Laughing Ravens

By and large, I look forward to winter. The cold and the snow are a welcome change from sweating continually in July and August. A week ago the thermometer struggled to climb into the single digits after nights below zero. Earlier this week felt downright balmy. The thermometer had climbed to nearly 30°F which meant we could walk outside in just a fleece and feel the sun's warmth.  Woke up yesterday morning to the wind howling. Bits of ice pelted the windows and bounced off the metal roof. Every now and then, a gust would push the house enough to feel it flex and bow. With the heat being drawn from the house with every blast of wind, I figured it was a perfect morning to pull the covers tighter and catch just a tiny bit more sleep.  After the winds relented and the snow settled, I took a quick walk outside. In some areas, there was snow only on one vertical face. The other side of trees and shrubs were completed blasted clean.   Iris bed, tucked in for the winter This aft...

  image courtesy of https://nara.getarchive.net I've been struggling with writing something coherent for the last week or so. I've drafted a few things, scribbled ideas, even tried outlines based on photos and eventually tossed out more than I would like to admit. Nothing has been noteworthy. It took until today for me to finally understand. This block isn't due to lack of ideas or stimulation... it is due to not feeling safe. In the weeks since the inauguration, I've watched things change that I assumed would never change. Seeing authoritarianism take hold so quickly is terrifying.  I worry because in my family we make use of many government programs. My job is funded by a Federal grant from USDA. Uncertainty is falling like rain on all of us. I worry because we are all connected. I've seen the consequences of Trump's first presidency on the migrant labor in New York State. The dairy industries and apple industries were hit incredibly hard. Last night I read a ...

  Red twig dogwood, Cornus sericea , also known as red-osier dogwood. Red twig dogwood, Cornus sericea , also known as red-osier dogwood. Host plant to the gorgeous Spring azure butterfly. Who wouldn't want to catch a glimpse of shimmering blue darting through the garden? Celastrina ladon, the spring azure or echo blue, is a butterfly of the family Lycaenidae.- Wikipedia image courtesy of Wikimedia commons   Of course, after twenty years of growing red twig dogwood, I still haven't seen a single blue butterfly. Fingers crossed that this year we'll see a few! Red twig dogwood with birch trees in tree tubes behind So why bring this up today? Because this week has been really absurdly cold. When the high temperature only has a single digit, that's really cold. The apartment toilet froze, twice. As soon as the snow gets squeaky, and the sky turns bright blue and the night sky is like black glass, the temps are going to fall through the floor. Speaking of floor... there...

  When I headed north for my first year of college, I had no idea what lay in store for me. Coming from Miami, I had a very "tropical" understanding of plants. What in the north grew indoors as houseplants, I had known to grow outdoors in my yard. I had never known deciduous trees or perennial plants. I had never experienced spring bulbs. It was a wholly new way to see plants!   On my first trip to mid-coast Maine, back in the late 80's,  I happened to be driving the backroads during the lupine bloom. I was surprised to the extreme. I had never seen wildflowers bloom in such profusion. And before anyone asks, no... I had never read about Miss Rumphius either. That would come that summer, courtesy of my farm boss. (That's another story altogether.) Driving around and stopping to gawk at these fields of wild lupines filled me with a new love. Fields filled with blue and purple, from treeline all the way to the road. I was smitten! Imagine my surprise when I returned a ...

  We're heading into the deep freeze next week. Life near zero is weird. I don't want to know the inside of my house this well. I can't really blame the cold though. I always get stir crazy after surgery. Something about surviving the surgical event makes me want to run off into the distance and just keep running. It might be escaping the hospital or being able to get up from the surgical table... I don't know. But once I am up and under my own power, I want OUT! This week I had a piece of skin cancer removed from below my eyelid. My face looks like I tried to hail a bus with my cheek. Not pretty. I thought going to a plastic surgeon would make me look cute. It said that in the brochure. And now it is wicked cold.  Years ago, we would relish time like this. Snow on the ground. No snowmobiles on the trail. Nights cold and black like ice. You can hear the trees creak. The snow is still fluffy, but after the weekend chill drops, I expect the snow to squeak. Warm sun over t...

 This post is meant to be a quick stab at the topic of starting iris seeds. On the surface, this should be straight forward. Stick seeds in dirt, watch them come up, poof! Irises. My first experiments with growing irises from seed started with Siberian iris, 'Caesar's Brother' which had plentiful seeds the year before.   And the truth of the matter is that it is a little bit more complex than that... but not that terribly difficult. The first question is where does one get iris seeds? What sort of iris seeds are you wanting to try to grow? Do you have enough room to grow a lot of plants or just a few? Wait, I thought I said this was going to be simple. Okay, the simplest place to get iris seeds is from your own irises. If bees have pollinated your plants, you'll see lovely swollen seed pods where the flowers used to be. Let those seed pods dry until just before they crack open. Then harvest them (with notes about what the name of the variety you gathered them from [this...

anemone blanda   I have planted these tiny corms in all the absolute wrong places. As with most bulbs, the grower is advised to plant them in full sun, in well drained soil and to avoid boggy, heavy clay. Yeah, not in the cards (or soil as the case may be). Some years, they come up where I didn't plant them. Wherever they finally find a place to call home, it is absolutely perfect. They came up last spring under one of the dwarf conifers beside the house. I never planted anything under there ... mostly because I cant get under there... simply not enough room for me to wiggle underneath. But whatever dug them up and helped plant them somewhere else seemed to have picked a great spot. Come late spring, these lovely dancing flowers find a way to catch every passing breeze no matter how slight. The color variety in anemone blanda is pretty straight forward. You can usually find a blueish shade, a pink, and a white. Supposedly, according to the catalogues, there is a true pink that is i...

    crocus (macro)   What does it mean to "have enough"?  I used to buy a few of something. A few bulbs, a handful of annuals, a couple perennials. Why? Mostly because we were broke, just starting a family, the usual reasons for a young couple. But our scarcity mindset came from not having a clue. What does one crocus look like? What does twenty look like in that same space? Bit by bit, I came to realize what thrived in our little garden.  Now I see crocuses in a completely different light. I dont want one. I want hundreds. I want the ground to be blanketed in rich yellows and creams, whites punctuated with saturated royal purples. And I want to feel that color fill the air. Somehow the radiant color makes the mornings warmer. The buzzing of bees is slow and unpracticed after winter dormancy.    It's easy to want winter to hurry up so that spring can begin. Spring seldom lasts very long. There's always that pressure to dive straight into summer. Hurry...

Not sure if this was iris reticulata 'Harmony' or 'Pixie' iris reticulata 'Purple Hill' 'Blue Hill' among species crocus   Anything I could write about iris reticulata would pale in comparison to their awesome beauty. So instead, here are a few images from the past few years.   For such a tiny flower, they have the biggest punch! A few days ago, I wrote that early spring bulbs are the punk rockers of the spring garden. Art school dropouts with dyed hair, ready to get into a fight over who is hardier, in the middle of a snowstorm.   About twenty-ish years ago, we planted our first hundred iris reticulata, courtesy of Van Engelen . Talk about enabling! When you have a hundred of anything, you start thinking bigger. After you've planted a hundred bulbs, you ask yourself... what if I had four hundred more? What could I do with a huge wave of purple moving through the garden?   I should try to capture the wave of blue from atop a tall ladder or maybe...

When faced with the bleak dreary skies of January, it is easy to want to fast-forward into April when blooms start to appear in the garden again. Let me rephrase that. There are two faces of winter. One face is sun-shiny and snow blankets the countryside. The other gives you a side-eye, pelts you with ice pellets, and hides the sun behind thick, unmoving clouds for weeks. You'd never guess that I love winter.  The local expression for this kind of snow is "Ithacation." It consists primarily of sideways snow and ice that nearly always finds a way inside your collar and into your ears.  Every few years we are gifted with the Norman Rockwell "winters of year's past"... and the sky opens up, dumps feet of snow on us and then the sun comes out and everything is still for a brief moment.  So how is one to deal with the interminable time between the rich colors of fall and the ebullient outbursts of color in spring? Around here, that can extend from November well i...

 Dahlias can simultaneously be both wicked tough and fickle to the point of being delicate. In a nutshell, they are tubers that just happen to make really pretty flowers. If potatoes were as fussy of a tuber, we wouldn't have french fries. I bring up potatoes for two reasons. One: you can eat dahlia tubers. That would be silly and wasteful, but nonetheless true. Two: their storage needs are very similar. Most of us keep potatoes in our house for a week or two before we consume them. If we had to keep the potatoes over the entire winter, then we'd be more aware of the myriad conditions that ensure safe storage. More on that at the end. Let's start out with discussing digging and cleaning. If you're an expert on dahlias, please feel free to correct any of my observations in the comments.  When should you dig your dahlias? In my zone 6 (really more of 5b) garden, we usually see a killing frost sometime in October, generally before Halloween. By killing frost, I mean the ki...