The, absolutely, totally, most beautiful flower in the Spring rock garden has got to be Crocus Seiberi, the three-colour crocus.
The very centre of the flower is a brilliant deep yellow, then there is a wide band of pure white, then the petals shade into a sumptuous violet-purple. The large stigma in the centre is a deep orange. At any other time of the year we would think it garish, but in the Spring, with everything around still wet and draggled from Winter, nothing could be more beautiful. It cheers, it revives, the weary Gardener.
The second most beautiful flower in the Spring rock garden has got to be.... but no, there are so many second most beautiful flowers we won't even try that.
I woke up about one o'clock last night with the clear thought in my head that a mouse had walked up my arm.
As I became a little more awake, I thought 'that's silly, I must have been dreaming....' Then I felt, unmistakably, tiny feet walking down my arm. Cold tiny feet! Whatever it was then stopped on the back of my hand and I felt the lightest lightest brush of something soft on my fingers. At this point instinct kicked in and I jerked my hand to get it off.
I went into the living room where my husband was still awake reading and told him 'A mouse just ran up my arm!'
He looked at me over his glasses. 'Don't be silly, you must have been dreaming,' he said.
I went back to the bedroom and turned on the light. There, sitting on my pillow, was a sleek and elegant brown, well, mousy-brown, mouse.
I called to Robert to 'come, quick!'
We watched the mouse, he or she, sitting on my pillow. It sat just like our cat does, with it's two neat front feet together and it's tail wrapped around them. It was mostly mousy brown-grey, with a lighter tummy and white feet. It had large ears, but they weren't round like in the cartoons, they were more like rounded-off squares in shape. It's eyes were like cartoon mouse eyes, though, black, shiny, and round. It looked all around, then went over to investigate the other pillow, sniffing at the corners and standing up against the headboard to see if it could see over....
Robert's big idea was to go and get the cat.
He put Pepper down on the floor near where the mouse had jumped (a three-inch mouse jumped over two feet), and she walked right over to it. I expected violence, but no, she sniffed the mouse, who showed no signs of fear, and turned and left the room! Kip, our Border Collie watched with interest, but he also made it clear he wasn't getting involved.
So I ran to the Studio and got a clear plastic bin I had just bought. When I got back with it the mouse was sitting in the middle of the floor looking around and I just put the bin down over it. Then I found a large piece of stiff paper which I slid under the bin to trap Mouse inside. We admired him (her?) for a while, then took him outside.
Meanwhile, of course, I will go right on complaining about the mice in the garage getting into my papers.... and yes, I changed the sheets before going back to bed!
"Do not put your rock garden under deciduous trees' is good advice, and I should know. I have just spent a long day carefully removing last summer's maple and oak leaves from my rock garden, and I'm not finished.
But sometimes good advice just can't be followed. When I started making my garden here, not only was the spot under these trees the only place where I could put a rock garden, but also a rock garden was the only thing that could go there. It is to the South and East of the house, and is basically a large granite outcropping. On the top there are a number of maples, probably all Red Maple, and one very old but still healthy Red Oak. The area slants down to the driveway and the Sampler Garden. The rock is mostly pink granite, but part-way up there is a long ledge of what I think must be limestone. It very much looks like it was once the edge of a lake or something. Some of the granite has fractured and the pieces have tumbled down, so the rock garden is basically on a large pile of broken rock.
Over the years, the leaves and needles from the trees have built up a bit of soil on top, and a few interesting plants have established themselves. There is a lot of Rock Polypody, Polypodium virginianum. It gets a bit dried out in August, but the rest of the year it is a crisp light green ruffle along the North-facing ledges. One good rain in the fall and it revives completely. What it lives on is hard to understand - there seems no soil at all under the plants. The easiest, in fact almost only, way to move this fern to a new spot is to move an entire rock with it already on it. I've tried transplanting it, and had no luck - I think pulling it off the rock damages so many roots it can't recover. It does grow on the ground in the woods in a few places, though.
Partridge Berry, Mitchella repens, also grows happily on the granite
. In one spot quite a large patch drapes over a rounded boulder, its little dark green leaves a sparkling contrast to the pinkish rock. In the spring it is covered with its tiny white flowers. They aren't large, nor are there a great many, but they have real presence. Then of course the berries which appear in late summer are a spectacular red against the green. It's not hard to grow in a shady spot, wanting only good drainage and not too many smothering leaves lying on it over the winter.
The other thing that has really set itself up for happiness on the rock ledges is some species of raspberry, but since I can't say anything good about it, we'll not talk about them.
Ever have one of those 'you can't get there from here' days? I got up early, and went out to the Studio even before the coffee was ready, I was so keen to see what the glaze tests in the kiln were like. Big bleah. Dull and boring blue, no life, too dark.... sigh.
Then I uncovered the bonsai pots I have been trying to make. I had covered them to dry them very slowly as I have been having trouble with the corners not holding. Sure enough, two out of three were cracking again. Guess I'll try them in a different clay, one with some grog in it. The porcelain I am used to for most of my work just does not assemble well as slabs.
In the afternoon two ladies came looking for a mug with yellow tulips on it. After dithering around for over half an hour one of them chose a pansy mug and a sunflower mug. She felt that a sunflower was sufficiently Spring-like! Her friend wanted to see the Studio so I took them in for the 10-cent tour, and Friend looked at my ferns and brightly told me that I was starting my tomatoes early...
Didn't have quite enough Frit 3124 to mix the glaze I needed.... went out to buy groceries and forgot the very thing I went for.... decided to get started on the window cleaning and banged my finger on the corner of the frame.....
Should have stayed in bed!
I'm relieved to say that china paints have once again saved my butt. I had promised a platter with a Trillium design to a local Wildlife Festival and had painted a half dozen of them. When they came out of the kiln, however, they were disappointing. The leaves were alright, the platters were fine, but the flowers just hadn't any 'poomf'. I looked at them for a day or two, trying to convince myself they would do, but it wasn't working. So yesterday I got out the china paints, mixed up a tiny bit of black, and added thin black outlines to the flowers. After re-firing to cone 010, they were much improved!
I bought these china paints many years ago. I only have the basic colours, but they are endlessly mixable and keep forever. I just mix a wee bit of the powder with a drop of mineral oil, and they are ready to go. I'm not skilled enough to paint whole pieces in china paints, and anyway that is a very different medium from pottery, but I can fix the odd piece. I once had to paint back in all the soft rose colour that had burned out in a batch of mugs with pink hearts on them - a lot less work than re-making them, and much quicker. So now I can bring the Wildlife Festival their platters for their Silent Auction this weekend. Not sure why I am doing this, an ego thing, I guess. I also made a very fine bookmark with info about my pottery and garden and had 1000 of them printed so I'll bring some of them as well. Never hurts to advertise!
I have flowers! This has to be the earliest there has ever been anything in bloom in my garden. Mid-March only and I have flowers!
They are Snowdrops, which seems appropriate. There is still a lot of snow, especially in the woods, but these tiny things are blooming happily right beside large drifts of snow. I found several clumps in the Sampler Garden and a largish patch in the Crabapple bed. I was a bit surprised to see some of them in a certain spot in the Sampler, as I totally don't remember planting them there, but I must have. They can't be the other ones seeding around because they seem different. The leaves are wider and the flowers seem to open wider. They are tricky to photograph - easy to over-expose the white flowers and end up with no detail in them. So these pictures aren't the best (must try again today), but worth seeing just because, well, because it's only March and they are really blooming!
One thing about Spring coming, it does make it hard to stay in the Studio and work. I'm trying to get ready for a Studio Tour next weekend and it's a challenge to keep working and not go out into the woods looking for signs of green.The Maple Run Studio Tour is next weekend, Saturday and Sunday, 10 to 5 both days. There are a variety of stops on the tour, including Fulton's Pancake House. If the weather is nice, it should be a great weekend - interesting stuff to see and maybe purchase, from pottery (three potters!) to blown glass to jewellery..... followed by pancakes with maple syrup. There is a website too: www.maplerun.on.ca. I'm at Stop 7, which is an interesting log house. The owners are log house builders and are on the tour to advertise their building company. I do hope the visitors will take a break from looking at the walls and look at my pots!Well, to work.
Spring is sprung! OK, maybe not quite sprung, but Kip left muddy paw prints on the kitchen floor! It's supposed to rain over the next couple of days and that will really get rid of the white stuff. It's been a very easy winter, hardly enough snow to bother shovelling, and never very cold. Luckily the snow did stay in the woods and on my garden so I'm not that worried about winter kill.
The snow storm two weeks ago that dumped a foot of wet heavy stuff on us did bring down a lot of branches and weak trees. I've started cleaning up - my paths as usual will need clearing. Maybe tomorrow I'll be able to get the bits of pine branch off the edge of the driveway. The huge pines there dropped a number of branches in that snow storm, and several landed on or right beside the driveway. Trouble is, then the oil truck drove right over them, as did my husband when he came home late, and then the broken bits froze into the driveway. For a while the driveway was pretty slippery and I said that at least the broken branches provided some traction!
I started seeds of a couple of dozen of alpine plants in the window in the Studio. Got the seeds from the Alpine Garden Society seed exchange. It's amazing to get free seeds, and of things that aren't in seed catalogues, but I wish they had sent me the seeds I asked for! I got a few of the ones I thought I wanted, but many others I hadn't asked for. I have no idea what they are. The packets come with only a number on them. I looked many of them up and at least found the names, but I haven't had time to research them all and find out what they really are. They may be treasures, or they may be useless. Many probably won't be hardy here. Well, it'll be interesting.
