Eight Days Until Christmas, and the Panic Begins to Creep In...

Behold, the Christmas Lights!  You know, I insisted on the lights for the flower box greenery sprays despite the difficulties in getting the cords up there inconspicuously, but doesn't it look a bit like the flower boxes are on fire now?

If you haven't gotten my Christmas card yet, that's because I haven't mailed any.  I haven't bought them yet, either -- or even picked them out.  I ordered pretty Christmas angel stamps over a month ago, but it looks like those will get stuck on bills instead of Christmas cards this year.  I'm thinking of starting a St. Patrick's Day Card tradition in 2011, but don't hold your breath.

Meanwhile, I have a mountain of Amazon boxes piled behind the cutting table in my sewing room containing unwrapped gifts for my children.  They aren't even secured behind a locked door, I can't remember what I ordered or who anything is for, and I have no idea whether I'm done shopping for the kids yet (if what I bought so far is 70% off one boy's list and only 30% from the other's, I'm going to have to head back out).  So you know what I'll be working on tomorrow.

Tonight, we're baking.  I use that "we" very loosely, because Bernie mixed up the dough, refrigerated it, rolled out all the little cookie balls and swirled them in the granulated sugar.  I flattened each one slightly with the bottom of a drinking glass, chilled the trays of unbaked cookies on the screen porch (next to the He-Man Tree) so they would crackle nicely, adjusted the racks and set the oven to TruConvect, and pulled the cookie sheets out of the oven at just the right degree of doneness.  Really, these are 80% Berniemade and only 20% Rebeccamade cookies.  I must give credit where it is due. 

Yummy!  They are Crackled Molasses Sugar Cookies, by the way, and since molasses is high in iron and I'm slightly anaemic, I'm pretty sure this is a health food for me.  That's my story, and I'm sticking to it!

Happy Christmas, everyone!

What's Blooming Today: Magnolias, Day Lilies, and EASTER LILIES!

William Shakespeare wrote that "brevity is the soul of wit" (Polonius says this line to Lady Macbeth in Hamlet, in case you're interested).  By Shakespeare's standard, most days I'm a witless, rambling fool -- but then again, so was Polonius.  Nevertheless, I'm going to try to be more succint than usual today and just share some photos of what's blooming in my garden right now.

 This is one of my favorite red day lilies, which my devoted husband dug up out of a flower bed at our old house before we moved.  The contract for the house didn't actually specify whether all plantings were included with the sale of the home, and these lilies hadn't even sent up shoots out of the ground yet so the buyers didn't even know they were there, but I wasn't taking any chances -- I made Bernie dig them up in the dark of night while I held the flashlight.  These lilies now live in a triangular bed around the lamp post that I've nicknamed The Flower Dump due to the fact that we've been just dumping flowers there willy-nilly when we don't know where else to put them.  Half the time, we don't even remember what's planted there, and although I've considered digging things up and rearranging them more attractively, that would spoil the surprise of random forgotten flowers springing up unannounced.  Like these pretty little orange lilies, not sure if they're technically tiger lilies or not:

Here's another beautiful lily that I don't remember buying or planting:

And, last but not least, I was thoroughly surprised when these two Easter lilies bloomed in the Flower Dump!  I now vaguely remember planting last year's Easter lilies in the flower dump after they'd finished blooming and the foliage was yellowing, but I had forgotten all about it until the blooms opened up the other day.  I still had this year's Easter lily out in the screen porch, so I added that to the other two out in the garden for next year.

Here you can see how well the trailing petunias are doing in the Amazingly Magical Birthday Flowerboxes that Bernie built for me.  Those are more Mystery Lilies in the Flower Dump that you see in the foreground on the right:

Here you can see another of my flower boxes and a mass planting of Stella D'Oro day lilies in the beds on either side of the front door.  That's a pink crape myrtle on the right; it should be in full bloom within the next week or two.  The Stella D'Oro day lilies have gotten huge this year; there weren't nearly as many of them last year.  We probably should dig them up and divide them in the fall, maybe plant a mass of tulips in the same spot while we have it all dug up:

Our evergreen magnolia trees have started to bloom, too.  All of the ones we've planted are the Little Gem variety, which is faster growing, more compact, and therefore better suited to my impatient nature and small yard than the slow-growing behemoths that most people think of as Southern magnolias.  Do you see the little insect peeking out from the center of the flower?  Hello, little guy!

Last but not least, I leave you with some pictures of my guilty garden pleasure, the kitschy little red-hatted gnomes my kids got me from Smith Hawken a couple of years ago. 

Usually I'm not a fan of "lawn ornaments," but these guys are pretty little, they're in the back yard near the woods, and you don't notice them unless you're up close. 

They make me smile.  Don't worry; I won't be adding fake dear, flamingoes, or statues of the Virgin Mary to the front yard any time soon!  These gnomes are keeping watch on some little baby hostas and an azalea that has finised blooming for the Spring.

Spring Gardening Update

...So, I finally called Wayside Gardens to complain about my "Yellow Bird" Magnolia having pink flowers.  You will recall that I planted the little twigling two years ago and have patiently tended it and waited for it to bloom, and this is the first year that any flowers appeared at all.  Wayside Gardens initially informed me that their plant guarantee required me to notify them within one year "if a plant fails to perform as expected."  How was I supposed to know to complain about the flowers being the wrong color before any flowers had been produced?  Eventually I obtained the concession of a $25 gift certificate, but the whole exchange was so unpleasant that I doubt I'll ever purchase from them again anyway.  They insisted that I didn't buy my lilac from them, but some internet research turned up some interesting possibilities for that plant's failure to bloom.  My darling husband confesses to having fed Holly Tone to my lilac, and several sources indicate that lilacs prefer slightly alkaline (not acidic) soil and that feeding them with a high nitrogen fertilizer will encourage foliage but inhibit blooms -- so no more Holly Tone, and better hopes for lilac blooms next year.

At least my clematis is looking good.  I planted it last year on a whim, from seeds, I think, and it was kind of like Jack and the Beanstalk watching this vine grow up and entwine itself on the trellis.  I'm pretty sure the seed packet said my clematis would have "dark red" blooms, and these look dark purple to me, but seeds are cheap and I'm just happy they are growing at all.

Other happy flowers in the spring garden are the irises that my husband rescued from a building site last year under cover of darkness.  It was one of those tiny old homes sitting on a big piece of land with gardens all around it, and a developer bought the house, razed it to the ground, and bulldozed the entire lot for future townhomes.  This happened right before the housing bubble burst, so once they had flattened everything the property just sat there for months -- and a couple of optimistic irises, in defiance of  bulldozers and townhomes and the economy and everything, had the courage to poke their shoots of green up out of the dirt last spring, trying to be a little bit of beautiful at an ugly abandoned construction site.  Now they live in my flower bed, where they are blooming alongside my son's favorite African Marigolds.

Those will be red lilies coming up behind the irises eventually, along with a motley assortment of camellias and other perennials that begged to come home with me even though I didn't really have a good place to put them.  I honestly don't know what all I've planted here.  This is the Flower Dump.

Now, before you start thinking too highly of my third-grade son's gardening instincts, I have to confess that he only likes the marigolds because they are orange.  He likes EVERYTHING to be orange; orange clothes, orange ink pens and highlighters, orange bookbags...  And he has a love-hate relationship with plants in general, as evidenced by what he did to this poor Autumn Joy Sedum plant a few days ago.  Apparently the plant went over to the Dark Side or something, because my son hacked it nearly to death with a light saber.  It's a good thing this plant is resilient!  My husband was so mad when he saw the plant, and my son looked so sincerely surprised that this was a problem...  Fun times!

Meanwhile, I'm finally getting the custom flower boxes that I've been begging for.  My husband is making them for my birthday present out of some kind of stuff that doesn't rot that we painted to match the window trim, with drainage holes at the bottom covered with some kind of fiberglass mesh screening so the soil doesn't fall out, and he has elaborate schemes for running little tubes up the house along the mortar lines so the flower boxes can get irrigation from the sprinkler system.  I don't like seeing the L-brackets underneath the boxes, and the decorative brackets I ordered are backordered for a couple of weeks, but they look pretty good so far:

Now I just need to decide what to plant in them.  I envision something red and trailing that will bloom all the way through the summer without anyone needed to climb a ladder or open a window to deadhead the spent blooms.  I went to two nurseries today and didn't see anything I liked, but I'm determined to get flowers planted up there tomorrow.