Giant Cabbages and Favorite Blooms

Whenever life gets too complicated I walk around my different gardens to find my balance. I do a lot of walking lately. Here’s some of what I saw just today to bring me back to that sturdy little girl I used to be that took everything in her stride.

I never expected to live so far away from my homeland. If someone had told me that I’d spend my middle and senior years here, I would have thought they’d flipped out. I love my country and love being close to my family. I used to brag that I had the best parents and sisters and aunties and uncles and cousins in the whole wide world. I still feel that way.

But life interrupts our well laid out plans and pushes them away. A new marriage, a different set of challenges cropped up when I wasn’t even looking. That was almost 32 years ago. Where did that time fly to?

Time to take a walk as the day wraps up. It’s been dark and foreboding outside with lots of little showers so I stayed in the house mostly ignoring my clean up projects yet again and cooking a nice meal. Here are some little beauties that looked this way a couple of hours ago. The first on the main page is one of my all time favorite roses that I grew at my first cottage, Apricottage, on the orchard we owned when we moved here in the mid 1990s. I forget its name, three words, French, and I originally bought one like this one at a local growers. When it opens the inside is like an egg yolk in color, but eventually it fades to white after being a creamy light yellow bud. We have cut it back drastically but it has overcome that by filling out all over again. The blue flower just opened today and is a form of echium. And the poppy’s hairy stem was just too iconic to ignore. Another poppy opened today in a fenced area that was too wet to enter and it’s facing downward so I skipped that photo for now and may just put in the cabbages that I’m growing instead of the hairy poppy stem.

The trees around the house have grown considerably since we moved here in December of 2009. So many areas we used to grow our vegetables in are currently too dark throughout most of the day for plants to thrive anymore. That has called for some innovative ways to expand our growing grounds into our more formal setting in front of the cottage, although it’s not particularly formal at all, more wild than formal. But that’s where the sun is most prevalent all day long so I’ve had to adjust my designs considerably and fence off really large areas so we can have a harvest and also have many flowers blooming without being attacked by foraging birds. That too requires balance. The cabbages are catching up with me, height-wise. They’d be good tucker for a giant but I don’t know of any around here although apparently they still do live in our world somewhere. But I’ll leave that for another day. Right now I’m going to serve that great meal I made and sit by our fire, a couple of weeks before summer starts…shocking weather.