sprig to twig

The two sitting at the back, smiling at the camera, are most excellent emergency room doctors. They came to Portland for a few days to try to line up work once their residencies are completed. If you happen to have any useful information along those lines, please get in touch. We had hoped to eat our dinner out under the cherry trees, but wouldn’t you know that the first raindrops to fall since early July would choose this time to put in an appearance. The front deck was a pleasant enough back-up. We just handed out sweaters and fired up the grill…and Noami and Ian are still hot to move to Portland. Woohoo.

I just discovered a great resource to share: Greenpix goes into all of the issues of photography without wading so deep into the arcana that struggling would-be picture takers like me get lost. His latest post opens the floor to questions. Mine is: how the heck can I take a decent picture of white flowers? You may have noticed my frustration in this department. Several of the shots in recent posts (the Romneya coulteri, the ‘Casa Blancas’) were taken in bright daylight, so I thought once an overcast day came along, I would be home free.

Not so, and here are a couple of pix to prove it.

It’s almost as if the white burns out all detail. I know many of you have great success at this, because I have seen terrific shots on several of your blogs. Your input is always extremely helpful, and as soon as I hear from Greenpix on the subject, I will share it here. In the meantime, if you have posers of your own when it comes to photography, you might want to pop on over there and poke around.

I’m tickled pink to be featured in a treasury by Bubbleberries, a seller whose sense of whimsy has led her to knit tails to be used as costume adornments, or just for fun. A devil’s tail could perhaps be just the kick in the you-know-what my wardrobe needs.

What do you think of this? Doesn’t it look like a stage set for the operatic version of Hansel und Gretel? It is so over-the-top, that I just have to love it, despite my well-documented feelings about plant torture. Almost qualifies for the WWTT category dreamed up by Loree.  Follow that link for a kindly chuckle, and to see what I am talking about. Care to weigh in?

Around here, they seem to be taking up where Arborvitae left off. I managed to talk Richard out of those, but once the man makes up his mind, he is not to be deterred. Our landscape designing friend, Amy did her best to talk him out of it. After all, the very thing that recommends it as the perfect choice for monoculture hedges (perish the thought), its lightning speed growth rate, makes it a poor candidate for most landscaping situations.

Here’s another one of those hedges-in-the-making, and the component trees were half that size just a year ago. That’s what R wanted…instant gratification.

So here’s his tree, at the corner of his studio. It requires regular haircuts, but then, as I may have mentioned a time or two, R is a bit lopper-happy. He can hack away at his tree and it is pretty magnificent as a specimen…who’da thunk?

Census takers who work in the city walk block after block knocking on doors, carrying all of the forms and manuals along with them. They sometimes feel like beasts of burden, but at least the houses follow a predictable pattern, and more often than not are right where one would expect them to be.

Not so in the country. We have the luxury of carrying our offices (the passenger seat) with us while driving down charming winding roads. Finding what we are looking for though: that can be difficult. People sell off pieces of land, houses get sandwiched in, and it seems like addresses get slapped on willy nilly, with no real master plan. Trailers or sheds get turned into living quarters, whole properties get fenced off with no way to know what is going on back there, and not everyone is thrilled to be asked a few fairly unintrusive questions, even with the promise of federal dollars being pumped into the community in direct proportion to the numbers counted by us, the always polite, unfailingly friendly government workers who dare to set foot on their sacred ground.

Don’t get me wrong. People are people, no matter where they live, and these McMansions on the hill have more than their share of folks who treat them as fortresses and us as marauding invaders out to strip them of…what? And just as many warm welcomes and offerings of ice water and a seat in the shade. I am sure that you, gentle readers, would all fall into the latter category.

I have been neglecting my dear blogging friends, and for what? Well, I am getting to see nooks and crannies in, about and beyond my own immediate neighborhood. I am also meeting, first hand, the full spectrum of humanity. At one end are those who thank me for the work I am doing, at the other are those who plaster their chained, padlocked and electrified fences with signs saying “STAY OUT OR DIE!!!”. Today, I thought I would share some of the public spaces I have encountered on my rounds.

High atop the West Hills sits a huge Mausoleum with no grave markers, but clusters of statuary and cypresses clipped into pompoms.

Here is a close-up of the topiary art. The next time I was here, the shapes had been newly shorn and were looking slightly burned, but as you can see, they bounce back quickly. They remind me of a poodle my mom had. He looked silly to me when he came back from a grooming session all pouffy, with ribbons, no less…but he behaved as if he were proud of his appearance.

At the entry point of one of the fancier neighborhoods, this knot garden is painstakingly maintained.

One apartment complex had this charming clematis-draped arbor at the entrance.

Practically next door to us is a little golf course. When I first saw this roadside planting, I thought it would become increasingly attractive as the plants sprawled and filled in. My mistake…in the last six years just enough pruning has taken place to keep it looking exactly like this.

A closer look reveals…what?…a duck, maybe?

My advice would be for them to stick to designing the golf course itself. This, I think, they got right.

Then there are the places that intend for their shrubs to be made into little cubes. The shrubs have other plans, so if there is no budget for at least monthly haircuts, forget it.

I myself am partial to a tangle of natural elements competing for space, but it sure is interesting to see others’ visions striving to supplant, or at least tame, the plants in their lives.

And no matter what a person’s or a corporation’s gardening style, it sure beats this.

James, over at Lost in the Landscape posted recently about the skeletal remains of leaves. His photos were sublime…mine, not so much. I have never been able to resist bringing all sorts of bits and pieces home from my walks. Bins, baskets and boxes in my workroom are filled with things like lichens, mosses, cones, pods and the like. I think I must be descended, not from apes, but from rats and squirrels. But I digress. The leaves here are from Epimedium ‘Lilafree’ after having been left on the ground through the winter. The Physalis, or Japanese lanterns, are appealing enough when they are papery and brilliant orange, but after weathering all that winter can throw at them, they are reduced to a delicate tracery of veins enclosing bright red berries at their hearts. The fragility of this booty precludes hoarding it, which somehow makes it all the more precious.

It’s time for the great backyard bird count. I am just dashing off to the Yard, Garden and Patio Show, but if you pop over to Faire Garden, Frances will tell you about it. Interested? Click here for all the rules, etc., and we can compare notes in a few days.

Several bloggers have raised the question “fake or real?” You can go here to find a table of pros and cons, but I would like to suggest a third way. For many years now, we have settled on some evergreen that we would like to have in our landscape and purchased it to first serve as a Christmas tree. When our property was small, we would coax it along for several years in a big pot before planting it out. Our trees were never the traditional firs, but they were always interesting. An Italian cypress accentuated the verticality of vaulted ceilings, while taking up little of the limited floor space. A Deodora cedar taught us that three years is about max for keeping a tree pent up in a pot.

This year, I settled on a Weeping Norway Spruce Picea abies ‘Pendula’. I sort of forgot that the selection of interesting trees would be depleted by now, but I am quite happy with this guy, and will post tomorrow, when he will be all decked out in seasonal finery.

But wait! There is even a fourth way.

A savvy friend gave me this exceptional topiary frame. Last year, when we were snowed in for the holidays, I decorated it in lieu of a tree, using dried allium seedheads, and other remnants from the garden. We are having a house-full this year, so I may go all out and use this too. You will know tomorrow.

Almost forgot yet another option. There are businesses that will rent you a living tree, delivery and pickup included. So whatever your moral and/or emotional stance, there’s a tree for you out there somewhere.