outdoors

Pay it Forward

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All along the Mohawk Trail through the town of Charlemont someone planted daffodils years ago.  It’s probably a 10 mile stretch of the road on the north side where there are clumps of various types of these flowers.  I look forward to seeing them every year and am always sad to see them go.

Daffodils also grow in what seems to be random places.  You drive by what may once have been someone’s home, now gone and there are daffodils blossoming on what may have once been their front yard. I find the resiliency of these flowers amazing.  Not only do they come back year after year they multiply.  A few turn into hundreds.

This is one of the things I’ve learned about gardening over the years – it’s slow.  Whenever you are planting perennials, shrubs or trees you always have to think years down the road.  Don’t plant things too close together or you will end up digging them up.  Take into consideration the spread of some plants before you plant them.  I have echinacea that takes up a good part of a garden now, that was the intent.  It has other things growing with it but I love that sea of pink in the summer.

Bill thinks the idea of planting new maple trees in the front yard of the house as pointless because we won’t live to enjoy the shade.  I say plant them now so my grandchildren will have beautiful trees shading the front of the house in the summer like they did when I was a child.

Perennial gardens are gifts to future generations in my opinion.  Some of the gardens I have in Rowe were planted by my mother, most of the plants cames from her friends and aquaintances.  She planted them for herself and to beautify the property but as a gardener you know that she probably knew that the garden would go on long after she was gone.  I love being able to go through my flower gardens and know where the peony came from or the dark purple iris.  They came from people I loved dearly that are no longer with us.   I love my gardens because I remember a day spent with Bill or my sister sweating with a shovel or moving stones.  Year after year I will walk down the stone path and see how my flowers are filling in.  A few years from now I won’t have to worry about the weeds because the perennials will have taken over.  A few years after that I will be dividing things up and giving them away – to people I care about.  It’s all about paying it forward.

New View

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130502 Back Forty Pond

 

I took a walk yesterday out through the woodlot.  It’s been dry this spring so I was able to get to it without the use of waders.  This is the second year we haven’t had beavers on the property although their handywork is ever present.  Without them there their ponds get a little smaller, their paths are beginning to grow in.  They had a pretty extensive network that is now being slowly reabsorbed into the earth.

I walked along one of the boundary walls so I could see how extensive this pond was.  I could only see the marsh reeds from the house and once the leaves are on the trees the only notion you have that it’s there are the birds.  Different birds live around these little ponds, that’s why I love having them here.  I had thought I could see a beaver house from the other side of this pond but as I discovered in my little hike there wasn’t one.  This must have just been another one of their engineering projects while they lived in the pond behind Hoover Damn.

The best part about this little hike was the view – I’ve never seen the house from this vantage point.  Timing is everything, once the leaves come out there really won’t be a view of the buildings, at least not this clear a one. So what started out as a walk in the woods on a glorious spring day had the added benefits of a beautiful new photograph, a renewed sense of well being and 2 really muddy dogs.

Retreat

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I’ve been in Rowe for the past few days, needed a retreat of sorts.  The weather is beyond beautiful and there is so much that I wanted to get done.  What I’ve found is that I’ve been most distracted by the quiet – in a good way.  The lack of activity all around you helps to bring you back to yourself, it helps to restore your soul.  Very few cars go by, very few planes fly over, there aren’t any people that I run into that I don’t already know.  My shelves are stocked if I want to make myself something to eat.  There is no schedule. The only thing you really have time to do is think.  It’s as if your entire day is spent in meditation.  It’s a good thing.

Sophie likes to spend her day on the pillows on the sofa.  As you can see she has no trouble relaxing at all.

Dog Heaven

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As I’m sitting at the computer writing this Chester is curled up in his bed beside me.  This is typical for a Monday, we refer to it as the hangover.

Brush was burned this past Saturday with our three dogs and Malcolm all there to make the most of the greening grass and sunshine.  There is nothing they like more than to be in the back forty doing whatever they find to do.  It is always more fun if their people are out their with them. There’s always the chance there will be a game of fetch.

It wasn’t so long ago that none of these dogs got along.  We were always on alert for the next sign of a fight.  The fights were ugly, blood was always drawn, always over a stick or toy.  The blood didn’t necessarily belong to a dog either.  This past weekend was one of those weekends where everyone got along.  There is nothing they love more than being free to go anywhere without a leash. They just ran and ran and ran. They all took a dip in the swamp – Chester more than once.  Malcolm had to have a bath  and the burdock picked out of his fur before he could get into the car to head back to Boston.

A lot was accomplished – we are all feeling it today.  Unfortunately Chester is the only one who gets to sleep it off.

 

Gas Plant

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Gas Plant

 

When I walked the dogs this morning in Enfield there were so many different birds singing away in our back yard I was amazed.  There were cardinals, robins, nuthatches and even a yellow bellied sapsucker.  I love spring.  I was looking for a photograph of one of my gardens in Enfield and failed to find one but happened upon this photo of my gas plant which is popping out of the ground right now.

I have moved this plant three times despite all of the nay sayers and books saying how difficult they are to transplant.  The first time I acquired it the move was made under the cloak of darkness (well, maybe moonlight).  We lived on a dead end road at the time, there were only three houses on my side of the street – on the other side was an abandoned garden center.  We were friends with the owners niece and I spent many hours photographing my girls in that area.  It was beautiful, just a bit overgrown.  Each spring I would walk down and look at the gas plant as it came up and visit it while it blossomed.  The  Gas Plant’s (Dictamnus albus ‘Purpureus’)  flowers give off a flammable gas, which is the source of its common name. It has a wonderful heavy, sweet fragrance.  I have never tried lighting it on fire.

The owner of the property where the gas plant lived died and his widow sold it to someone that subdivided it into building lots.  They cut down the trees that were hundreds of years old to make way for as many crackerbox ranches that could fit in what little acreage there was.  One night, after the bulldozers were starting to do their work I put my spade in my wheelbarrow and walked down to the bed where that gas plant was living and dug it up.  Mind you this was no small plant, it was work and I really was trying to do this unnoticed.  After struggling to get it into the wheelbarrow I filled in around it with some of the soil that was around the plant, I figured with more soil it might not be too shocked.  I wheeled it back to my yard and the next morning I planted it in a special spot in the garden.

We were renting the house my garden was in at the time.  The loss of the wooded areas that surrounded that house made us look for a house to buy that was in a neighborhood that was old and established.  I never wanted to feel that kind of loss again.  We moved a couple of years later in the spring and I once again dug up my gas plant and put it into the garden where it is now.  It’s been there for 15 years and apparently the haphazardly way I transplanted it the second time didn’t really phase it.

For the past couple of years I’ve thought about transplanting it to Rowe.  I’ve been scouting out spots to put it.  Sheltered but sunny.  I may have finally found the spot for it to go in my newest garden.  The info says it’s slow to establish.  I may divide it and leave half in Enfield and bring the other to Rowe, sort of having a backup plan.  I’d hate to lose it, we’ve been through so much together.

Thrive Where You’re Planted

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During the Blizzard of ’78 my sister was in the hospital for some emergency surgery.  Her later to be mother-in-law sent her a pot of daffodils – there were a dozen in the pot as I recall.  Once they had died back they were planted in a border garden around the patio.  Over the years they have naturalized to the point of hundreds.  They are all over New England at this point.  Everywhere I have had a garden they are now too numerous to count.  They have been given away to friends and family in  MA, VT, NH and CT.  They are now in full bloom in Enfield, around the front of the house, along the driveway, in the perennial garden in the back yard.  They are scattered all down the bank going into the back forty in Rowe.  These amuse me most of all.  For years my mother’s mulch pile was over that bank.  There was a stone wall there many years ago and it was completely grown in with trees.  She would dig up things that she no longer wanted or bulbs were perhaps pulled along with the weeds – over the bank they would all go.

I have planted many plants in a perennial garden only to watch them migrate to where they really want to be.  They will self seed in a sunnier or wetter spot and the original will die back.  It’s no use trying to get them to grow where you want them to, they just grow where they are happy.  That’s how I feel at times about being caught between Enfield and Rowe, suburban and rural, noisy and quiet.  I just want to be where it’s sunny and quiet.  Then I think about those daffodils. They speak volumes about thriving where you are.  It doesn’t mattered the soil type, the sunlight, the moisture – they all seem to like where they are and continue to multiply year after year.  In my head I know that’s how it should be – thrive where you are – but some days (especially sunny spring ones) I just want to be in a quiet spot.  Maybe transplanting daffodils.

Happy Earth Day – go dig in the dirt!

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Going, going, gone.

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130411 (1)Sue messaged me on Tuesday to say I wouldn’t believe how much of the snow was gone.  Sunday when we left there was just one bare spot next to the patio.  This morning all of the gardens are exposed.  Things are popping out of the earth everywhere.  God I love this time of year.  The birds were all singing.  The back forty was very, very wet but walkable.  The water is rushing through the little brook that exits Hoover Damn (I guess I should write about Hoover Damn sometime).

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The garlic is up!  That’s very exciting.

130411 (2)And this looks like what will be on the agenda this weekend – burning brush.  It seems like this is a never ending chore.  It piles up all year waiting for burn season to open in January.  Of course in January there is usually too much snow and half the pile is buried so we have to wait . . . and wait . . . and wait.  Burn season ends on May 1st so we just finish sugaring and it’s a mad couple of weekends trying to get everything burned.  There is also a large pile of logs that needs to be cut and split.  And of course Chester has photo bombed another shot.  That’s his purpose in life.

 

 

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Sunrise 130327

 

6:30 this morning this is how it looked toward the back forty.  The only place where you can see bare ground is the driveway.  The difference is how it sounds.  Spring is here, the birds know it, they are all singing their spring songs.  The woodpeckers are all around rapping away at the dead trees. They have all returned from some warmer climate to sing spring in.

Bill doesn’t understand why I sleep with the window cracked open this time of year.  I’m a very light sleeper and there is nothing that compares to having the birds sing me awake at dawn.  As the sun is coming up their songs build to a crescendo.  By the time it’s 10:00 they’ve settled into whatever they do for the day but there’s nothing like dawn in a quiet country meadow.  When I was a kid I used to love to sleep in a tent out in the yard just so I could hear that.  The sun would come up and heat up the canvas (yes, before nylon) with the birds singing away.  I’d open the flap to see the dew rising over the grass and smell that sweet smell of morning.  Then I would just sit and listen to the birds.

While there’s too much snow to sleep outdoors right now each morning you can walk out early and just be quiet and listen.

Snow Again.

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080229 Sophie & Buddy in snow (5)

 

It’s snowing again, although I’m not sure how much accumulation we will get.

I have to say that it’s hard to be too disgruntled about snowy weather when your dogs love nothing more than the back yard being a winter wonderland.

Little Dogs and Snow

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Sophie in the Snow (1)

 

It’s difficult not to love snow when you have dogs that are crazy about it.  Sophie is especially obsessed with it.  I don’t know where it came from or how it started but if she sees you with a shovel she’s there.  This is what she lives for in the winter.

 

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All she wants you to do is throw shovels full of snow into the air so she can jump into it.

 

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And she doesn’t stop.  She will jump and jump every single time.

 

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She’s quite the acrobat.

 

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And more entertaining than anything I can possibly think of indoors.

Of course she really appreciates it when we go indoors and there’s a fire in the fireplace.  Unlike Chester, all of the snow sticks to her fur in little snowballs.  She waits in front of the fire until she is standing in a puddle of melted snow.  Now if she would only learn to stand on a towel.