Saturday, April 19, 2008

The Patio, & More Flower Pictures

On Golden Pond
After a rather rough summer last year (it turns out, you can kill equisetum, if you have a special talent for it), our equisetum is coming back and looking all jewel-like and glowy in the evening sun.

It reminds me that Matt & I should try to get that pond operational sometime soon so that we can get a little enjoyment out of it before the annual 4 months of Summer Misery set in. Now that the ligustrum has been civilized, the pond actually looks kind of inviting, in a stagnant, overgrown, dysfunctional way.

Pretty equisetum (carefully contained by trained professionals in a pot inside a molded plastic pond--kids: don't try this at home)

Progress on the Patio
Our shade patio is currently in beta-testing. We laid out our assortment of miscellaneous pavers to see how they would all fit together and what sort of a space we'd be creating. The answer to the first question is "haphazardly," but we'll compensate with sand and mortar, and I think it will look very nice in the end. And even as is, it has a kind of blocky, irregular, sort of Mayan-looking appeal. Minus the funky little rain dudes with big noses.*

Matt laying the final band of pavers around the edge of the beta release of our patio

The next step is to surround the whole thing with metal edging, and then take up all our painstakingly placed pavers. Then put down sand and level the thing, then re-lay the pavers, then pour in mortar, and then--hey presto!--new patio. Look for it in 2010.


More in the "Things Are Different out Here" Category
I'm on our local freecycle, which services Elgin, Manor, McDade, Taylor, Lexington, and Coupland, all eastside Austin outliers. Before now, there have been requests for goats and offers of chunks of concrete and hay bales along with the more usual used clothes and miscellaneous furniture. But this one, which appeared in my inbox this morning, really takes the biscuit:

"If you have worms on your catalpa or catawba tree that you dont want let me know, I want them. lexington area"

!!!

Worms that you don't want. Because obviously, you're not going to give away any unsightly parasites that you do want. But why does anyone want these worms? Perhaps catalpa worms make silk? Or maybe chickens really like them or something? I do hope that implicit in this request is an offer to assist with the harvesting of said catalpa worms. Either way, 10 points to Mr/Ms Catalpa-Worm for brightening my morning with with a healthy dollop of eccentricity.

Flower Pictures
It's still spring, and things are still blooming, so bring on the flower pictures.

First is the crinum I mentioned last week. It might be 'Ellen Bosanquet,' which was the subject of my senior-year thesis back at A&M. ("Micropropagation of Crinum 'Ellen Bosanquet' by Tri-Scales," was the irresistibly sexy title. It was a rather cool project actually--all of that translates to "Tissue-culturing a Bulb I Really Like.") Anyway, thanks to the Project (now a good 11 years past), I still have a fair number of EB kicking around. But Matt also has a hearty respect for crinum, and when free/cheap crinum have been in the offing at his various gardening gigs, he's always said, "Please sir, can I have some more?" So this could be EB, or it could be some other pink-flowering crinum. Will do a little more research once flowers open to see if I can make a more positive ID.

Possible 'Ellen Bosanquet' crinum

And a great big "¡Bienvenidos a nuestra hacienda!" to this rose--all doubts have been removed--it is 'Duchesse de Brabant.' This blossom is slightly past its peak, but it's got the soft pink color, the loosly held petals, and the low, soup-bowl-shaped blossom that's classic DdeB. Isn't it a lovely thing?

'Duchesse de Brabant,' finally looking like 'Duchesse de Brabant'

In a similar category, we think we've got a fix on the rose-formerly-known-as-Mystery-Bourbon-and-prior-to-that-as-Mystery-Hybrid-Perpetual. We visited a nursery in Bastrop today, and I said to Matt, gesturing towards a cabbagey pinky-red rose, "Hey, do you think this could be our mystery rose? What is this thing, anyway?" And then I flipped the tag over and we both had a headslap moment. It was "Maggie," a really popular, bourbony, highly fragrant, deep cerise-colored rose. "Maggie" (ha! life is funny sometimes) is also a mystery rose. It's one of the Antique Rose Emporium's "found roses," and they were never (so far as I know) able to positively identify it. Until they do, it's called "Maggie" with double quote marks. Since ours is a strong hunch rather than a positive ID, we should probably call it '"Maggie"' in triple quotes. "Maggie" is also one of ARE's most popular cultivars, and as former ARE employees, we really should have thought of it as soon as we saw our mystery blooms. Eh, well. We're busy. We've got distractions and stuff.

Here's a nice thing. Our bur oak (planted last spring) has these nifty bronze tips on its new leaves.

Bur oak (Quercus macrocarpa) with new, bronzy growth

And I've finally captured our mystery stripy rose on film. You'll note that, contrary to my optimistic predictions, it doesn't play particularly well with 'Burgundy Iceberg.' One is bright lipstick red, and the other is wine-colored. They tend to bicker a bit. Fortunately, mystery stripy's flowers are so short-lived (in spite of being a modern), that they have a limited window of opportunity for clashing. This, like Wild Blue Yonder, is a very difficult color for my camera (and, I think, for most cameras. Check out the gross fraud perpetrated by the Weeks site with the help of Photoshop. For heaven's sake, how gullible do I look? Someone online had some better luck: this is a reasonably good representation of the color.)

Mystery stripy rose and 'Burgundy Iceberg'--in real life, the latter is substantially more purply

And here's a closeup. Finally.

Mystery stripy rose blossom

And here is another stab at capturing 'Wild Blue Yonder' (which totally kicked that virus's pasty little ASS). Like 'Burgundy Iceberg,' WBY is really hard to capture on... pixels. (Go to the Google images search page for this rose, and you'll see that I'm not the only one who's struggling.) It's deeper and plummier than the picture below would suggest. I'll keep trying. Maybe a change in lighting will help.

Another unsatisfactory picture of 'Wild Blue Yonder'

On the other hand, here's a pretty darn cool picture of a freak siamese-twin 'Belinda's Dream' blossom. That's weirder than a double-yoked egg, a thing which has always given me the heebie-jeebies, although I acknowledge that this is utterly irrational of me. Still. 1 egg + 2 yolks = WRONG.

Freaky 'Belinda's Dream' blossom

* Pinched from here: And oh, all right, he's not a rain god, he's "Itzamná - Maya god of creation, drawing from Dresden Codex, 1500 A.D. (Post-classic Period)." Now you know.

3 comments:

Matt V said...

Ah, Catalpa worms. I have to admit, I don't have much hands-on experience with Catalpa worms, but I've heard from reliable sources they're good fishing bait. Or fishin' bait. Apparently the Catalpa produces so many of these worms that most people ignore the positive attributes of Catalpas- which it must have although I can't think of any- because they don't want to deal with the worms. So I can see how someone might want some, though asking on freecycle still seems a bit weird.

Matt V said...

Ah, Catalpa worms. I have to admit, I don't have much hands-on experience with Catalpa worms, but I've heard from reliable sources they're good fishing bait. Or fishin' bait. Apparently the Catalpa produces so many of these worms that most people ignore the positive attributes of Catalpas- which it must have although I can't think of any- because they don't want to deal with the worms. So I can see how someone might want some, though asking on freecycle still seems a bit weird.

Anonymous said...

Hey, the mystery, stripy rose looks like one Matt gave me when we lived at the farm. It came from the ARE. I never got the name right, just remember calling it Bologna (like the lunch meat) because that was as close as I could come to saying the real name!.............Madame Bologna, eh, why not. The old girl must have a name!

mom v

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