedlings coming up that I thought were weeds but they have sprouted little cockscomb blossoms. Wonder where those seeds came from?

The pentas are amazing little plants. When I forgot to water them they just kept on growing. They are a full sun plant but haven't been in the full sun since late August. The blooms are still gorgeous.

I think I'll buy more of them next year. Woot!

Lady in Red Hydrangea

Not your grandma's old-timey hydrangea....

The traditional hydrangea has dozens of these petals that make up a puff ball blossom. The Lady in Red blossom has a lacy center with only eight of these petals on the outer edge.

The lacecaps bloom pinkish-white in the spring and turn burgundy-rose as they mature. I discovered the petals actually turn themselves over and it's the underside that becomes burgundy.

The dark green leaves become reddish-purple in the fall and stems are dark red year round.

The bush is supposed to be only three feet tall at maturity, but mine is already at least four feet and growing taller and larger every day.


Here is the bush in full bloom in late May:




A close-up of the lacecap blossom:

Five Minute Garden Sketches

It's been a long time since I've drawn anything. This winter just wasn't conducive to creativity for some reason.

I've wanted to draw these three things for several weeks but I fell into the old perfection trap. If I couldn't draw them perfectly I wasn't going to even try. But I wasn't drawing anything at all and had to snap out of it.

I got the idea of doing five minute sketches to get over my drawing block. I set the egg timer on the porch and let the pen fly. I tried to capture the essence of the thing and not get too hung up on details. If a line was out of place, so what. I just added a few more to it.







Small square sketchbook
Watercolor added later.

Haircuts

Sketchbook 9-12-08

Backstory at "Weekend Doodles"