Facebook Deactivated...

For the past few months, I was posting pictures on my Facebook page. I got to the point where I, like several of my friends, was spending too much time in Facebook, so I have deactivated it... in favor of getting things done. One of the things I like to do is work in the gardens, and take pictures. I think pictures can tell a lot about what is happening in life... and the gardens are alive.

Lynnda and I spend a fair amount of time in the gardens. This is Lynnda in a hosta patch in the back garden. Don't let the smile fool you... she is being sassy, upset that I fooled her into looking up...

Lynnda is the better of the two of us around the plants... and she seems to like to dig in the dirt. She certainly has a green thumb... and fingers. She is motivated, and understands the many plants we have, better than me. She knows what is a weed, and isn't... very important in the spring, before the weeds are obvious as different from the new flowers from re-seeding.

Here on the Eastern Shore rock gardening is popular... but this is not the typical rock gardening... here we work the ground and remove countless stones, rocks, small boulders... and then we augment the sandy soil that is left, with peat and compost... and we grow plants successfully. What is amazing here, more than anywhere else we have gardened, is that the rocks also grow! Every garden therefore is a rock garden... we seem to rid ourselves of the rocks by the barrel full each spring, from the exact same place we did the year prior... there are not only more rocks. they are also larger! So, we are rock gardeners. The only way to avoid the rocks, is to container garden...

This first picture is of a White/yellow Viola... kin to the pansi... as it happens, this is in a small container with Dusty Miller, and White Lobelia among other things... no rocks here,

Here is a huge rock... a boulder, the largest on our property. There is Maiden Hair Fern shading the family of Mushrooms that seem to grow here each year. This path is laid using cement that we cast using Rubarb Leaves in a shaped mold we make in the sand...

There is some real beauty in nature, and while my pictures are not intended to do it justice, we can at leastuse them to remind us if we fail to remember them in our mind's eye.

This is part of the same boulder... here we have lichen on the over-hang with some moss and grass growing in the shade of the overhang. It has been pretty wet here this past cople of weeks, so we also see some mould here in this picture... it comes and goes.

This garden gets morning sun which is never too hot... so the hostas do really well here. There is some Bleeding Hearts against the wall and several colors of Lupin. We have a hard time finding some yellows, and in the foreground we seem to have come across an orange which we have never had before.

More to come one day, when I have time...