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Ferrebeekeeper has been over-reliant on garden posts lately. Yet the last days of spring/first days of summer are such a beautiful time, that I thought I would put up some more pictures anyway. Most years I select tulips to bloom at the same time as the cherry tree, but, last autumn I apparently picked out whatever took my fancy and paid no attention to the timeline. As a result there were lots of frilly, fringed, or otherwise baroque tulips blooming in late May!
As the tulips faded, the roses, impatiens, and torenias started to bloom. The rose pictured below has the splendid name “Cherry Frost” which sounds like a sinister James Bond girl or a punk band or something. Because it was transgenically tinkered with, the little rose is surprisingly resistant to blackspot and molds. Additionally, it does well in low light and cold (at least so far). This rose was blooming back in February…but I did not post the pictures because the blossoms were not nearly as beautiful (and the rest of the garden was fallow).
Speaking of lying fallow, I recognize that I did not post a great deal for the last few weeks, and I apologize. Sometimes it is necessary to take a little break to think of new ways to express oneself. This in no way indicates that I have lost my enthusiasm for writing about art and science or opining about the affairs of the world! It does however mean that I have been working on some new artistic themes (maybe the poor misunderstood flounders need to lie fallow for a little while too). In the meantime, I have been sitting in the garden working on new ideas…and how to explain/popularize them.
We will explore this more in soon-to-follow posts, but for right now, I hope you are enjoying June too (and maybe have some lovely flowers of your own). Don’t give up on coming here for posts (nor on anything else for that matter). Sometimes things take their own time to germinate (just like this year’s late tulips).
Although 2020 has been a pretty alarming year in all sorts of ways, there was a silver lining: my flower garden ended up being unusually fulsome and colorful this year. Unfortunately photographs don’t really do gardens justice (just like the camera “adds 10 pounds” to portraits, it apparently subtracts 20% of blossoms and color). Even so, I think a little bit of the prettiness shows up in these pictures.
Brooklyn was appropriately rainy and not too hot. Even though I have a shade garden where barely anything grows (except for the trees which are the true stars of the show), there was still plenty of color, texture and form to keep things exciting.
Spooling through theses pictures makes me wish I had taken some shots in summer when sundry flowers were at their apex, but at least these allow you to see some of the Halloween decorations I put up (and the “Furnace Flounder” sculpture which I lugged out into the elements). I can’t believe I haven’t posted about my garden since spring (when I was busy painting watercolors back there).
I don’t know what I am going to do when winter brings gray desolation to this refuge (and cracks my sculptures to pieces). I guess I can always start thinking about next year’s garden and how it could be better. For one thing, maybe I will be able to have parties again with lots of guests to enjoy it with me. In the mean time I am going to go out and soak up some of the last rays of September sun and listen to the crickets. Even this slow, messed-up year is starting to gallop by as summer dies. Maybe I will find some more pretty flower pictures to post before the frost starts though.
My garden in Brooklyn at the end of June.
My summer garden looks a lot different this year for two reasons. First of all, the hydrangea finally started blooming! It has magnificent human head-sized blossoms the color of blueberry ice cream (or maybe I should say the color an alien gas-giant planet) and I love it. I thought the poor thing was dead for a year and a half but now it is the centerpiece of the garden! There is an allegory about hope in there somewhere.
The second big change is more disquieting. In shade gardens, the best way to get a colorful ground cover is to plant impatiens—tiny jewel-like five petal flowers which easily grow into a dazzling multicolor carpet. Because they are cheap and hardy (and beautiful–despite what flower-snobs say), I usually carpet my beds with them. But this year things went very, very wrong for impatiens. A deadly strain of downy mildew has struck down happy little impatiens across the nation and beyond. The pernicious fungus is named (Plasmopara obducens) and it has spread like an Old Testament plague through the United States and Great Britain (as painfully detailed in this excessively wordy NY Times article). I bought a few flats of impatiens from the hardware store at the beginning of spring—but after that there were no more. I fret that the little red and pink flowers could fall dead at any moment.
Vinca “Jams ‘N Jellies Blackberry” (that doesn’t get easier to write)
To make up for all of the coral and purple impatiens which I never got a chance to obtain, I bought a bright white New Guinea impatien (which you can’t see in the photo up there) and it is magnificent, however it was so expensive that I only bought one. I filled up the remaining beds with weird purple-black vincas agonizingly named “jams ‘n jellies blackberry” (who comes up with these names? Maybe the seed companies should hire some of my poet roommates). The vincas are growing very slowly. It is unclear if they will be able to set roots and flourish before the evil squirrels dig them all up.
New guinea impatiens are so pretty!
So my garden is all ferns, Persian shields, caladiums, vincas, and lilies. I am hopelessly drifting back towards Victorian England while the rest of the world is going all ahead towards ultra- cyber-hip-hop (which is represented in the garden by what exactly? picotee morning glories, track lighting, and giant aluminum cylinders maybe?). Anyway I also planted some weird autumn plants—passionflower vines and toad lilies—so check back in late summer to see how those turn out!
ferrebeekeeper 