Happy Solstice!

Welcoming back the light at the Dr. Sun Yat Sen Garden, a venue for the Winter Solstice Lantern Festival last night. I was too busy being a donation fairy to get pictures of all the luminously lovely lanterns floating in the night air--particularly the water lily lanterns trailing across the pond! But I did get one of Joey Mallet's heron...

Farewell to the fading year, and welcome to the new! Time to take a gardener's holiday. Peacen' love everyone. What a beautiful city we live in.

Holiday Door Decoration...

Here's this year's Yule Ball at Roswitha's--I explain how to make these in the Dec. 8th/2009 post.

This year, we have some lovely Magnolia grandiflora foliage in the mix (the leaves with the brown fuzzy undersides). You can buy these in pricey bunches--occasionally--at the same places you purchase holiday greenery, but I salvaged from the choppity-job that surveyor did in the lower garden.

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(I have a post about that a couple posts ago. The survey company turned out to be very apologetic for the shoddy work of one of their employees, and paid for a replacement tree.)

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There are also redtwig dogwood branches (at the top), red skimmia berries, blowdown fir, dry hydrangea blossoms, and whirly holly branches coming out the bottom. Whatever I could find!

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As a side note: I also used a bunch of Laurel Daphne/Spurge Daphne/Daphne laureola as filler on the backside, and it has held up really well (I made the Yule Ball two weeks ago and this pic is from today.) Daphne laureola actually has "noxious weed" status in Washington, but people here think it's pretty... So I encourage everyone to go out in the woods and pick it for your holiday arrangements! Weed while you decorate :)

How to hide a stump...

Here's a strategic Willow Wigwam--built over a fresh stump which you can see is scored to increase water penetration, helping it rot out faster. I piled extra soil around the stump and planted a ring of salvaged tall red Crocosmia 'Lucifer' corms (although you could use any tall shallow-rooted perennial) so the vision is: massive clump of crocosmia emerges in spring, growing up through supporting willow wigwam, completely obscuring unsightly stump.


I generally build these wigwams/hobbit houses over perennials that have a tendency to grow tall and flop over, like some shasta daisies, asters, tall perennial geraniums, and the like. You should do it in early spring (or winter, when you cut down frostbitten perennials) so that the new growth will grow up through the wigwam naturally. This looks so nice--compared to staking after the fact--and a wigwam also tends to last a long time, because sucker-type branches easily root so you'll have a little living wigwam-shaped bush if you don't discourage it a bit.

The biggest challenge is finding long straight bendy sticks when you need them. I've also used the branches of forsythia, redtwig dogwood, wild hazelnut...most trees that sucker freely make good hobbit houses, and willow is, of course, the best. Traditionally (in basket-weaving cultures), willow trees were regularly "pollarded" or drastically pruned back to a tallish stump every year or two, to encourage the massive production of whip-like suckers. In fact, local municipal gardeners regularly do this to several golden yellow willows in Grand Boulevard park, yielding massive quantities of willow switches. When the gardeners prune them in the spring, they tend to leave the piles of branches lying around for a couple days because those "in the know" covet them for a myriad of purposes.

An aside: yes, this photo was taken today, in the fifteen-minute interval during which the sky was not bucketing rain. It's not cold though, so I'm not quite as whiny as in the previous post. Just feeling like a confused bear, blundering in and out of hibernation!!