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A Spring Walk in February?

Monday, February 6th, 2012

Another post already!! Today was finally a beautifully sunny Spring-like day…. in February?? Not normal for us here in NE PA, but it was a nice one today. The temp. got up to 50 or more so I decided to take a little walk through a couple gardens with the camera.

Witch Hazel Bud

I mostly used the macro lens today and this was the first thing I found! I had some papers to burn, so I took them to the brush pile that is still in the yard from the creation of the Bird Sanctuary garden last Fall, to try to burn a bit more of the pile… Little by little the pile is getting smaller. I started my walk by checking all the new baby trees and shrubs I planted just a couple months ago. I was afraid the deer had gotten all the Witch Hazel buds, but when I looked really close, I found a few tiny buds beginning to unfurl petals…. What a treat! I love the fuzzy texture of the buds and bark.

Lilac Bud

I walked through the Lilac Garden and amazingly got a fairly clear shot of a Lilac bud. With my shaky hands and a bit of a breeze that was starting, I was surprised to get it this clear…..

Juniper procumbens Nana Variegata

Just below the Lilacs, is the Variegated Juniper that I can see from my studio window… Right now the tips of the branches are a bright yellow. They will fade to creamy white in summer and then green as they age. The photo above shows an area not much over an inch wide…. I got really close with this…

Iris in February 2012

Usually this time of year, most of the perennials are hiding underground or under a blanket of snow… not this winter, at least not yet… This Iris almost looks like it has some new growth….

Fungi on Wood

There is definitely a lack of flowers this time of year, but there is a bit of color if you look really close… this almost ferny looking fungus is on some old logs from the dead Catalpa tree that are still around.

Shelf Fungus 1

There is a nice crop of this pretty shelf fungi on another log I found. You can even see a little of the flatter kind on the bark if you look close.

Shelf Fungus 3

This photo above shows another grouping of the shelf fungi… Some of the stripes in it look nearly blue… These were also pretty small… the largest in this group was around 1 inch across…. Loving the macro lens!

Aconite Surprise Feb 6 2012

These little guys starting to peek out were a real surprise! The Winter Aconites have been blooming in March most years, and last Spring they didn’t even show anything until the end of March…. This is only February 6, and they are already beginning to show peeks of color!

Fungi on Rock 1

The Aconites are growing next to a stone wall and a set of old stone steps. I sat down and took a closer look at some of what was growing on the rocks… The photo above shows a number of different varieties of fungi.

Moss on Rock

This little clump of moss is just over an inch in diameter. Here is a really close look at it.

Moss and Fungi on Rock

This photo shows the whole clump of the moss along with some groups of various fungi… You have to get really close to things to see much pretty color this time of year.

Granny Smith Apple

This apple was sitting in the fruit bowl and the light was shining on it just right for this closeup….

African Violet Petals Feb 6

The African Violet in the kitchen window is still blooming, too… Here is just part of one of the flowers…I love this shade of pink.

It was nice to get out into the gardens again, even if there isn’t too much going on right now. There are some little bitty treasures to be found if one looks close enough.

Tags: andrusgardens, flowers, gardens, inspiration, rocks, sue andrus
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Flowers and Gardens in the Studio

Saturday, February 4th, 2012

It has only been just over 2 weeks since my first post of the year, and I am already posting my second one…. Maybe hope for keeping up better…. Since creating my “Too Many Two’s” art cards, I have been cutting more flowers with my die cutter.

Flowers out of Fabric

The photo above shows a couple of charm squares of fabric backed with Wonder Under that were cut using my flower die… As you can see there is a lot of fabric left between each flower cutout. This bothered me, so I decided to take things into my own hands….

Fixing Flower Die

This photo above shows the die as it originally was. I used a cutting wheel on my Dremel tool to cut the individual flowers apart from each other… I drew lines to help to guide my cutting.

Rough Cut Die

Above is what the die looked like after a lot of sparks flew as I cut the sections apart.

Cut up Die

After using a grinding wheel to round some edges and clean up the cuts, this is what things look like now… Each of the flowers are now separate from each other. With the flowers as separate dies, it is much easier for me to cut just the flowers I really want, and it is much easier to use up smaller fabric pieces.

Group of Dies

As you can see in the above photo, I have some other dies from the Spellbinders Shapeabilities series of dies. The leaves and butterflies started out with each shape separate from the others, and with the leaves, there are multiple sizes that nest within each other when stored. These dies are considered “wafer thin” dies and meant to cut one sheet of card stock or chip board and also will emboss the papers, too. With a bit of experimenting, I have figured out that I can cut two layers of fabric successfully. The cutting base is 6″ wide by 9″ long, so if I want, I can place as many shapes as I can on 6×9″ pieces of fabric and cut quite a few pieces at a time.

Cut Flowers and Leaves

This photo shows a bunch of flowers and leaves that I cut after “fixing” my flower die. In the lower right corner, you can see some little strips I cut from some of the leftovers to make tiny Delphinium flowers. After I cut up a bunch of the shapes, I fused them to pieces of the Wonder Under backing paper until I can use them in a project. You can see some flowers fused to the left of the photo.

Compound Flowers

I didn’t have any projects in mind, so I just got a bit creative with the iron one day and put together new flowers by combining larger and smaller flowers like I did with these that somewhat remind me of Dianthus flowers… just not “normal” colors.

Lots of Flowers

This photo shows a lot of the flowers I came up with… Pansies, Delphiniums in different sizes, Coneflowers, and a bunch of Random compound flowers. There are a lot of possibilities with the different flower shapes. I can cut up some of the larger flowers to make the Pansies, group multiples for Delphiniums, and more. Not long after I fused up these flowers, the most recent FFFC theme was released- Memories of My Childhood. Hmmmm…. From just a little girl, I have loved flowers and remember helping my mom in the gardens. There even is a photo of me at about 3 yrs old with a bud I had picked off of one of my mom’s rose bushes in one hand, and “bouquet” of weeds in the other. The random compound flowers are not “botanically correct”, not what I usually use in my quilts. With my horticulture degree, I usually make my flowers as close to nature as possible. This challenge gave me a reason to just play like a child would.

Garden Play Base

I started with a base that was to be one of my Botanical Applique series pieces. I roughly cut some green fabrics for grass and stems. I wanted it to have the look of a child’s crayon drawing.

Garden Play Fused and Quilted

Once I had the grass, I added flowers and leaves. I packed in a lot of flowers, and then added a few butterflies. After the fusing was done, it was ready for quilting, but I had to put it aside for a couple days to get paperwork in order for a visit with a new doctor. I was going to see her for the first time yesterday, in the hopes of finding out if there is something other than my fibromyalgia causing my pain levels to be increasing so much this winter, and my Rheumatologist has no answers at this point. The appointment proved to be very discouraging, and by the time I got home last evening, I needed massive doses of chocolate… I almost went to bed early to just hide from life, but I saw this piece still in need of quilting. My mood improved quite a bit as I lost myself in the stitching…. I didn’t even care if I followed lines perfectly…. I just stitched wherever I felt like stitching at the time…. Great Therapy….

Garden Play Finished with Wet Glue

Once the quilting was done, I trimmed some of the white border off then couched yarn on the edges to finish them off. I had a sparkly pink ladybug button and a couple dragonfly ones that I added. I also had some plastic flowers with single holes in their centers to add more to the piece. I normally would have stitched on the flowers, but since I was dong a child-like piece and it was late, I decided to glue on the critters and flowers. I added various sized pearlescent beads to the plastic flowers and some of the fabric flowers. The photo above shows what I had just after gluing things… You can see some of the still wet glue.

Garden Play Finished- 10.5"x13.5"

This is what it now looks like… All the glue dry and a better photo taken with better light in the studio. Here is a detail shot showing the little plastic flowers, ladybug and pearls. A change in the way I look at what I was creating was a fun change…. Sometimes just playing like a kid is needed….

I’m not sure what will grow in the studio next… I do know I will be cutting out more flowers with my dies and there is lots of gardening to do…. Things are pretty dreary outside these days.

Tags: andrusgardens, art quilt, die cutting fabric, FFFC, flowers, garden, quilting, sue andrus, work in progress
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The Birth of a New Garden- Step One

Thursday, October 13th, 2011

As anyone knows who has seen many of my posts here, I have a LOT of big gardens…. Much of the past few days has been spent doing the beginning preparations for my first New garden in over a decade. Like I really need another new garden…. Well, this one had been dreamed about for many years, and it will be where the “Back of the Workshop Mess” photo in the previous post is, or should I now say it mostly WAS. This area has attracted a lot of birds in the past few years, but the area is full of weedy Sumac trees and have fallen over. I have always dreamed of this becoming a beautiful bird sanctuary with various trees, shrubs and perennials to attract the birds in a much prettier way.

Future Bird Sanctuary 1

Shortly after the photo in the previous post was taken, I started breaking up and piling what I could with the hour of daylight I had left after the last lawn mowing. The pile of branches in the left of the photo is from my Diablo Ninebark bush on the side of the Lilac Garden. It should have been trimmed years ago, and I finally took the pruners to it and gave it a severe “haircut”. The pile far back is what I was able to break up of the ugly Sumac trees that fell over into the lawn years ago.

Future Bird Sanctuary 2

I finally got put on Ken’s calender and Wednesday the chainsaw was put to the mess. You can see from this photo above how many of the trees were laying on their sides.

Future Bird Sanctuary 3

The bonfire…. The first day of chainsaw work we had a fire going constantly as Ken cut and we both dragged limbs to the fire. In addition to the Sumac trees, there also was great abundance of overgrown wild grapevines. Those made getting the tree limbs out pretty tricky…. we had to cut the vines to free much of what had to go.

A little bit later, more of the workshop trailer can be seen. We kept working till it got to dark to see where we were walking.

Fire at End of Day 1

I wanted to see what the new camera would do, and took a few photos of the fire as I left the area for the night. This one came out pretty good even with not too steady hands. One thing about all the rain we have had since August, the ground and everything else is still really saturated and we didn’t have to worry about starting an unwanted fire somewhere else.

Future Bird Sanctuary 5

By the time I got my body to allow me to get back to work the next day, Ken had gotten most of the trees cut and burned a lot more. Now most of the trailer can be seen, There are still some Sumac, wild Roses, and a lonely Ash tree left on the south end of it. The Ash tree will be the only thing left by the time all gets cleared. The trunks of the trees were left high enough for Ken to hook a chain onto them and pull out the roots. Sumac is really hard to get rid of because of all of the roots running just under the surface of the ground where new babies pop up. The more roots out the better, but I have found with the Lilac garden that if I keep a deep mulch of hay, any babies that pop up can be plucked easily and after a couple years less and less try to grow. I am still amazed when I see some garden catalogs offering various Sumac varieties for sale…. They do have pretty fall color and red fruit clusters in summer, but they are huge invasive weeds!

Maple in Woods

Here is one of the young Maple trees that has kept growing despite having Black Walnut trees not far from it. Most of the rest of the woods is Green Ash which in some areas are being attacked by a borer, so I am glad to see other varieties finally taking hold. I plan to find a not too big one of these Maples that might be too close to another to flag with ribbon to dig next Spring for the Bird Sanctuary garden or somewhere around the workshop to provide shade.

Baby Ginkgo Tree Leaves

Here is one of the two Ginkgo trees I purchased in the Spring. One of these will go in the North end of the new garden. They can get really huge, but that will take probably take more than my lifetime for that to happen, but I will still give them plenty of room. I also bought another Acer griseum (Paperbark Maple), a pink Dogwood, and a Carolina Silverbell. I joined the Arbor Day Foundation and received another group of baby trees, and also have some baby shrubs from my gardens in pots. These will be used as some of the understory bushes. I am now trying to plan how everything will be planted. Not all will fit in the new area, but many will go there. The nearly bare area after removing the junk trees is over 50 feet wide at the far end of the trailer. I have some tall trees, medium height ones, and the bushes, then will fill in with various perennials. The new garden will look a bit sparse and the birds won’t be too happy for a while, but eventually it should be alive with them again, and more enjoyable since I plan to have some paths and seating areas in there.

Fungi on Stump

And now for some more random woods and garden pictures… Above is another rotting stump in the woods with three different kinds of fungi on it.

Steps Stone

This good sized stone looks like it has had steps cut out of it… It was near one of the old stone walls on each side of an abandoned roadway that goes through the middle of our land.

Walnut Trees

This is the back yard group of Black Walnut trees as viewed from the edge of the woods. They have really gotten huge in the 21 yrs we have lived here. The only shade that comes close to our trailer. It’s still dangerous to stand under them now with the huge crop of nuts falling, but they make the nicest shade in the summer.

Walnuts on Steps

Here on the steps that go to the back yard, you can see some of the nuts… I think this year is the biggest crop yet…. and many are Huge!

Blooming Grasses

The Ornamental Grasses in the Maple Tree garden are in their full glory! I really need to put a person in one of these photos… these grasses are huge… Miscanthus Goliath is the largest clump on the right, Pannicum Cloud Nine is the really light and feathery one, and way in the back just coming into bloom is Miscanthus giganteus…. a perfect name for it…. It is over 12 feet high. Goliath is around 10 ft high.

Variegated Grass in Bloom

Here is the Miscanthus variegatus blooming in the Arborvitae end of the Maple garden. This plant has only been here for 2 seasons… There are two, but you can see the left one is pretty scrawny. It was a smaller chunk when I planted them and is just starting to take off.

Pink Clover

Here is a closeup of a Pink (Red) Clover flower… I keep practicing with the new camera and am getting more good macro shots.

Queen Ann's Lace Closeup

One of the last Queen Ann’s Lace flowers in the field…. We have only had a tiny touch of frost, but it won’t be long now till the flowers are done for another year….

Tags: andrusgardens, flowers, gardens, nature, process, sue andrus, trees
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A New Beginning?

Tuesday, September 13th, 2011

My last post was 3 weeks ago, and the perennials in the gardens are beginning to look a bit shabby… It didn’t help that we had nearly a week with no sun and 4 straight days with rain… One of them with 6.5″ in less than 24 hours….

Soggy Hibiscus

The above photo shows the Pink Hibiscus after one day of rain on Sept. 6…

Back Yard Rivers before digging

September 7th- The Mound Garden river was flowing again…. This time, I had a ditch dug in the dog yard to divert some water to the woods… It took a lot of water (near the back fence), but there was more water going through the Mound Garden than in any previous storms of the year….

River outside Studio

This photo shows the river as it passed in front of my studio window… The water running by the propane tank headed straight for my studio wall and ran right around it, then flooded much of the dog yard… Poor pups! They didn’t know whether they wanted to go out to do their business or not… Some water had puddled under my sewing machine and the towel I keep along the wall was soaked, so some re-routing of the river was required.

Back Yard rivers after digging

During a slower rain shower, I was able to dig the ditch in front of my studio deeper and also dug the ditch to the woods deeper to give the water a place to go. As you can see in this photo above, there is a lot of water in the ditch in the dog yard, and very little in the garden… That helped for a while, but a later heavy downpour caused breaks and overflows in the ditches, so I had to choose another break in the rain to do more digging…

Van in driveway

We usually park the mini van in the lower parking area, but we had gotten groceries the last time it was driven, so it was parked and left in this part of the driveway… The water was getting really high, and when I went to move it before my second digging session, the wheels were already partly buried in the gravel that had washed from the upper part of the driveway.

Flooded Dog Yard again

This was one of those helpless feeling moments…. The latest heavy downpour had overflowed the banks of the ditches and broken part of one of my new levees (left side of pic, inside the dog yard). When I got out there later to do damage control, I found that grass, leaves and other debris as well as LOTS of driveway gravel had plugged the wire of the fence and caused water to stand everywhere and return even worse to the mound garden.

Dog Yard after Flood

Sept. 8th, after the bulk of the rain had fallen, this is what the dog yard looked like… The two piles of mud and gravel along the back fence is what I dug out away from the fence, trying to get the water to go under instead of through it. I had 3 areas where water was flowing under the fence, and the middle one clogged again…. The gravel came from far up the driveway….

Culvert by Upper Parking Area

This photo shows some of the deep gullies formed in the driveway… I am really glad I added the big rocks by the pipe before the storm… This culvert has been washed out too many times this year. There was still a big ditch from the previous storm, so I filled in much of it with rocks…. Some stayed! It’s amazing how much damage water just from 1/4 mile above us could do…. all that water ended up heading to the Susquehanna after collecting more along it’s path…. We were very lucky living this high up. The river flooding was near or above record levels with many homes and businesses being affected.

Wet Mini Rose

Here is a lonely bloom on the mini Rose bush….

Harry is still trying to grow!

“Poor Harry” seemed to like all the water…. He seemed to put out some pretty good new shoots! The poor thing has been munched on much of the summer… it seems every time he has put out new growth, it has been eaten off. This time I gave him a douse of dear repellent before he became deer snack again.

And speaking of “Poor Harry” (a Harry Lauder’s Walking stick bush), he was the inspiration for my latest batch of art cards for my trade group.

Harry in the Petunias

The full view of Harry shows the dead branches that he was left with after being mauled by deer. I liked the shape of these branches, so I left them even though they are dead. A bit of “sculpture” in the garden. I took this photo and removed the background in photoshop to use for the art cards.

Balance ATC's Printed

The theme for this trade was “Balance”… My gardens have been about the only thing to give ma any balance to my life lately, and Harry makes a pretty balanced “sculpture” in the garden, so he was to be the star. I began by fusing random scraps of fusible backed fabrics to parchment paper until I had just a bit larger than a sheet of paper. I wanted to print Harry’s picture on this fused background, so I painted over the fabrics with titanium white to soften the colors, and a bit of gel gloss to seal and snaggy edges. I then set up the document to print and it worked! No Jams! The above photo shows the printed fabric base.

Balance Pair started

This photo shows two of the cards after they were cut to size and Inktense pencil was added for the Petunias in the garden. I had only dampened the pencil for Harry’s leaves, and not the flowers yet.

"Poor Harry" Balance Cards

Above are four of the finished cards… See how much more vibrant the colors from the Inktense pencils are after I painted over them with very dilute gel medium. I added some more deep shading on Harry with the pencils and thicker gel gloss to give him a little shine like he has in real life. I finished these cards the day before the heaviest rain hit, and they got in the mail just in time… I’m not sure how many days we were without mail after that….

Studio Window Garden

Since I have been pretty creatively blocked lately, I have been trying different things to get things moving again…. A member of the Quiltart list was about to turn 49 a few weeks ago and decided she would make a little journal quilt each week during her 50th year. She invited others to join her, and since I just turned 50 last month, I decided it might be something to get me back into creating. For the first piece, I used the photo of the view of the garden I see from my studio window when sitting at my machine.

Week 1 Sept. 4

The “due date” for the first piece was Sept. 4th…. Thankfully the rules for the group are pretty flexible, and I only had part of the piece fused together by then, but for me that was better than I had done in a long time. Yesterday, I finally finished it…. It took a while to do the quilting with all the thread color changes I did, but Free Motion Quilting seems to be like riding a bike… I was a little rusty at first, but moved along pretty quickly. The photo above shows the finished piece!

Before I started quilting week one’s quilt, I worked on the second piece.

: Week 2 Beginning with Photo

Since week two included the storm, I just had to use a part of one of the photos of the water flowing through my Mound Garden. Above is the photo I used with the beginning of the quilt before quilting.

Week 2 Sept. 12

Here is the finished piece for week two. I played with different shades of beige and brown threads for the muddy water and gravel in the quilting. The main fabric in the middle of the piece is a bit of a small piece of a batik I had that gave the feel of much of the upper part of the garden. The lower part of the garden is a piece of my pale hand dyed fabric with Inktense pencil used to add the green for the leaves of the plants. I used little touches of titanium white paint for the Phlox and Echinacea flowers, and quilting with a variegated bright pinks thread makes the Vinca flowers.

While these two little pieces aren’t a lot, I really hope they will be the beginning of my creative mojo returning…. Maybe I’ll even finish a quilt that I started nearly 1 1/2 years ago. I’ll take any creative bursts I can get!!

Tags: andrusgardens, art quilt, fabric, flowers, gardens, inspirations, nature, process, sue andrus, work in progress
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Mid July to Early August Gardens

Saturday, August 20th, 2011

This summer has been flying by quickly…. We began with a very wet Spring, followed by no rain and high heat in July, to mist, drizzle or downpours many days so far in August. The flowers have been blooming through it all.

Pale Pink Phlox Seedling

This pale pink Phlox was one of my many pleasant surprises this year. This is a seedling I moved from the Front Door garden to the top of the rock wall by the deck. I think this is my favorite of the Phlox Seedlings. Probably a cross of the white and one of the pink varieties. When new seedlings pop up, I never know just what colors of flowers I will end up with…. So much fun to find new colors!

Phlox Fireworks 2

One evening when I was walking through the gardens, it started to get dark and my camera decided I needed a flash. I usually will turn the flash off, but decided to see what I would get by taking photos with the flash. Many of the photos made me feel like I was looking at photos of fireworks. Here are a few of my “floral fireworks” photos.

Echinacea Fireworks

Sedum Buds

Echinacea Fireworks 2

Double Cutie in the Evening

Schwartz Cat in the Dark

This is not a flower, but Schwartz was hanging out in the Lilac Garden and even though I couldn’t see her enough to be sure the focus was right, the flash gave me a good photo of her. It seems I always have at least one cat following me around the gardens.

Purple Glad 1

One of the Gladiolas that wintered over from last year. I found that just about every bulb I planted last year lived over the winter. Even the ones I didn’t find while weeding and buried with hay poked their way out.

Peach Glad 1

One of the first Peachy Pink flowers.

Curved Pink Glad

The Glad flower stem above drooped then grew up again, giving it an interesting curved stem. This year I found some perfect scrap lumber in Ken’s workshop to use for stakes, and tied them with strips of pantyhose to keep them from toppling over. Last year I didn’t stake them so I ended up cutting the flowers as they opened and fell over so I could enjoy them more. This year I could leave the flowers in the garden with the stakes holding most of them upright.

Front Door Garden from Kitchen Window

Here is a photo of the Front Door garden that I took from my kitchen window as the first Phlox were beginning to bloom.

Morning Glories Pink

Here are a couple of the Morning Glory flowers that have been blooming. More of my free flowers that came up from seed in the planters on my deck. I also have some pretty purple ones, too!

Walnut Mess

When the dog yard was fenced in, the Catalpa tree was taken down and most of it was piled near the Walnut trees in the back yard. I wasn’t able to mow around the mess, so I ended up piling most of it between the trees so I could mow the grass. I burned a lot of the small branches while cleaning up and found that Catalpa branches send out lots of sparkler-like embers…. Not a good thing for campfires with the grandkids, so what was left had to be hauled to a brush pile for burning.

Tractor and Wagon

By the time I got to cleaning up the Catalpa remains, we had a storm come through that caused a bunch of Walnut branches to fall, so I had a Very Full wagon load. I have gotten a lot of use out of the lawn tractor and “little red wagon” for hauling hay and other things around. You can see where the pile of branches was on the lawn… much of the grass died out. Thankfully, with the recent rains it didn’t take too long for it to start growing again.

Black Swallowtail Butterfly

One of the “Flying Flowers” I caught with the camera on the Echinacea.

Echinacea Surprise Seedling

Another fun find! An Echinacea seedling that I planted in the Maple Tree garden that bloomed with a really interesting flower with green petals. As they opened further, there were more tiny “flowers” forming around the center.

Volunteer Petunia in the Squash

The squash finally started growing and a petunia popped up in the middle of the patch. It looks like a version of the Tidal Wave varieties I used to have growing near the Arborvitae.

Baby Lupine

I planted some Lupine seeds a few weeks ago, and this is what they looked like a week after planting. One little baby has it’s first true leaf. The rain we have been getting really helped these little guys to sprout. If I am lucky, I might get a flower or two before frost, but should have a nice bunch of flowers next Spring.

Arborvitae Point 8-3-2011

The Wave Petunias that I purchased and planted late June to early July are finally beginning to fill out and show more color every day. The Purple Wave variety coordinates pretty well with the Summer Wine Monarda. “Poor Harry” can be seen mid photo… the red leaved Harry Lauder’s Walking Stick that has been munched on too much. It does keep putting out new shoots…. He’s not giving up…

Sparrow Nest

Here is a little Sparrow nest I found in the lawn after a storm. You can see the colored plastic from hay bale netting woven in and it looks like Schwartz Cat’s fur lining it. There have been a lot of Chipping Sparrows nesting in various bushes in the gardens.

Mound Garden During the Storm

A nasty storm the day before my birthday seemed to want to wash away the Mound garden again…. The water did stay in the gullies formed earlier in the year. The grasses were really whipped by the wind.

During the Storm Back Yard

The rain was pouring off the deck roof and the water from the driveway was flowing through the Mound garden, across the lawn and into the Shade garden at the edge of the woods. This was the first big storm since June, so I finally got to see just where I needed to dig a ditch to get most of the water to go straight to the woods where there are no gardens.

Broken Glads

After the storm I ended up cutting myself a big bouquet of Glads…. The wind and rain knocked many flowers over even when tied to stakes. I had a pretty birthday bouquet.

Wet White Phlox

The sun came out bright after the storm and I got this photo of the still dripping white Phlox flowers.

Last Double Cutie Bloom of 2011

The day of my birthday, the Double Cutie Hemerocallis opened it’s last flower for the year. A pretty gift!

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In the Gardens Mid July

Wednesday, July 20th, 2011

There are still flowers on the Hemerocallis (Daylily) plants, but they are now beginning to slow down. Since my last post, I made some interesting discoveries. The first was a nicely double flower on the variety Double Cutie.

Double Cutie Double Bloom

One of the stems of this variety opened flowers more double than the first blooms. The one in this photo above was the most fluffy of them all… As you can see, the stamens in this bloom became petals, and they even have pollen like normal ones. One of nature’s wonders!

Another interesting discovery was with the variety Melon Balls…. One evening, I found all of the flowers were streaked with white and pale peach… I had not seen them like that before and thought it might have been caused by the sun or heat…

Hemerocallis Melon Balls Faded

The faded blooms were very interesting looking, and after a few days of stalking them, I found that it did seem to be the sun doing the fading. After a few days of finding streaked flowers in the evenings, I finally got photos of the flowers morning, mid-day and evening… The more sun during the day, the more streaks there were by evening… What a great find! Flowers that changed as the day progressed!

Hemerocallis variegata

Also, as I mentioned in the last post, there was another double flower that hadn’t bloomed yet… It finally did, and here is one of the flowers. The original plant had variegated foliage, but most of my clumps have reverted back to green leaves. I will have to make an effort to dig out some of the remaining variegated parts to keep propagating those. The green foliage is much stronger growing, so it can take over if you let it keep growing. My clumps have been ignored a lot over the past few years.

OK, now that I have pretty much covered all of the Daylilies, there are a lot more flowers in my gardens. Other flowers that have been blooming this mid July.

Front Door Planter Right

In past years, my planters near the front door have been filled with flowers that I usually purchased early to have color out front as soon as possible. This year, I couldn’t afford to get anything new for the planters and I have had to wait for color this year. I had some extra plants left from planting this year’s Memorial Day planters, some white Petunias, Alyssum, and blue Lobelia. I had also been able to get some wave Petunias late June to add a few touches of annual color to my gardens. It is amazing what can happen when you don’t do anything more than take weeds out of planters with the soil left in them from the previous year.

Front Door Planter Left

This is the planter on the other side of the steps. The only new purchased plants in these pots are the White Petunias, Alyssum, and one Purple Wave petunia in the Left planter. The Violas, Nicotiana, and tall purple Petunias in the Left planter are seedlings that came up from last year’s plants. The same plants and the striped Petunias in the Right planter are seedlings. I even was able to take out some extra Petunia and Nicotiana seedlings to use in the gardens. I LOVE “free” flowers! I had to be patient to see much color in the post, but they are now beginning to overflow!

White Asiatic Lily

Back to perennials in the gardens, here is a pretty rare sight… at least this year for me. The mice and moles, or voles or whatever critters they were ate the bulk of my Asiatic and Oriental lilies. These white ones are in the Maple Tree garden near the pond that is covered with black raspberry bushes.

Pink Lilies

This stem of pink Asiatic Lilies is one that lived through the critter snacking in the Back Yard Mound garden. This garden used to have gobs of Lily flowers mid July, but between the critters eating the bulbs, the water washing gravel on top of the bulbs, and snacking deer, I had one stem of pink and one stem of yellow blooms. The center of the Mound Garden used to be full of yellow Asiatics that would grow to about arm-pit height. I dug up some of the bulbs this year and moved them around.

Hostas in Washout Zone

This is the end of the Mound Garden where the Hostas have nearly been washed away or buried in gravel. It still amazes me how beautifully they bloom every year. The shade trees in the back yard are Black Walnuts and there are lots of plant that will not grow near them, but the Hosta and other plants I have here and along the stone wall have been doing great.

Mound Garden 7-8-11

This photo above shows the Mound Garden from the lawn at the top of the mound. Toward the right you can see the pitiful yellow Lily plants. The Echinaceas were just beginning to bloom when this was taken, and a couple Hemerocallis Ice Carnival plants were blooming between the Hosta and Echinaceas.Yyou can see the pale lilac Wave Petunias just beginning to grow a bit… I bought them late in the season and they were pretty long and scraggly, so I needed to trim them some so they will branch out and bloom better. I just have to have more patience waiting for the plants to fill out and bloom more. There is a Salvia Black and Blue with blue flowers with pale green leaves… My plants sat on a table out front of the trailer until I could get them into the ground and didn’t get fertilized like then should have been…. Yea, I was a professional greenhouse grower and don’t always do things right.

Back Yard Gardens from Wall

Here is another photo of the Back Yard gardens taken from the end of the stone wall closest to the Walnut trees, looking toward the new dog yard. Vladdi our son’s black Lab is standing at one of the gates hoping to be let free. He has helped my gardens a bit so far by getting a woodchuck who was teasing him from the other side of the fence. I let Vladdi out and the woodchuck was no more. The Hostas along the stone wall are doing nicely. The Mound Garden is to the right in the sun and hard to see. The wider part of the Stone Wall garden is just past the stone steps right about in the middle of the photo. On hot summer days, the shade of the Walnuts is wonderful.

Lady Fern

Here is one of my Lady Ferns tucked between one of my Krossa Regan Hostas and the stone wall. Last year the fern was pretty scrawny, but this year with all the early rain we had, it has done great.

Deck Planter with Back Yard in Background

Here is one of my deck planters with the Back Yard gardens showing in the background. The deck planters didn’t get many new plants this year either. The Nemesia in this planter was a gift, and the Petunias, Nicotiana, and Violet plants are seedlings from last years flowers. Some more “freebies”. I had so many baby plants coming up, I had to take a bunch out and put them into pots to be used in the gardens. The Petunias I had here last were plum colored with deep plum veins. This year I have shades of plum, pink and lavender Petunias.

Phlox Flame White with Eye

Here is the only new perennial plant I purchased this year. Phlox have done really well in all of my gardens, so I have been adding new colors and dividing my favorites to fill various spaces. The Flame varieties are shorter growing varieties than the older varieties. As with most perennials I buy, I just HAD to divide this one into two pieces and it is now a part of the Mound Garden.

Vinca Annual

Along with the lavender Petunias, I have also planted Impatiens in the shady areas, White Petunias along the front edge, and behind them are these Vinca flowers. I found these in a greenhouse I stopped at on the way home from giving a lecture to a quilt guild in Reading PA. I tend to “shop” my way home if I have a few dollars to spare. I also found these in a beautiful shade of pink. I only have 12 of the Vinca, but they should fill out quite nicely in the next few weeks.

Hosta Lemon Lime in Bloom

The last photo from the back yard for this post is this Hosta Lemon Lime tucked nearly under the Brunnera Looking Glass.

Hydrangea Anabelle

Back to the front yard, the Hydrangea Annabelle is blooming beautifully. These flowers last a long time, and look great with the Crimson King Maple as a backdrop. There aren’t too many small delicate plants in the Maple Tree garden… It is the largest garden and a great home for some pretty big and aggressive plants and shrubs.

Carpet Rose

Not too far from the Hydrangea is one of the few Rose bushes I have. This is a Carpet Rose that is a low growing variety that blooms on and off all summer.

One Tomato Left

Not all plants in the gardens ind up looking good. Even though I sprayed the Tomato plants with deer repellent, they still got munched on. I bought 3 nice sized plants that had Tomatoes started and this is the only fruit left. Since this photo was taken, they are all growing much better and look like they will do well if I can keep the critters away from them.

Poor Harry

Here is another victim of critters. This poor Red Leaved Harry Lauder’s Walking Stick was beginning to put out some new shoots after being chomped by deer over the winter, and the new shoots were eaten… There are still some shoots trying . I have put more repellent around this and hope it can get growing again. It has reddish leaves on twisted branches.

Monarda Summer Wine

Here is a closeup of a Monarda (or Bee Balm) flower. This variety called Summer Wine is a really pretty bright fuchsia wine color. This is near Harry, on the end of the Maple Tree Garden with the arborvitae. I used to keep this area for annual flowers, and am slowly adding perennials here. I have planted more Wave Petunias in this garden and the Purple Wave’s that are planted near the Monarda are nearly the same color. So far not much color yet from the Petunias, but in a few weeks if the weather cooperates, I should be able to see them from my kitchen window.

Evening Sky

Again a post is getting pretty long…. Here is a photo of the sky one evening, looking through the Maple Tree garden. The left round tree is the Crimson King Maple. The Monarda and Harry are to the left not shown in this photo. You can just make out the Hydrangea flowers along the lower center of the photo. The Maple trees, Balsam Fir (center) and Junipers are getting pretty big. It’s amazing to think that less than 20 yrs ago these all were pretty small trees from a nursery I worked at back then.

The great thing about the gardens is that there is always something new popping up or beginning to bloom. There will be more posts from the gardens…. the Echinaceas and Phlox are beginning to really come into bloom now.

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The Dancing Daylilies

Thursday, July 14th, 2011

I have so many beautiful Daylilies (Hemerocallis) blooming that I decided to do one post devoted just to them.

Hemerocallis Double Cutie

This plant is right in front of my kitchen window in the Front Door Garden. It’s name is Double Cutie and it was supposed to be nearly double, but this first bloom of the year was completely single.

Hemerocallis Double Cutie 2

This is the second flower of Double Cutie to bloom this year…. It has two extra petals… Almost double! Some plants with double blooms will have more double flowers as the plant matures, so it may get more double in coming years.

Hemerocallis Pandora's Box

This photo could be a bit misleading size wise… Pandora’s Box has small flowers about 2 1/2-3″ across. I love the creamy, nearly white color with the plum near the center.

Hemerocallis Bodacious Returns 2

The next Daylily in the Front Door Garden, is Bodacious Returns. I showed a flower from a different day in the previous post. So far I have had no more than 2 flowers at a time open, but the huge blooms (nearly 7″ across) make up for the lower number of flowers.

Hemerocallis Peach Rose

This is one of the Daylilies I am not sure of it’s variety name. I tried to check greenhouse records, but did not figure out who this is. I try to label my plants, but this one didn’t get one. I do know that it was a poor lonely plant that was brought home when we had our greenhouses. It is a nice soft peach with a lavender rose blush toward the yellow center.

Hemerocallis Melon Balls 1

Melon Balls is next around the garden. This plant has had a lot of flowers open most every day. As you can see, there are lots more buds.

Hemerocallis Melon Balls 2

Here is another photo showing one of the blooms closer. The beautiful melon color also has tiny blushes of reddish plum and some lighter streaks in the petals.

Hemerocallis Mini Peach

Wandering from the far side of the Front Door Garden up the path toward the house is another un-named variety… I call it Mini Peach because of the small, soft peach colored flowers. This was another lonely baby that had lost it’s tag at the greenhouse and came home with me. After many, many years here it is finally large enough to divide so I can have more in other places. The mulching and attention I have been able to give the gardens since losing the greenhouses has helped many plants to thrive instead of “just hanging in there”.

Hemerocallis Bella Lugosi 2

Here is another photo of a Bella Lugosi flower. I have divided my original plant and now have 4 clumps of it, two in the Front Door Garden and the others in the back yard. This photo shows how the sun makes these blooms seem to sparkle.

Hemerocallis Black Eyed Stella

Back to near the front door, walking out toward the driveway, is the clump of Black Eyed Stella. This is another small flowered variety. This one is also supposed to be a re-bloomer… I don’t remember if I have gotten any late flowers from this plant, but this is the first year I have a bumper crop of flowers.

Hemerocallis Hall's Pink

Not far from Black Eyed Stella is Hall’s Pink. The bloom in the photo is from a plant in the Stone Wall Garden in the back yard. The plant in the Front Door Garden has not bloomed yet this year.

Hemerocallis Ice Carnival

Ice Carnival is one of my favorite Daylilies with it’s creamy pale yellow to nearly white flowers. The color of the flowers fades during the day as they age.

Hemerocallis Ice Carnival Closeup

Here are a couple more blooms…. This variety has multiplied nicely and I have these planted in the Front Door Garden as well as in the back yard in the Mound Garden and Stone Wall Garden. So pretty in the early evening.

Hemerocallis Swiss Strawberry

Swiss Strawberry is tucked in the middle of the garden not far from Ice Carnival. This particular plant was not to stay here in this garden because the flowers were too reddish and clashed with other flowers near it. I dug the whole clump (I thought) out and plunked it in the woods in a damp area. The clump in the woods is a bit taller, but still growing in the now deep shade. The Spring after I dug these out, it returned…. I obviously missed a few pieces of root and they sprouted and grew happily. I didn’t have time to dig it out again, and now it has grown on me (quite literally)…..

Front Door Garden 7-11-11

Here is a photo from the walkway to the driveway, showing Ice Carnival and Swiss Strawberry with a peek of the dwarf Blue Spruce and Echinaceas in the background. This garden probably has the largest number of different varieties of perennials in it. It was the first garden that I dug out of the yard and planted, but it did start out much smaller. It took a few years to figure out what plants were the happiest here… if it is a wet Spring, this can be a soggy area. The Hemerocallis, Echinaceas, and Phlox seem to take most any conditions I have, so I keep dividing those and adding them to other gardens, too.

This is not the end of the Hemerocallis in the gardens…. There are other varieties in other gardens.

Hemerocallis Hyperion

This pretty lemon yellow, fragrant variety is in the wet area of my Rock Garden and a couple areas in the Maple Tree Garden. Hyperion is a delicate flowered variety that is nicely fragrant. This is the last of the photos I have for this post, but not the last of the Daylilies I have. I also have a couple small Stella D’Oro plants, one is in the middle of the flood zone in the Mound Garden in the back yard, and another is in the Shade Garden that is getting washed away at the edge of the woods.

There are also a few plants that have not bloomed yet…. I have a variety with variegated leaves. A couple still have the white variegated leaves, but most of them have reverted back to green leaves. The neat thing about them is that they have double blooms even if they are a very similar color to the wild roadside Daylilies which I have growing in one of our hedgerows and along the driveway. I also have a small growing plant that I forgot the variety I divided, and planted in the Stone Wall Garden. I guess I will know what it will be soon… the little flower buds are getting puffier…. I also have another plant in the Front Door Garden that hasn’t bloomed yet…. It is labeled Pandora’s Box, but the flower stem is 3 ft tall…. much taller than the one in bloom. What fun!! surprise flowers!!

This has been a mini-tour of mostly my Front Door Garden and a couple others filled with the blooms of Dancing Daylilies.

Tags: andrusgardens, flowers, gardens, inspirations, nature
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July 5 & 6 Walks and ART!

Wednesday, July 13th, 2011

To keep my posts from getting too long, I am including a couple days of photos in each. This post includes Photos of flowers taken during my July 5th and 6th garden walks, and as a bonus….this one also includes the first creative project I have done in a LONG time!

Black Caps

This year the Black Caps (or Black Raspberries) have been very productive. I have picked a few quarts of these luscious berries and eaten most of them myself… I LOVE them!

Blurred Berries

This is what happens when the camera isn’t ready to take a picture…. I am not sure if I could reproduce this effect, but it did result in a fun photo of the berries on this wild Honeysuckle bush.

Free Pink Petunias

These petunias flowers are on one of the self seeded plants. Last year I planted some plum colored flowers with deep veins in them, and this year I have an assortment of pretty shades of pinks, plums, and lavenders.

Kitchen Art

Since all of the drama around here, I finally got out some of my art supplies and worked on some very late ATC’s for the “Arts in the Cards” exchange group. Thankfully, the other traders were very patient with me! The studio is a hopeless hovel right now, so I took over the kitchen table.

Hearts ACEO Pair

The group of cards due my the end of May had the theme of “Fabulous Fakes”. I had planned to do something with fake flowers or such, but after Ken had his heart attack a new idea crept in. Our real hearts don’t look as pretty as the “fake” ones we are familiar with. I used an image from one of Ken’s brochures of a real heart on the backs. We don’t tend to think too much about our “real” hearts unless they cause us trouble. For these, I cut my own stamps for the simple solid heart and the one with the rays around the heart. I also used some thin metal in pink that I embossed with a pencil on both sides to give different texture. I also played with embossing powders for scrapbooking that I have had for quite a while now.

Wild Daisy

Sunflowers Daisy Print

The second set of cards were done for the theme of “Sunflowers and Lemonade”. The wild Daisies were coming into bloom, and I thought I would do some flower prints with them to make my Sunflowers. The idea didn’t work as well as I thought it would. I am used to printing on fabric not paper, so the textile paint I used was too thin. I had to play with the paint to get it thicker and finally got some decent prints.

Pair of Sunflower ATC's

The prints needed a bit of touching up with my Inktense Pencils and I added the leaves with the pencils too. The backgrounds were painted in a watercolor effect using my Inktense Blocks, water and a paintbrush. I used the pink metal again and used a scrapbooking paper punch to cut the butterflies, and embossed them with a pencil from the backs. The centers were made glossy and sparkly by using embossing powder with Art Glitter over Inktense block.

Pale Yellow Pansies

Back to the flowers…. Here are a couple of pale yellow Pansies that came from seed in one of the deck planters. I had assorted Pansies and Violas in the planters in the past couple of years.

Seedling Petunias

This photo shows what I think are flowers from the same plant in an earlier photo. You can also see some of the purple Petunias and Lavender Violas that are also seedlings. The only purchased flowers I added to the deck planters are Impatiens, Lobelia, and white Alyssum. I have even found baby Lobelia plants, too!

Hosta with Cuddles

The nearly washed away Hostas were beginning to bloom in the Mound Garden. In the background you can see the top of Cuddles who likes to follow me when I try to take photos in the gardens.

Hemerocallis Bella Lugosi Closeup

This is one of the first varieties of Daylily to bloom….. Bella Lugosi is a really deep wine purple color with a greenish yellow center. They are hard to photograph due to the deep color. I really wish these blooms lasted more than one day… At least there is a bumper crop of buds this year.

Hemerocallis Bodacious Returns

Bodacious Returns was the first Hemerocallis to bloom this year. The plant is not very tall… barely over a foot, but the flowers are absolutely HUGE! As the name implies, this is a re-blooming variety. It should bloom again sometime in the fall.

The next post will have lots of Hemerocallis flowers of all colors. I have counted at least 13 different varieties in the gardens with flowers in all sizes and colors.

Tags: andrusgardens, art, flowers, gardens, inspirations, nature, play
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Catching Up in the Gardens

Tuesday, July 12th, 2011

A lot has happened in the gardens in the past month since my last post. I have slowly gotten most of them mulched with hay to keep the weeding chore as minimal as possible, the Iris and Peony flowers have long faded, and new flowers have taken their places as bright spots of color.

Riedels Greenhouse Flowers

While I would love to have the garden in the photo above in my yard, this one is along RT 222 between Reading and Kutztown PA…. The greenhouse is set back from the road, but the flowers literally pulled me in. The end of June, I was in the Reading area to present a lecture and trunk show to the Quiltessence Quilters quilt guild, and on the way home I did some “greenhouse hopping”. In the past while we owned the greenhouse, I did have gobs of these Tidal Wave Petunias in my own gardens…. Without the greenhouse and with a very limited garden budget, I have none of these this year, and the Petunias I have were purchased the last week of June and are no where near full bloom yet.

Deer by Deck

This little deer and other critters have been making things quite challenging to keep my plants growing and blooming. The deer and woodchucks seem to love the tender buds of various Lilies, Petunias, Phlox, and more. I even found that two of my large Hydrangea bushes have been trimmed by the unwelcome guests. The deer in the photo had been playing with one of our cats in the front yard, then wandered to the back and posed while I stood on the deck. A week after the deer’s visit, and additional sightings of this same critter, we gained a couple more fur-kids…. one who is helping with the unwanted critter populations.

Andrue and Dogs

The photo above shows our two new charges…. Nick and Megan’s dogs. They brought them up from GA on their way to Germany where Nick will be stationed for the next 4 years. They took their 2 cats with them, but wanted to be sure they would be able to find a home they could have the dogs at before having them sent over. Well…. It looks like we will have Roxie and Vladdi here until they get back to the states…. They found that renting a home for 2 dogs and 2 cats was not a possibility…. most homes only will allow one pet. Vladdi is the big black Lab, and Roxie is the brindle who lived with us for 6 months, a couple years ago. Roxie is pretty low key… the total opposite of Vladdi, who within 5 minutes of being let out of the car when they arrived here, had killed and rolled around over a skunk AND killed an Opossum that came wandering down the yard. He began his stay as a “skunk dog” who has now had three de-skunking baths and still has a lingering odor especially when wet. He is helping out my gardens a bit…. I let him out of the dog yard we now have off the greenhouse when a young woodchuck was teasing him from the garden…. the woodchuck didn’t last very long….

Roxie in new Bed

What was the wood box in the greenhouse is now a comfy dog bed. With just Roxie, we could let her stay in the house and outside when we were with her. Vladdi tends to be a runner, and to be sure we don’t lose a dog, the fenced in yard was made so they can come in and out of the greenhouse. The cats are a bit put out, though…. they “owned” the greenhouse…. Now they “own” the deck for the summer. We will have to figure out how to get everyone to get along in the greenhouse come winter.

Mound Garden Mulched

This photo shows the Back Yard Mound Garden after I got most of the weeding and mulching done… This garden has taken a real beating this year with all the heavy downpour rains that have washed gravel from our driveway all the way through the garden and into the woods shade garden. It is hard to see, but the Dark Purple Japanese Iris were in bloom when this photo was taken. I also had some white Impatiens planted between the ditch and lawn along with some lilac Petunias on the upper side of the ditch.

Pale Japanese Iris

Here is a photo of a pale Iris flower I found… The flowers are usually a very deep, dark purple.

Vladdi and Cuddles

This photo shows Vladdi with his favorite toy and a few others nearby. He loves to chase and catch the frisbee and chew on various pieces of lumber or dead branches from the old Lilac bush. If you look closely, you can see Cuddles the cat “picking on” the dog…. He is in the gravel at the top of the Mound Garden. That end of the garden was not completely weeded yet the end of June.

Before the Storm

This photo was taken the same day as the earlier two…. A few showers started, and something bigger was looming on the horizon. You can see some water already running down the driveway….

Mound Garden Water 1

Here is the Mound Garden during the storm…. The water turned the garden into a raging river…. So much for the new hay mulch…. Most of it did stay, but a lot got covered with more gravel. The water ran right through the middle of the dog yard.

Mound Garden Water 2

Even though the Japanese Iris do like water, they are not usually at the edge of a stream. Here you can see how much water was flowing through the Hostas and across the lawn…. This storm was the biggest one yet this year. Thankfully, the Impatiens and Petunias I planted were out of the major water flow.

Lawn Ditch

The storm shown in the previous photos was on June 28, This is what the area that was covered with water looked like after I filled in the ditch, mowed the lawn, and another storm came through on July 2nd. I started with larger stones in the ditch and filled over them with gravel dug out of the garden…. July 3rd, the gravel was gone, but the larger stones stayed… not all was lost!

Deck Planter 1

With all the rains causing trouble in the gardens, I was glad I had my deck planters. I have been blessed with an abundance of flowers that seeded themselves from last year. I did plant the Impatiens, Lobelia and Alyssum in this pot, but the Violet, Nicotiana, Pansies, Violas and even some Petunias came up on their own. The seedlings were so thick I removed many and put them into pots to use in the gardens and other planters.

Back Yard Gardens planted

July 5th I finished planting most of the Mound Garden. It doesn’t look like much yet, because by the time I could purchase annuals, they were a bit scraggly but half price so I gave them a trim and with a bit of patience, will have color again in the gardens. Things were pretty much mainly green after the Peonies and Iris finished blooming. In the photo, you can see the buds on the Daylilies on the left nearly ready to pop.

Pink Lilies

These Pink Asiatic Lilies are pretty rare sights in the gardens this year. I used to have many, many varieties of these and Orientals, too. The mice or other critters must have eaten many of the bulbs as there is no trace of many of them this year. Of the few that did escape the critters, many of those became deer snacks…. the deer seem to think that the Lily buds are like candy. The biggest problem…. Once the buds are eaten, I have to wait until next year for flowers again… The deer also like to munch on the Phlox buds too, but at least those will re-grow new shoots that will bloom a bit later than usual.

Pink Achillea

This will be the last photo for this post. This was taken on July 5th. The Achillea, or Yarrow, likes hot, dry weather. It has grown a bit taller than usual and has flopped due to the many rain showers we have has this year. This is growing in the Lilac Garden which has not been very colorful since the Lilacs finished their bloom months ago. In the week since this photo was taken, I finally finished planting all of the annual and vegetable plants I purchased late June. All but a few areas have been mulched with hay, and the Daylilies have been blooming. The Phlox are beginning to bloom a bit, too. To keep posts from being too big, I am dividing things up a bit. I have taken many many more photos throughout the gardens in the past week or so.

Tags: andrusgardens, Family, flowers, gardens, inspirations, nature
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What a Few Months!!

Friday, June 10th, 2011

Whew!! The past months have really been a roller coaster full of things happening…. I thought I had a couple days to catch my breath a little, but…… This post is a bit of a catch-up on things…. It’s a bit long…..

Windbreak Trees in May

My last post began with a photo of this same group of trees covered in snow. Thankfully the snow left, but there have not been many days without rain, so the grass has been really growing.

With the coming of Spring came my parents trip to Texas and my usual stay with my Gram mid April. I was only able to stay with her one week this year because our son Nick’s wedding was to be April 30th in South Georgia. The original plan was to head South as soon as I got home from Gram’s, but a cabinet building project was running behind (cabinets we needed to take to GA with us for Nick).

Nick's Cabinet 1

The photo above shows one of the cabinets nearly done after we got them to Georgia. They still needed staining, varnish and assembling once we got down there.We started toward Georgia very early AM Wednesday the 27th. Did I say I was to arrange the flowers for the wedding??? I had expected to have 5 days to do them, but that time was really cut short.

I should have taken a photo of the van after we got things loaded. Four bathroom cabinets, one of my large plastic drawer units full of items that I sell from my ArtFire online shops, luggage and a couple coolers for a few meals and snacks on the road. It was literally full to the roof…. cabinets stacked and filled with whatever would fit in them.

Tennessee Rest Area

The first 7 hours of the trip went quite smoothly, and we were thinking that we might be able to do the trip without stopping for a night, but as soon as the day got hot and we started traveling through the mountains of Virginia, the van decided to misbehave like it did last summer. It would chug and sputter up the hills, then Ken would try to gain momentum down them, then sputter up again… We cut through the corner of Tennessee then into North Carolina. The scenery was beautiful, and we got to see more of it than planned due to having to stop alongside the highway occasionally. By the time we were nearly to South Carolina, it was time for a stop. As it turned out, it was a good thing that we did not keep going at our original pace…. That night while we were in the motel, many nasty storms cut across our path. It was just a loud thunderstorm overnight where we were, but many tornadoes had touched down during our first day and night of travel.

Van Repair 1

Ahhh, what seems to be a usual sight with this van…. The morning of our second day, we looked for an auto parts store after breakfast. We found one that put a computer on and a couple possible problems were found. We found out two parts were bad at a garage that was suggested by the parts store, but not cheap and not available that day, so a temp fix of sorts was done. We did get a tire that went flat on the first day fixed, so the van wasn’t shaking wildly from 2 cans of fix-a-flat that we used with a tire patch kit (another thing that slowed our progress on day one). Not long after getting on the road again, the chugging started again up hills. when we got half way through GA, it was time to call for help. All of our boys were at Nick’s house, and Aaron had his Tahoe that could tow the van. A car dolly was rented and he started North while we kept heading South to meet up. We passed a number of areas that had been damaged by the previous day and night’s tornadoes. Lots of trees uprooted and mangled. A bit South of Atlanta, a large tornado had cut across Rt75 leaving the trees on each side looking like a huge weed whacker had gone through. Two tractor trailers were picked up off the road and tossed into the woods… If we hadn’t had the car trouble, we could have been dodging tornadoes. What was a frustration really was a blessing. We finally arrived at Nick’s house Friday morning. I had to work fast to get the flowers ready for the wedding.

Bridesmaid Bouquets

It’s a good thing that floral design seems to be like riding a bike for me…. within a few minutes of wiring and taping flowers and arranging, I got fairly fast… not as fast as when I did it full time, but fast enough. The above photo shows the bouquets for the bridesmaids. I finished all of the flowers just in time to dress for the wedding. Talk about stress….

Nick and Megan Walking the Isle

Here are Nick and Megan walking the “isle”… a sidewalk along the side of Megan’s Uncle’s house which made a beautiful setting. It was good silk flowers were chosen… The heat of the day would have been really hard on fresh flowers.

Family Picture

The wedding was a great way to get our whole family together for pictures. Above are Nick and Megan in the center, Aaron, Zack and Marla behind Nick. The tall guy in the back row left is Derek our oldest grandson. Eva and Maia (granddaughters) are on each side of Nick and Megan. Ken and I are on the left, with Aaron’s wife Jonelle holding little Jenna and Andrue on the other side front. the only one missing was Ally, the oldest granddaughter. Not all the faces are great…. the sun was really bright.

Calla Bouquet

A very tall arrangement of silk Hydrangeas, Roses and Calla Lilies.

Bouquet and Chairs

The Bride’s bouquet lying on a little table between two rockers on the porch of the house. A number of these rockers lined the length of the porch.

Aaron, Jonelle and Kids

A nice picture of Aaron and his family, Jenna didn’t want her picture taken for some reason that day… One photo she actually didn’t hide from.

My Guys

A photo of my 3 guys together for the last time for quite a while. Zack (middle- Army) is now back in Iraq, and Nick will be stationed in Germany for 4 years with the Air Force, and leaves in only a couple of weeks, now. Aaron is the only one who lives not too far from us. He is in the Air Guard working in Syracuse, NY.

Bathroom Vanity

Once the wedding was over, Zack headed back to Texas on Sunday and Aaron headed back to PA… A day later the bathroom remodel that has been in the works since before our trip last year, needed to be worked on. The photo above shows the vanity cabinet fully finished and installed. the cabinet over the toilet is another Ken made. They are made of a combination of Oak and Walnut lumber.

Bathroom Cabinets 2

These are the other two cabinets that were made and brought from PA to GA. There was a lot more room in the van for the trip home!

Ruby

One of the grand fur-kids… This is Ruby, and her sister Sapphire is another pretty black and white. They share the place with two big dogs- Roxy, who stayed with us a couple years ago, and Vladdy a big black lab. The kitties are going to Germany with Nick and Megan, but we will be dog-sitting until they get settled into a home and can get them over there. The weather was absolutely perfect while we were in GA…. Warm enough, but not too hot with low humidity. It rained just about every day we were gone here in PA.

Van Repair 2

Another of those common views of the van… Nick was helping Ken to check out some possible parts that needed replacing. They did find another bad part that we would pick up after eating breakfast as the journey home began on May 9th. We hoped that new part would solve our problem, but NOT! We got to Macon,GA after a very frustrating 5 hours… normally a much shorter trip to get that far.

GA Old Little House

Thankfully, Ken has two cousins there, and we stayed the night with one and the next day with the other while the van was in a garage getting a new fuel pump. The photo above is a little old house that we stopped the van near to let it cool a bit before chugging on. Later we found that one of Ken’s cousins lives not far from this house. Finally late Tuesday May 10th we got back on the road again with not enough money for a motel, so the rest of the trip was done with no overnight stop. The new fuel pump and another new part did the trick! There were no more chugging episodes the rest of the way home. We finally got home mid day on Wednesday, then napped to catch up on sleep.

Mower in grass

Leaving for a couple of weeks in late April to early May, is not a great thing for the lawn and gardens. All the rain kept the grass growing and it was pretty deep by the time we got home.

Weedy Front Door Garden

The Dandelions were blooming beautifully, and other weeds were also taking off in the flower beds.

Baby Ginkgo Leaves

I have longed to have a Ginkgo tree of my own, and now I have 2! They are only 2-3 feet tall and were leafing out nicely when we returned home. They will live in a large pot for most of this summer before they get planted in the yard.

Pear Blossoms

The pear and Almond trees were in bloom.

Deep Grass with Dandilions

The very shaggy lawn in need of mowing, The leaves on most of the trees were just beginning to pop with little bits of green.

New Violets

While walking the yard and gardens, I found these pretty Violets…. They must be a cross of some that I have already…. I had white, regular purple, white with flecks of purple, reddish purple ones, and now these new ones!

Red Trilliums

It’s hard to see the flowers, but here are a few of the Red Trilliums I brought from my parent’s woods last Spring. To the right is a variegated leaf Brunnera in full bloom.

April Showers Damage

With all the rain and storms while we were gone, a lot of my shade garden washed away…. there has been one gully (the one on the right), but now there are 3 deep gouges from the water.

Lilac Garden

This was taken on April 13, after I got much of the lawn mowed…. The Lilacs were blooming, but the water did a lot of damage. There were lots of moldy buds. There is my “faithful companion” Cuddles who follows me everywhere while I try to take photos.

Wisteria

Wisteria Flowers!!! The deer had kept the Wisteria pruned pretty short, but I had nine beautiful flowers bloom. As you can see, the weeds were doing well in this bed, too.

Swimming Dandelion

We had about 3 days without rain after we returned from GA, then it began to rain every day for what seemed an eternity…. This Dandelion was swimming in the “ditch” through my back yard mound garden.

Oops!

Ken tried to get the bales of hay off the fields…. Because of all the rain, the low spot between the lawn and the field was really soggy…. The tractor remained buried for a couple weeks…. This photo was taken at least a week after it got stuck… I mowed the lawn a day after the tractor got buried, but nearly got the mower stuck, too. Thankfully I got that much done before the seemingly never ending rain began again.

Pink Lily-of-the-Valley

Wet Pink Lily-of-the-Valley…. The white ones that didn’t wash away bloomed nicely this year, too.

LOV Bouquet

A pretty bouquet of Spring flowers…. I picked these to bring in the house to brighten things up after things really took a turn and life seemed to blurr by…. Very early May 15th (before 4AM) I had to take Ken to the ER with chest pains. He was admitted for observation after a few tests, and to wait for additional blood testing. I came home for a quick nap after he was settled into his room, then things got even crazier after one of the test showed he had already had or was about to have a heart attack…. He has had artery blockages in the past, and has had 2 previous catheterizations with a stent placed during one. He has had angina pain for the most of the past 10 yrs. even after the caths. He got moved to ICU before being transferred to the Robert Packer Hospital in Sayre, after much waiting for a doctor, a room, then an ambulance. He got settled into a room at the Packer by 7PM and he said he didn’t have any pain, so no one was super concerned. As we were waiting for the Dr to get back to us to let us know when a heart cath would be done Monday AM, Ken had a heart attack while we were watching the second half of the finale of Survivor on TV.

I was pushed out of the room, and people were coming from everywhere. His heart had to be shocked back into rythm, and I was allowed back into the room once he was awake and talking again, but very groggy. It seemed forever (but wasn’t really that long) before he was wheeled to the cath lab to find out what had caused the attack. I found that a hospital OR floor can be VERY desolate after 10PM on a Sunday night. Aaron and Jonelle came up and as soon as the procedure was done, we got to see Ken. Aaron thought he looked near dead…. One Dr showed us videos of the procedure and the two blocked arteries that had caused the attack and were now opened and everything flowing properly again. One blockage was referred to as the “widowmaker”. Even though it seemed that there were delays all day getting to the Packer Hospital, everyone who he needed was there when he needed them.

I went home after he was settled into the CCU for the night. He was waking a bit more, but didn’t realize everything had been done already…. I got home near 2AM and got a couple hours sleep before calling the CCU the next morning. He was sitting up and eating breakfast and all looked good, so I slept a couple more hours. By the time I got to the hospital, he was sitting up and looking perkier than he had in quite a while! He said he felt better than he had in years…. no chest pain! He came home on the 19th after a few boring sleepless days and nights in the hospital, and we both spent the rest of that day sleeping…. Hospitals are no place for patients to get any sleep….

Dbl White Aquilegia

Once Ken got home and got some sleep, he ended up spending most every day the rest of that week visiting friends and “supervising” Aaron’s kitchen floor re-do. His only limitation was no lifting over 10 lbs for the first 10 days…. Totally Amazing!

Garden Gloves

By this time I still had not had time to work in my gardens…. Here is one of the new pairs of garden gloves I got for the task…. A great dollar store find! They don’t look like this now, after 3 weeks of use.

Glad Nubs

While pulling weeds in the Front Door Garden, I found a wonderful surprise…. The Glads that I had planted last year lived over the winter… they are not usually hardy around here…. What a wonderful find, especially since there is no money left for many annual flowers this year.

Oops!! I guess I didn’t get the caption right on this one…. It is a photo of one of the Deutsia bushes in bloom…. They were so pretty!

Planters

A week after Ken came home from the hospital, it was time to get Memorial Day planters potted up and delivered to the cemeteries. A bit of a challenge this year with Ken’s limit for lifting. He usually moves things around for me since I can’t lift most of these myself. We ended up sharing the load to get the job done. The day we delivered the pots to the cemeteries was hot and a really nasty batch of storms popped up…. we had to wait out hail at one cemetery, and the storms seemed to follow us, we stayed dry during most of the task. We visited Ken’s aunt and uncle near the end of our deliveries, and found that there was a tornado warning up, and the storm was headed for our home…. Kind of Spooky…. We got the rest of the planters placed and on the way home we were in the middle of a really nasty storm…. Not a fun ride home, but we got there and everything was fine there. The 2 pots above were delivered later, and just behind them is the little “creek” that was running down the driveway due to the storm.

Washed Over Hosta

My Hosta that are used to getting buried a bit each winter, really got buried with that storm…. the gravel on them is from somewhere up the driveway…. a LONG way from the garden.

Back Yard Grass Flattened

The grass in the yard was flattened from the water in a 12-14 foot wide path.

S Curve Washout

This photo shows the edge of the road heading to our house…. The ditch is at least a foot deep and pretty wide…. there used to be a gravel shoulder there.

Shade Garden Waterfalls

Well, there are not supposed to be waterfalls in the shade garden, but the water was still flowing over 12 hours after the storms ended. There were a few plants clinging to the sides of this gully, but they must be at the neighbors or lower in the woods.

Blue Iris

One of the pretty Blue Iris that decided to open the morning after the first Big storm. The day after our stormy planter deliveries, we attended a reception at the Troy High School that was the first of 3 parts of Ken’s 50th class reunion. The skies were clear and the weather really warm when we left home, but the rains began again during the program we attended. We again drove home in another nasty storm to find that the driveway was blocked by a group of little trees that had fallen across it. We ended up walking (or running) down most of the driveway in the lightning, thunder and thankfully lessening rain (good thing I had a flashlight in the van… I’m blind in the dark, and we had to dodge the rivers of water. It was almost like day with the lightning).

Broken Tree

The next morning, this is what Ken found…. A pretty large Pine tree had snapped off from what must have been a big gust of wind. It knocked the other trees over the driveway… That WAS a nice tree.

Driveway Gravel

This is more gravel that used to be in the driveway…. It is nearly 6″ deep in many places.

Buried Echinacea

Not only grass and Hostas got buried in driveway gravel… here are a couple poor Echinacea plants that I don’t think will recover. They are not happy having their crowns buried. First the grass from mowing caught on them, then the gravel piled on. I have a lot of gravel removal to do in the back yard.

Thankfully the night of the Class reunion dinner was nice with no storms…. A power outage caused the venue for the dinner to be changed at the last minute. We were crammed in an almost too small building with no air conditioning, just windows to let in the breeze. It was nice to have a drive home without lightning and pouring rain.

Peony with Sky

Here is one of the Peony flowers from underneath…. They came into bloom while we had a heatwave, so they didn’t last very well… The heavy rains didn’t help either.

Peony with Iris

One of my fat, fluffy Peonies with Siberian Iris in the background.

Mulched Front Door Garden

During a few cooler days, I was able to get the Front Door Garden weeded and mulched…. The mower wasn’t working, but the tractor made hauling the hay easier with the wagon. This was taken just as the Peonies were ready to pop their buds.

Miss Canada Lilac

My late blooming Miss Canada Lilac with Hello Darkness Iris in the background. May ended, and June began….

Then another Sunday in the ER…. Night this time… Sunday June 5th after church and afternoon nap, I tried to mow more lawn with the mower that kept throwing off belts and causing other problems, and Ken did some mowing with the push mower…. probably more than he should have done. A couple hours later while sitting watching a movie, his heart started racing and BP jumped, so we ended up heading back to the Towanda ER to be sure it was nothing serious. By the time he was hooked up to the monitors, things were back to normal. Ken was kept over night and discharged the next morning with a heart monitor for 24 hours. Another night with no sleep, and another day of sleeping to catch up on…. A new med not taken at the right time in addition to the mowing probably caused the scare.

Ken with Cuddles

Here is Ken working on the mower again a day after getting home from the latest hospital visit… I think Cuddles is more pest than helper…. After that fix, the mower worked until I almost ran it out of gas…. This time the drive belt popped off… There are still areas of the yard that have not been mowed for the first time of the year.

Single White Peony

My single white Peonies are the latest ones to bloom…. The blooming blue Nepeta make a nice background.

Stepping Out Iris

There are still a few of these Iris in bloom…. They put out a lot of flowers this year.

Well, that’s been a wrap-up of the past few months….. Many scares and frustrations, but all in all there is no doubt that the Lord has been watching out for us…. Ken is feeling better and we hope all is good at the cardiologist follow-up next week.

Posted in Architecture and Old Buildings, Family, Flowers and Gardens, inspirations, Landscapes and Skies, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Archive for the ‘Flowers and Gardens’ Category

A Spring Walk in February?

Flowers and Gardens in the Studio

The Birth of a New Garden- Step One

A New Beginning?

Mid July to Early August Gardens

In the Gardens Mid July

The Dancing Daylilies

July 5 & 6 Walks and ART!

Catching Up in the Gardens

What a Few Months!!

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