Moss and Brick

Time for a little bragging on my partner. A has been working with me on a strange little vision I had for a particular corner of our yard.We have this nook against the back of the house where the stone foundation creates two walls around a sheltered little garden spot. When we bought the house it was already a special feeling place.

One day while digging there, my spade hit a little china statue of St. Francis, resting in the black dirt and now he sits in the top of my china cabinet (probably some Catholic sacrilege to dig him out from under the roses and bring him in but I am none the wiser for having done it). The moss grows green and moist here and there were ferns of several varieties that didn't live anywhere else on the property. It was green and lush and the grass was even usually happy. I decided it needed to be a slightly enclosed, circular kind of contemplation garden. The kind of place where you could bring a good book and have a good cry, or a little boy could be alone with his favorite Matchbox cars which all have secret names. Eventually I want to enclose it quite a bit and have the flowers and things inside it be special lush haven. Someday there's going to be a little burbling fountain and a bench or chair for resting but for now...there's the first amazing, real piece.

Wall in progress, still a little sod on the right to be lifted and filled under.

Some of the old bricks we found on our property that got worked into the sides.

A built me a brick retaining wall, making the lawn a perfect little circle. The bricks will age and the moss will move in and sometime very soon I'll lay a set of steps. I'm rather in love with the effect. A was very energetic about the project, peeling back the sod and shoveling good topsoil underneath to raise it all the a level plain, morning after early morning before work. I am very impressed. Not bad for a guy with no masonry experience, eh? I think its all pretty magical.

Tah Dah!!!!! The finished beauty...minus steps.

Golden, Garden Days

This is life at our house lately.

 We're planting and weeding and raking and planting and trimming and watering and planting. The highbush blueberries are in, the lily bulbs are in, the ornamental shrubs arrived this evening and our planters by the doors are full of pansies and daffodils and grape hyacinth, all starting to bloom beautifully.

 It's dirty fingernails from here on our for the whole gang! Nothing for it but to jump in with both feet and a trowel. Lots of gardening to do before the third trimester finishes up as we take our leisure on the lawn with Baby lolling about on a blanket.

Hydrangeas Don't Have To Be Blue

 We're getting to the end of the heady blooming season for most gardens. All that really seems to be left are the hardy, and ever optimistic black-eyed-susans. In our garden the same is true, although some previous owner left us one botanical trump card, two stunning hydrangea trees. They're not really trees...in the classical/botanical sense of things, they're shrubs, but over the years somebody worked hard to prune them into beautiful fountaining tree shapes, and with very little care on my part they're the late-season garden stars.

 I love how amazing it feels to be underneath them, the world barely visible through the emerald umbrella the arching stems. They are perfect little dream-houses, wonderful places to play on hot days when the boys are scheming up a world of secret kingdoms.

The Latin name for these hydrangeas (in case you're interested in hunting one up for your own garden corner) is H. paniculata 'Grandiflora.' I love them for being such lush, spectacle bloomers (check out those blossoms as big as my head in the shots above!), their carefree nature, sweet scent, and the way my honeybees are drunkely stumbling all over themselves to get back and forth from the blooms to their hive. Some of my sources tell me that this hydrangea which is a garden plant over 150 years old is out of vogue, and has been overdone in many gardens. I say, baloney! You can't overdo the classic plants, and the only thing it could do to impress me more would be produce fruit. I'm a wild fan.

 The blossoms are positively humming with visitors, tiny butterflies, shimmering irridescent flies and of course the girls from our hive, I even saw a ladybug there, doubtless eating some less fortunate visitors.

I am thinking about trying to dry some of the blossoms this year and hoping for some kind of artful arrangement. I love the delicate, papery way they can end up, like a million tiny wings. See here, here and here for examples of what I'm dreaming of. I could do that, right?

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Iris Season!

Image via Wikipedia

One of Van Gogh's many iris paintings.

Finally, the tall bearded irises in my backdoor bed are blooming. They opened sometime last night and this morning when we came out the door, there they were, glistening in the morning sunshine. That long wait was totally worth it. Several of these iris rhizomes were rescued from the lawn which had crept into their overly shady bed. I dug them in the middle of a misting spring rain, in the very chill world of mud and drizzle that is the early year. And the incident inspired this Poetry Friday post.

My purple veined iris that came with our house.

I think the irises I was digging and transplanting that day are these lush, purple veined ones, and I think the fluttery lilac one below is a variety I ordered from the excellent folks at Shreiner's Iris Gardens, along with a brilliant butter yellow which I hope is still coming.

If you're looking for some new irises, I heartily recommend them. The only caveat is that you'll get lost drooling over the photos on their web site. If you're a novice gardener, looking for some recommendations, bearded irises are a good pick, they're beautiful, often fragrant, make beautiful cut flowers and given sunshine they are carefree and unfussy. I love them for all these reasons and also for the fact that they are so historically enduring. Irises are one of those flowers that often outlives houses or at least the owners of said houses and will still be bravely blooming every spring, even if their good gardeners have gone on to contribute to the soil themselves. I love a resourceful romantic, even if the romantic is a plant.

Image via Wikipedia

Monet's iris path. Someday, I'll visit.

Next iris task is to paint my own rendition of them, after the great masters of brush and palette. I have in mind to try my hand at this beautiful basket of cut irises for sale that I photographed in a garden France during our trip to Europe in 2008.

I've been thinking about it for years, way before I "could" paint. A and I used to play this game somewhat perpetually called "If I Could Paint" wherein we'd call out to the other person and point when a particularly heart-tugging image hit us and we wished we were able to wield a brush. It still cracks me up to think that suddenly one day, I discovered I could paint...I have years of catch-up ahead of me. That game set me up with a long list of future subjects.

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Floral Foraging

 The wisteria is in bloom here on our Connecticut roadsides. I cannot resist foraging when I run into a cache and abundant wild flowers are no exception. In many parts of the country wisteria is considered invasive so there's no big concern about picking an armful of blossoms as the muscular vines can bulge and flex and pull over a house if they wish. Even if it a dizzy hellion of a vine, it is breathtaking.

 One of my very favorite flowers. I can't really resist it. I tried to pretend that I wasn't going to plant one here but then I got over it when I pulled over to the side of the highway, in the mighty shade of a massive wisteria, laden with soft ropes of blossom dripping all over the entire backside of a some nameless big box store. That single vine where I stopped to fill my arms must have been 30 feet or more across and about 20 feet high....thick with sweet, pendulous clusters.

 There's a potted wisteria sitting in our driveway now, waiting for just the right spot. I am waffling about where exactly I will plant it, my third wisteria at a dwelling of ours. I planted a wisteria vine at our first house, we bought a house with a lush wisteria pergola and then sold it after just one season of ripe blooms and now, here we are again. New beginnings.

 Wisteria is a good flower for us. It will help encourage us to make sure to build that imaginary pergola over the imaginary stone patio in our back yard, a little bit an anchor tying us to plans we dreamed up. It also makes me think of our wedding in my great-grandparents vineyard all draped with gold and purple and is a good tie between our mutual interest in The East and our origin in The West. A flower held in great traditional esteem in China and Japan and then "discovered", named and affectionately adopted in England. Just about exactly right.

And you have to admit. Even if you're not a "flower person" that it is spectacular. Right? Tell I'm right.

Coffee: Homegrown, Home-dipped.

Remember, back when I talked about the coffee tree blooming?

So, it bloomed beautifully...and survived the wild botanical mistreatment of our move and then it started making coffee cherries! Really! I couldn't believe it. I was so proud. This  stalwart little tree, valiantly blossoming and fruiting here in the chaos of an urban home in Connecticut. That's guts, right?

As soon as Planty (he has a name) started to fruit out A and I began plotting what we'd do with the coffee. We're not big coffee drinkers and it was sure to be an infinitesimal amount of beans anyway. We considered just eating the cherries by themselves to see what coffee in-the-raw was like and decided we felt badly about not going further with our hard-won produce. And then a brilliant idea hit me! Chocolate covered coffee beans. Genius. A small amount was ideal, it highlighted the little nuggets beautifully and it would be a genuine experience to take it from tree to table. The other hidden bonus was of course that chocolate covered coffee beans can easily be packed up and fly across the ocean to be shared with Miq and Penny, the tree's rightful owners.

And that is how I found myself finishing the process, this afternoon and looking proudly at the first homegrown coffee beans, hand-dipped in quality dark chocolate....that I have ever known. There is something cool about making a thing yourself, however silly the quest may be.

Here's how it worked:

First we picked the ripe, red cherries.

Then we peeled off the skin (which we found were sweet when we couldn't resist tasting them), and put the beans themselves to soak and ferment in a little water.

They soaked for about 3 days. Every day or so I poured off the water and added fresh and rubbed the beans to encourage the pulp to drift off and leave the seeds bare. Somewhere in there, the seeds began to separate and I found that each cherry contains two seeds, their flat bellies sweetly pressed together. You learn new things, every time the sun comes up. Once the seeds were feeling pretty clean, I rubbed them smooth and free of all fleshy bits and gave them one more good rinse under the faucet.

Next I stoked a fire in the fireplace and got out the vintage popcorn popper that I found at an estate sale this summer.

Once the fire had created some nice coals I put all the beans into the cage and rattled them over the coals for a good long time, checking periodically to see how they were coming. Eventually, they started to smell nicely: a great toasting, roasting aroma that I can still smell hanging in the house. Not too long after, they were finished. I think we might have taken some of them a bit farther than we wanted but hey....a dark roast is more European, right?

I let the beans cool and melted some dark chocolate. Once the chocolate was a shining, wet puddle of sweet I was ready to do the final dip. Each bean took a swim in the cocoa bowl and then was dripped out onto a wax paper sheet where they cooled and became...our very first crop of homegrown chocolate covered coffee beans. So, so cool.

Miq and Penny, watch your mailbox!