Midwinter ode to the garden

The kiss of the sun for pardon

The song of the birds for mirth

One is nearer to God's heart in the garden

Than anywhere else on earth

Dorothy Gurney

1858 - 1932 

     I love flowers.  I love gardening and watching flowers grow. For years I was stymied by a lack of time, knowledge and the right spaces to make flowers grow. When I married Lanny, I came to live at his home in a rural area in Indiana. While we are close to the city, we enjoy 3 acres of yard that includes a woods and creek. We have neighbors, but they are far enough away that noise and the hubbub of raising a large family (the families on both sides of us both have 4 kids...) isn't an issue.  When I arrived, the lawn and trees were in great shape, but there was an absence of flower gardens. I knew I had to change all that!

     I set to work first in the front yard up close to the house, making an English style garden filled with frilly blooms like hydrangeas and carnations and babies' breath and creeping flox. I planted some day lily bulbs around a sun dial Lanny gave me for my birthday. We got new shrubs that were low to the ground so the flowers were the star. And hostas for the shaded area up close to the house. I read in a gardening book that when planting perennials the gardener needed to remember "the first year they sleep, the second year they creep, the third year they leap." That is exactly what happened. I am finding myself dividing the hostas almost every spring as they grow to mammoth size, and am now considering moving some of the other plants as they are crowding out smaller ones. The displays in May and June are wondrous... 

White clematis, pink azaleas and green hostas

     In the back we had a deck built after my father died, using some funds he had set aside for me. He was an avid rose gardener, so the decision to surround the deck with roses was an easy one. I have vivid memories from my childhood of my father tending a rose garden that was outside my bedroom window. Back in the days before air conditioning, I slept with my bedroom window open. I remember the fragrance of those roses almost as much as I remember the terrible fog that drifted into my bedroom when he was up early on a Saturday to "dust" the roses for blight and mites! 

     I have 22 rose bushes all told, most surrounding the deck.

     I love watching them throughout the year. Right now in the dead of winter they are dormant. We do not prune them in the fall, but rather leave the last blooms on them so they will go dormant. That means that each plant has some dried old blooms still on them-- a kind of old fashioned bouquet for winter that reminds us of what will come in the spring. 

     Sure enough, every spring we watch for the first green shoots to appear on the canes. And they do. By mid May the bushes are lush and full and most are covered in blooms. It is the first round of blooms that I love the most-- a lovely and most welcome sight after a long winter.

     The last couple years we have been hit hard by Japanese beetles, who are drawn to the colorful blooms. They munch on the flowers, the buds and eventually the leaves of the bushes. I found an insecticide that seems to keep them at bay, so do battle with these foes starting in mid July. As the summer heat intensifies, the need for watering the shrubs becomes critical. If I tend my roses closely, the blooms continue long into the fall until the weather is consistently cold enough to put the roses to sleep for the winter. Then we tuck them in with a thick layer of mulch and wait until spring. 

     This past summer I tried vegetable gardening as well. Lanny made a small raised bed for me where I planted green peppers and tomatoes. I even had a jalapeno plant! The endeavor was so successful Lanny became a new fan of homegrown tomatoes, and hopefully will agree to make another raised bed for more produce this year. We have to be very careful out here in the country, as wild critters love garden produce... especially a certain doe and her two offspring. Fencing helps, as does a thick rim of nasturtium flowers around the bed. 

The gardener with her first edible produce-- a one inch jalapeno pepper

     Gardening provides hours of pleasure, some good exercise for this aging grandma, and a lot of enjoyment of the flowers and now, even the edible produce. In the dark, gray days of January, it is fun to look forward to the time when I can get out in the garden and dig a little, and to anticipate the flowers that will come in the spring!

Our back yard in the winter...

and how it looks in spring!