Plant Talk

A New Garden is Coming Alive on 2nd Street in Langley...Watch the Transformation Post #3

Last week my co-horts and I set to work pulling out spent plants, prying up pavers, and preparing Langley's City Hall garden for spring planting. The work is part of the Langley Main Street Garden Initiative, the first step in building on Langley's floriferousness to turn our Village by the Sea into a garden destination.

Tulips, Korean spice viburnum and fragrant exbury azaleas are in bloom all over town....we're just adding in some structure, more vegetables, and flowers for passersby to enjoy. And pass by they do - as we dug in the soil at City Hall last week, dozens of people stopped to make suggestions, chat, join in the work, and tote away plants they hoped to rejuvenate. It was a delight to see how invested people are in their public gardens here in Langley. It's a good place to hang out - the public library is next door, a bustling and delicious coffee shop, UBCC, right across the street, and the mayor stopped to thank us, the police chief suggested we move a rhody, and public works backed their truck up to haul our clippings away....

Stay tuned - we'll be installing feed troughs in the next week and planting them up with snow peas, herbs, sweet peas. Layers of hedging will definine the garden edges, there's a chartreuse bench in the scheme, a place to stop, rest and enjoy the garden. Soon enough hanging baskets with herbs and vegetables as well as flowers will line the downtown streets, and we'll be planting beans, sunflowers, and our new Pollinator Pathway Promenade.

Read more about the Langley Main Street program and future garden plans here, and be sure and make it up to Langley this spring and summer to keep track of our progress. We hope you'll stop by the new City Hall Garden on 2nd Street, pull a weed, and tell us what you think. Soon enough there'll be blueberries and snow peas to snack on while we chat...

A pole apple hedge behind the first feed trough (we found it on drewslist, Whidbey's own version of craigslist) - the 2nd feed trough is a bit bigger and will hold tomatoes when the weather warms up.

Our jaunty leader and volunteer extraordinaire, Janet Ploof, hard at work...

Strawberries Are Peaking...In Easter Baskets

Last April, Langley gardener Marcia Wiley decided she didn't want strawberries taking over her vegetable garden again this year. They do tend to colonize every bit of spare (and some not so spare) ground with thier runners.

And yet, Marcia did want fresh, ripe berries come June and July....so right after Easter, when baskets are cheapest and most available, she made the rounds of thrift shops on the island, picking up dozens of baskets inexpensively.

Marcia already had a wire and wood fence around her vegetable garden, decorated with bottles topping the fence posts. So she simply added to the folk art look of the plot by wiring the baskets to the fence. She filled them with soil, moved her strawberries up where they'd get plenty of light and sun, and last week the berries started turning red.

Not only do the baskets with berries dangling down the sides look charming, but the strawberries are easier to control and to pick. Plus Marcia opened up lots of space for more lettuces and other vegetables.....This is repurposing at its best, putting inexpensive, nearly-throw away items to artistic use while solving a common gardening challenge...

You can see Marcia's garden from the road as you drive from Langley toward Bayview - it's on your right as you drive out of town, just before the tunnel of purple leafed plums.

Langley's Autumn Scenes from Crisp Hedging to Alley Zen

No matter how ready I am for for fires, autumn leaves and soup-making, it's heart-wrenching to watch the hollyhocks and sunflowers die down. The dahlias are diminishing, I ripped out the last of the dwindling sweet peas over the weekend, and the raspberries and blackberries are pretty much gone. So I went out in search of autumn scenes to stir the heart, warm the blood, and usher October in with grace.

One of Langley's beckoning alleys draped with wisteria leaves and dangling pods...

A Georgia Gerber bronze dog surrounded by blowing pennisetum plumes outside Brackenwood Gallery on First Street.

The Inn at Langley's freshly pruned hedge quite spectacular in its smooth, dense perfection. 

I'm lusting after one of these colored glass vases with donut-like tops in the window at classy Island Design on First Street.

A zen-like alley scene next to the Commons Coffeehouse on 2nd Street

 

Frost on the Sedum

Hoarfrost coated South Whidbey Island this weekend, turning the world as sparkling white as a snowfall without the treachery. I don't remember ever seeing such exuberant, furry-looking frost. Turns out such thick ice crystals are known as hoarfrost - what an old-fashioned, poetic word for one of nature's most amazingly lovely phenomena. Here's the definition:

"Hoarfrost refers to the white ice crystals, loosely deposited on the ground or exposed objects, that form on cold clear nights when heat losses into the open skies cause objects to become colder than the surrounding air." 

Such simple, scientific words fail to evoke how hoarfrost softens and transforms the world from dull and dark to glistening reflectivity...Here's the hoarfrost settled on a pot of sedum, a glass ball and a wooden table in my back garden in Langley about 10 a.m. this morning:

 

Wall of Roses

 If you're looking for a mammoth rose to coat a wall or drape an arbor, consider Paul's Himalayan Musk. And if you want an example of how abundantly it blooms, walk down 2nd street in Langley, and right next to the bakery, in front of the Coldwell Banker office, is the most sumptuous example of this or maybe any rose I've ever seen. It creates a cave of sweet scent and shade right along the sidewalk.

This antique musk rose is an exuberant rambler and climber, blooming pale pink from June through early August. You have to stand beneath it and inhale to really bask in this rose's old-fashioned beauty, but here are a couple of photos to give you the effect of a full-blown Paul's Himalayan Musk at its peak:

Lettuce Bicycle

I love Langley because it seems like there's something cool and unexpected around every corner....like this lettuce-laden bicycle enticingly parked in a neighbor's driveway. I had to snap a photo...it looks to be custom-made to carry a market basket of produce, in this case lettuces wilting in the heat of a July evening. The bike is equipped with a watering can and herb planter in case you need a snip of oregano or dill as you're pedaling along.....I know there's a story, and I could have asked, but prefer to imagine the possibilities......maybe a mobile greens unit? Or a salad-mobile, with a big wooden bowl, oil and vinegar tucked into the saddle bags?

Summer Bouquet

One of my favorite things about summer (since I'm a Seattle native and don't like heat, I look for other benefits....) is creating huge, English-style mixed bouquets from the garden. Nothing captures the essence of summer's bountiful garden like going outdoors early in the morning and clipping here and there (color, foliage, fragrance, large blooms, fluffy filler), then pulling it all together into an arrangement.

On the first weekend of every month, I have the pleasure of creating a bouquet for the art opening at Langley's Museo Gallery (July's show is the amazing Whidbey Island Glass Invitational, with pen and ink drawings by Seattle artist Joseph Pentheroudakis).

In winter, I have to break down and buy flowers, but this time of year even my little garden yields plenty - although in the bouquet shown below I admit the sunflowers are purchased. I needed a few big, bulky flowers to balance out the centerpiece delphinium, and couldn't bring myself to cut the lilies just coming into bloom.

The rest of the flowers - sweet peas for perfume, kale gone to flower, the plum-colored Clematis 'Polish Spirit', the first of the 'Annabelle' hydrangeas, the blue shrimp plant (Cerinthe major 'Purpurascens') and the silvery blue nettle in front (Eryngium 'Sapphire Blue') which I could hardly cut  because it was bristling with bees...speaking of, check out the black "bees" in the center of each delphinium flower....are all from my garden, cut on Saturday morning....(my editors at the Seattle Times would never let me get away with a sentence like the one above!!...the pleasure and perils of blogging...)

Lilacs, birds, dogs and springtime

Right now is the moment lilac lovers wait for all year. For a brief few days (a bit extended this year because the weather remains so chilly) all the colors of lilacs are in bloom at once. As the white lilacs come on, the dark purples are opening and the paler purple ones are beginning to fade. It's the time to pick bouquets with all three major colors - what a delight. Nurseries are full of miniature lilacs ('Miss Kim') and novelty lilacs that bloom in summer, like the new Syringa x prestoniae 'Redwine', but my heart belongs to the big old-fashioned lilacs blooming around town.

I probably moved to Langley because it has more lilacs than any town I've ever seen.  You can walk anywhere around town this time of year and inhale the near-overpoweringly sweet scent of lilacs. Or you could if it ever warmed up a bit - the sun brings out lilac perfume.

Speaking of, the sun finally broke through the clouds Thursday afternoon, and here's my puppy Bridget sniffing the wind and enjoying the breeze blowing through her whiskers. There's nothing like a dog or cat to remind us how delicious spring can be if we pause long enough to enjoy it.

Would you say I'm crazy if I suggested that my new bird art, a glass piece by Whidbey artist Meredith MacLeod, purchased at Museo Gallery in Langley, is drawing more birds to my garden this year? Maybe they come to admire themselves in the piece's luminous reflectivity, or perhaps they take it as a sign of a bird-friendly garden....I saw my first goldfinch of the season last week, and now the garden is filled with hummers, goldfinches, sparrows and robins, all busily going about the business of singing, sipping, fluffing, and nest building. Meredith made the piece to go outdoors - that cool frame is solid cedar, and it's hung on the outside of the house.....