Hollow Garden

Zsa Zsa, cactus, and marigold.

Our new kitten, Zsa Zsa, is settling in as new cat in the hollow. We plucked her from a porch just over the county line last June when she was 8 weeks old, weaving her way in and out of the paws of assorted dogs and eating out of common dishes. She’s not afraid of anything and has a calm demeanor. She’s not a needy cat, just the kind to win my heart – a diamond among stones, a seal point Siamese out of Nelson County.  Here in Albemarle she is becoming mistress of her domain, pestering the aging Milo (going on for 11) and generally giving some life to the place.

We head out as usual this time of year for the Outer Banks of North Carolina and south Nag’s Head, leaving behind the old garden of summer. Always love to toast the autumn equinox at the edge of the tide. And tackle the hollow garden when we come back, tilting toward fall.

This summer star tomatoes have been heirlooms ‘Mortgage Lifter’, ‘Cherokee Purple’, and the golden cherry tomato ‘Sunburst’. In spite of foliar disease, they push out the fruit.

The single marigolds in the half barrels host hummingbirds, swallowtail butterflies and assorted pollinators throughout the day. They come up from seed every year and I can’t remember where I got them!

Planted with peppermint and spearmint, the deer have left these smelly plants alone.

High Summer in the Hollow

Here we are simmering into the summer of 2012. The West is on fire and here on the eastern seaboard we’re just recovering from a week long heat wave and historic derecho wind storm that together have thrown us back to the era before electricity. In the cities and towns where everyone is dependent on the grid, it’s not been pretty.

Out here in the hollow, it’s been hard but at least we can open the windows at night to let in air that cools with the evening instead of releasing the stored heat of asphalt and concrete. We can haul water from our spring-fed reservoir and pick strawberries and tomatoes from the garden.We don’t have to depend on anyone to bring us water or rescue us from the upper stories.

We got power back 3 1/2 days after the storm on June 29. We lost a willow and a locust and a couple of large branches from the walnuts, but have been luckily protected by our little hollow. Neighbors in Batesville, Crozet, Keene, Charlottesville and Waynesboro sustained widespread damage with downed trees, power lines and smashed vehicles. Two people dead in Albemarle County.

No one around here will ever look at the wind come up in the same way.

We thank God for all our blessings.

Bloodroot (Sanguinarea canadensis)

I had a ball driving all over Albemarle and Louisa counties the past three weeks, interviewing some of the best gardeners around for my feature in C-VILLE magazine, “Roots: Gardening with Natives in a Time of Change” -  www.c-ville.com

The dedicated gardeners I met devote amazing amounts of energy to maintaining their landscapes one way or the other – from meticulous weeding to periodic attacks of herbicide – and made me realize how much I prefer strolling about the grounds with a glass of wine. If I squint my eyes just right, I can ignore the mugwort and chickweed in the beds and focus instead on the presence of the great round beech and the fringe tree by the creek that’s blooming a month yearly.

It looks to be a good year for peonies – a perfectly non-native plant born in China – with round fat  buds on the ‘Festiva Maximas’ and good clean foliage.

It takes all kinds to have a garden, people as well as plants.

April Beech

Peony 'Festiva Maxima'

Ostrich Fern, Dogwood by Creek

Witchhazel 'Diane'

Signs of Spring before the Equinox:

• snowdrops and daffodils,
• dead skunks in the middle of the road,
• Lonicera fragrantissima,
• bright blue blue birds,
• quince since Christmas,
• wrens cheeping in the morning,
• witchhazel in bloom,
• and bright shiny red peony eyes of ‘Pink Charm’, brought to the hollow from Mrs. Hereford’s garden at Carr’s Hill so many years ago.

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  Peony 'Pink Charm'

No matter the early spring, I’m waiting til the soil tests around 50 F before sowing peas, spinach and cool greens like lettuces, cilantro and arugula. Down here in this low spot by the creek we stay cool and my handy dandy soil thermometer is still showing low 40’s.

Soil thermometer

I’ll plant peas in the upper bed that warms up soonest and drys out quickest to cut down on the chance of rot, the chief bane of peas. I will sow with the waxing moon as the old adages advise, about a month from now.

Consulting Johnny’s Selected Seeds, www.Johnnyseeds.com, I find peas and spinach (as well as beets) prefer a soil Ph as high as 7.5. Wood ash, of which we have an abundance, is used to sweeten acid soil much like lime, so I’ve been adding it to the vegetable garden as well as to boxwoods, lilacs and peonies.

The vegetable garden will be my salvation this year, a nice tidy plot where I can make my Paradise inside the post and wire fence. I’m going for the no-till, heavily mulched and cover-cropped style as described in Virginia Gardener’s February issue www.vagardener.com. The idea is to keep all parts of the soil either mulched, in green manure plantings, or vegetables – nothing bare.

This mild, benevolent winter gives none of us any excuse not to get a jump on spring!

It’s been a bumpy year here in the hollow, but we’ve made it past the solstice into the lengthening of days and the hopeful winter sky. Jupiter continues to make his stately progress each evening heralding Orion the hunter with his spangled three buckled belt, stalking east to west above our tree-tipped teacup horizon. Venus is in her evening star phase, pulling down the waxing moon as it sets.

When I look at the stars and planets and listen to the creek, I feel connected to all who’ve come before me here, who stood in the same place, looking at the same sky, hearing the same flow of water – Indians, foxes, Scotch-Irish settlers, herons, hardscrabble farmers whose old pig pens molder in the woods along with the piles of rocks they gleaned from their tilled fields – the farmer’s wife (it must have been a woman) who planted the poppies and old daffodils by the drive. I think of her when I plant long-lived things.

I hope what we leave here may comfort someone years from now.

Rocks gleaned from hillside hold creek bank.

Late summer garden sees us off to the beach.

Each year, for so many I don’t want to count, we head for the Outer Banks of North Carolina – Jennette’s Pier in south Nag’s Head, to be exact. It was the bull’s eye of Hurricane Irene and we watched the weather anchors blowing along the beach right in front of our own special dune not too long ago.

As we take our perennial trek eastward across the great state of Virginia, from the foothills through the Piedmont to the coast,  I always feel a sense of renewal and hope. Maybe it’s the pull of those negative ions from the crashing shore after all these months in the lee of the hills. The difference in sound is the main thing I notice – the constant sussing of wind and sand in contrast to the quilted quiet of the hollow. How to  convey the sound, or its absence?

We’ll greet the autumn equinox on the edge of the Atlantic on September 23rd and start the long low tilt into winter. Maybe when we get back home, I can finally get the garden in order! It’s been a battle this year, with many distractions, but despite all the neglect, we’ll have ripe tomatoes, jalapenos, zinnias and globe amaranth to take to the beach. Unfortunately, I forgot to plant nasturtiums, so we’ll have to find something else to feed the turtles at the Charles Kuralt bird sanctuary on Pea Island.

Hollow girl at the edge

Moonvine

The best thing about moonvines is that you don’t have to wait til dark to see them bloom. Individual moonflowers last only one night, withering with the morn, but you can begin toasting them as soon as twilight. An annual morning glory, it likes regular feeds of liquid fertilizer and lots of water in its large pot on our hot south-facing deck. We run mono-filament fishing line from a stake up to the little balcony. Come frost we’ll rip it all down, but it’s lots of fun through summer.

Moonflowers climb the line.

Sowed fresh foxglove seed a couple of weeks ago and hope to have young plants to put in the ground this fall. Biennials, they will get established this year and next, blooming two springs from now if all goes well and the creek don’t rise. The deer don’t eat them and they do well in the shady beds on either side of the house. For many years we grew sedum and black-eyed-susan here, even hosta, but for the past couple of years, the resident herd has begun browsing, so they’re a lost cause now; naturally toxic, drifts of Digitalis purpurea  along with some ferns, also reliably deer resistant, will suit the spot much better.

Freshly sown foxgloves to plant this fall

Foxgloves with jasmine and blue hosta last spring

Watering the Tomatoes

How wonderful to be here when the bats begin to feed,

Lightening bugs among the basil,

 The sky a tender screed.

Not a breath is stirring,

Though the earth exhales her ease.

The insect chorus rising,

A peaceful summer’s eve.

Bones show in triage.

Everybody knows trouble’s the best diet and it makes for a good late garden, too.  A family emergency this spring re-sorted our priorities like a deck of cards and we came to appreciate the garden more deeply as vast areas endure even more than usual benign neglect.

It has been a season of triage (all gardeners love a good war analogy), where you have to prioritize what’s worth saving. A close cutting of the outer garden is the first to go, somehow making the perfectly round dark green beech brood behind the flowering grasses in a way it never would on a mowed lawn.

This is the first summer our beloved American beech, Fagus grandifolia, planted from a woodland seedling a dozen years ago, has born nuts, just a few sprays here and there. I have seen old trees covered in nuts, a boon to wildlife – the great specimen in the courtyard at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D. C. and a lovely spindly one that rained down nuts on greenhouse panes at a private estate.

First beechnuts in the Hollow

The winged sunflower is overtaking some of the outer beds, and mugwort is fighting with Tartarian asters in the perennial border. But the Regale lilies got dead-headed just in time to keep them from dissipating energy on seeds and the idea that we could get the essential summer garden in – tomatoes, basil and peppers – before the solstice was an encouragement outside our particular troubles.

Last minute tomatoes and basil with larkspur going to seed.

We push against it a little at a time and still can walk among the beds in the evening and derive comfort.

Why is that?

The earth gives sustenance. Lilies and milkweed bloom and swarm with pollinators. Even in an overgrown patch, dill and sorrel are there for the taking regardless of anything but the tilt of the planet and the warmth of the soil.

We see life come from death every day in the garden and this is our reward for getting out there and trying no matter what.

Annual cicada emerges from its shell.

glidin'

It’s been a long, cool spring, but Memorial Day has unfolded like a lush, ripe flower and Milo is beginning to enjoy cooling afternoons on the glider. Of course the equinox won’t come for another few weeks, but this sure looks like summer to me.

We Thank God we are together with our family this holiday weekend with a roof over our heads and plenty to eat and our hearts and prayers go out to all people who cannot say the same, especially our countrymen who have suffered historic floods and tornadoes in the last weeks.

And we honor all who have died and suffered in the defense of our country.

The force of nature is irresistible. We were very gently reminded of this down here in the hollow when our creek overflowed its banks in April. We could feel the heavy rain cell sitting on top of us as it let go its flood. Luck was with us and the downpour was brief. Because our little creek is fed only by a few springs and the run-off from the road, it all receded almost as quickly as it came.

from office window

milo checks it out

looking from east meadow

gazing globe engulfed

Periodically some neighbors want to pave the road that runs through the hollow so their cars don’t get dusty and they don’t have to slow down over the wash-boards in the old gravel. A hard surface down here would shoot water into the creek with a terrible velocity, eroding the banks and washing oil and other pollutants  very efficiently into the water and it would be one more country road gone forever.

As long as we’re here, we’ll give the creek its room and cross our fingers.

hollow road becomes a river

There are worse chances to take for  lesser causes.