Spring of 2022 is now in the history books, for today is the first day of summer. I’ve decided to welcome the arrival of summer by taking a look back at the show the garden put on over the spring months.
What a show it was!
But before we get to the pictures of the show, please bear with me as I post a few rambling observations of said garden.
Death in the garden
Plants, like all living organisms, sometimes die. Some die from old age, some die from disease, and some die for no apparent reason at all. C’est la vie.
Winter can sometimes be especially brutal on the garden.
Here along Colorado’s Front Range, we had slightly weirder than usual weather during autumn & winter. Autumn was very warm and dry, a pattern that continued well into December. I was seriously worried that we wouldn’t get any snow at all. Then January arrived, and we got hit by snow every 8 days or less for two months straight!
Taking that into consideration, I am fairly pleased at how few plants of my plants perished over the colder months. By my tally I only lost two ornamental grasses, one butterfly weed (not really a weed), several blanket flowers, and one ‘Ironweed’. The last one doesn’t surprise me much. I planted it in mid-autumn, and I don’t think it had a chance to get established in time for the cold weather.
At one with nature.
A pair of robins had a nest somewhere in or near the VintageGarden. I never actually saw the nest or the chicks, but I know there was one nearby because the parents were extremely aggressive, almost suicidal, at chasing away possible threats.
I watched them swoop and dive at a hawk and until it finally flew away. A cat in my neighborhood likes to perch on my fence so it can survey its kingdom. These robins relentlessly divebombed it until it slunk away in shame.
Plus, they were pure hell on the squirrels, which amused MrsVintage and I to no end.
Yet they never attacked me once. Were they able somehow to sense my benevolence? I would be out in the yard watering or pulling weeds, and they completely ignored me. I would lounge in my hammock or in a chair on the patio, and the robins would get surprisingly close to me. Not pigeons eating popcorn at my feet close, but they would sometimes get to within 10 feet of me.
Not an earth-shattering observation. I just thought it was interesting.
On with the show
Today may be the first official day of summer, but here at the Vintage domicile, the temperatures have been in mid-summer mode for the past three weeks. You might be thinking that the early onset of hot temperatures must’ve diminished the garden display, but you would be wrong. The spring garden was a smash hit!
Plant sick bay
Speaking of rescuing, two of my shrubs were nearly destroyed by rabbits last year. I put hardware cloth around both shrubs in early spring this year, and so far it looks like they may stage a comeback.
The two tubes of hardware cloth are a little distracting, but what can you do? Rodents are going to…rodent, I guess. I will probably keep the hardware cloth around them all the way until next spring. Hopefully by then the shrubs will have grown large enough so that the damn rabbits won’t bother them anymore.
