Still Life with...

Doesn't everyone have a stump covered in rocks and...glittery bouncy balls...on their coffee table, with, say, a vase of Alchemilla mollis nearby? A shaft of morning sunlight transformed it all into something ethereal as I ran out the door today. Won't find this in a Dutch masterpiece, but I'm not much for dead pheasants anyways.

Still glorifying roses...

Two weeks ago, the yellow 'Graham Thomas' rose in the background got most of the glory in Anne and Peter's garden. This week, the foreground rose, 'Sunset...something' (it's coming to me...) is so beautiful we're wondering when Canon cameras will record scent. Anne figures we've broken some design rule, having a tall rose at the front of a bed, but all the better to sniff it.

Below, the panicles of a Hydrangea paniculata ('Kyushu' or a similiar cultivar) are just about to open behind 'Sunset...something' (my, I'm on top of my names tonight). The important botanical fact is that these rose cultivars are descended from old-fashioned roses; therefore, they tend to retain authentic qualities like fragrance and robustness, instead of sacrificing them for bred-for-market qualities such as repeat-bloom and wedding-cake-perfect-petals.

From the top step of the door stoop...

2010, The Year of The Big Bloom, recorded for posterity.

Summer-thyme

A bee's-eye view...

Considering that the flowers of Geranium cinereum (below) are one inch across, this little lady is a lot smaller than I thought at the time.

So many dimensions in a garden :)

What's behind your roses?

I've never understood the concept of formal rose gardens, where a hundred varieties compete for attention in geometric beds. For one thing, it's like being at a Calvin Klein convention: everyone's beautiful, so no one in particular stands out (such a drag). For another, rose blossoms are attractive but the plants themselves tend to be prickly and gawky. So I'm more in favour of interplanting roses with plants that soften and complement the dee-luxury of roses.



Here's the 'Joseph's Coat' climber by my front door, with California lilac (Ceanothus) and Achillea 'Moonshine' below, and a variegated ivy growing up around the post.



In Anne's garden, below, an un-named own-root cultivar unfolds in front of Choisya 'Sundance' and red valerian (Centranthus ruber).




Also in Anne's garden, this 'Graham Thomas' is a stand-out in front of the black-leafed elderberry, Sambucus 'Black Beauty'.

I took the picture below by holding the camera up over my head. Graham's outgrown the six-foot rebar frame Peter constructed last year!





And finally (until the next 'round of blooms anyways), here's a silvery display of a white 'Iceberg' rose in front of billowing Mexican hair grass (Stipa tenuissima) in Rojeanne and Jim's garden.

Japanese Irises in The Swale

Wow. The white Japanese irises (Iris ensata) in Sheena and Terry's garden (in the swale-to-be) are busting out in full bloom. This is significant because we watched them dwindle away in the lower garden, where I now submit they were gradually overwhelmed by cedar roots. We were starting to talk nostalgically about the last time they bloomed.

Japanese irises are particlularly gorgeous and unusual because the blooms are flat.

Then, last year, I transplanted them into the new beds out front, where we are transforming the gravel pit into a swale garden (see entry on May 18 2010). They definitely have wet feet out here, since the water table reaches the surface this time of year. And they love it.

Here's the before-shot, from this May:

And here's one month's growth, in this crazy wet year:

That's a white hydrangea on the far left, followed by the white variegated leaf of the redtwig dogwood, Cornus sericea. There's a human leg, for scale, in the pic below.

Recycled Baby Stroller + Rubbermaid Bin = Bicycle Trailer

Here's my Car-Free Day rig--nice wheels from those running-mommy-style baby stroller/joggers. A friend built it for me a couple years ago, but I've rarely used it for gardening. I loaded my handtools in a side pannier, and had no desire to regularly haul heavier items up North Van's hills. Now, of course, I'm scooter-ified.

Today, however, I resurrected the trailer for a Car-Free Day personal parade and tweaked some irksome elements to make it really roadworthy.

That is, I removed the bicycle rack. The trailer hitch is on the seat post, so the trailer bars always hit the rack when I turned corners. Now, it can swivel no problem, and I'm ready to haul some fun gear up the road for the summer. I'll get a kick-stand and a back fender first, and I'll rig some kind of shower-cap lid for the box so I can overload it if necessary. Quadra Island, here I come?!

Car-Free Day, North Van style, was a shade different from the mother-event on Commercial Drive. More skaters, fake snow and jumps for boarders (a la Olympics), boom-box music, and a deficit of colourful street performers. However, this was the first effort, and they did take clever advantage of the steep grade on Lonsdale. I found the organizer, who said another one is planned for September. So I'll get my act together for that one.

Car-Free Sunday!

North Vancouver has a Car-Free Day!!

Agh--because I am a gardening workaholic with cbc.ca permanently tuned to a certain event in South Africa, I didn't hear until Friday that Car-Free Day has finally crossed the inlet...on Sunday! The streets around Lower Lonsdale will be full of fuel-free festivities.

As the Scooter-Gardener, formerly known as the Bicycle-Gardener, this calls for immediate and drastic action. I've hauled out the three bicycle-paintings I did in the depths of winter. I don't quite know what I'll do with them, but they seem appropriate. Here's one. The rest are in the sidebar and at the bottom of the page.

I've hauled out my baby-carriage-converted-into-a-bicycle-trailer. (I was considering a One Less Baby bumper sticker, but this may be obscure humour. You have to be familiar with the popular One Less Car bicycle-sticker.) I will fill said trailer with flowers and pedal the whole rig downtown.

I'm feeling like my vocation is still pretty fringe, despite my workaholic status. Obviously, there's enough of a niche out there for gardeners who don't run truck-operations. The savings in overhead are phenomenal, and some of those savings are passed on to customers. There are countless other benefits--all the Car-Free benefits--and it's not as difficult as you'd think to run a two-wheeled operation. You get better at logistics, organization, co-operation...

I think it's training for a energy-conservation future: one that I am not particularly afraid of. Everyone seems to dread an assault on our lifestyle, but I can see a healthier and more vibrant community evolving around more careful energy management.

Pink Police Report

The Pink Police are out, and have reported this as the pinkest garden bed in the city. Bodaciously borderline. Warnings have been posted.

Pink dogwood, Pink paeonies, Pink thrift (Armeria maritima)

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Pink everything from a different angle.

You kind of want to jump in it. But that would wreck it. Jumping in gardens is a distinctly unprofessional activity.

(This is Norma's garden. The third-year-planted pink dogwood is outrageously pink this year.)

Showing more restraint, the foxglove below is serenely Pink against a backdrop of California lilac (Ceanothus)...

But there's hundreds more where it came from. Glade of wild foxgloves in Roswitha's garden, below, as viewed through a Pink gateway of mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia)...

Up close, Kalmia latifolia unfolds as precisely as the most surprising Japanese paper sculpture.

Very pink.

Proof that I am in a Motorcycle Gang

So yeah. I now qualify for the Sunday a.m. Lonsdale Beans biker gang.

Closer to the truth: I got waved down (again) by the local Ruckus maestro-mechanic known as Drew. Since January (the last time I got pulled over by the Maestro), Drew has continued to morph his formerly-known-as-Ruckus machine into something that closely resembles a down-sized Harley. The fact that an original Ruck (mine), a real-deal Harley, and the machine were parked side-by-side at the same time, within the same dimension, was definitely worth a pic.

Drew has a few tips for The Scoot, after which I'm sure I'd have to change it's name. The machine can go, hmm, a bit faster.

Recycle Broken Concrete!

How genius is this?!

While I'm on the topic of flagstones, I'm posting another project-in-progress from the Eco-Theme-Park also known as Liz n' Len's back garden. I get excited about things like this--what a fantastic use of and "disposal" solution for cumbersome broken concrete!

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In the past, I've used it in the place of flagstone for pathways or small patios--usually because a homeowner wants to remove an old cement pathway and forego disposal costs. Broken concrete has the same irregular shape as natural stone (see the slabs lying-in-wait in the photo above) so is surprisingly attractive once recessed in the earth as stepping stones.

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However, it is also surprisingly attractive as a retaining wall, as well as easier to stack than natural stone. And shall we point out it's free and delivered to the site, because the source site owners/contractors are overjoyed to forego the hefty disposal costs!

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I'll be lurking in Liz n' Len's garden on a regular basis because genius is known to rub off on people.

Flagstone around Tree

Isn't this a beautiful? A couple years ago, the old scotch pine fell over in a windstorm so Anne and Peter replaced it with a Katsura tree, and Peter reconstructed the flagstone patio around it. Then Anne and I planted a groundcover potentilla and blue star creeper (Isotoma fluviatilis, formerly known as Laurentia--I don't know why "they" renamed it--Isotoma sounds like an ocular disease).

Anyways, the pale starry blue glows with the complementary orange deciduous azaleas in the background.




I'm really liking the fractured root-like pattern around the tree, and am convinced there's some kind of optical illusion going on--the surface looks like a dome. If you were a colourist/paintster, you'd say that's because the lightest colour is in the centre of a circle, which gives the impression of light striking the top surface of a dome.


Here we are--Gardening Co-Conspirators/Inspirators. (Anne said my shirt matched the garden so she had to take my picture. Anne is also a paintster. I said I had to take her picture because it's her garden!)