The Big Picture

My friend Kate said she wanted to see holistic sort of pictures of the yard. Seems kind of appropriate, since the last post was all closeups of roses.

But the awkward thing with photographs is that sometimes what looks really big and significant in real life looks small and puny and uninteresting in a picture. Especially at 7:00 in the morning. So you'll just have to trust me when I tell you our garden is fat with blossoms and is confettied in red, white, and pink petals. Even if you can't quite see if from the pictures.

You can't see them, but 'Fourth of July' is bursting with crimson flowers, and 'Cramoisi Superieur' is covered with blooms. It looks really pretty. Honest.

Still, at least you can see the front walkway that we (especially Matt) spent so much time on. Though it also looks better--more proportional and better integrated--in real life. Dammit.

And here's the whole house. Even if you can't see the flowers, you can tell that everything--bushes, trees, roses--is bigger and greener and plumper than ever before. So that's nice.

Even the color of the walkway is off--it matches better in real life. Geez Louise.

Last year's 'Cascade Falls' weeping baldcypress is leafing out nicely, even if it isn't much bigger. The 2-year-old chitalpa, on the other hand, is about 3 times taller than when we first planted it two years ago. Glory be, those things haul ass.

Finally, you can sort of kind of see some color--those pink dots at the foot of the chitalpa are our 'Archduke Charles' chinas, planted in the fall, I think, and already blooming their fool heads off.

See? This is exactly what I'm talking about. When I look at the rose bed, I see roses everywhere. When I look at this picture, I see a sickly expanse of lawn rimmed with some insignificant frowzy things that are mostly green.

WTF?!?

Okay, here's a rose that rarely disappoints. Mutablis. It's covered in a kind of festival of blooms. Not as intense as in real life, but you get the gist. When the Mutabilis hedge gets like this, it reminds me of some sort of medieval fair--the kind that probably never really happened, but scifi/fantasy writers like to imagine--different colored banners snapping in the breeze, lush green grass, brightly colored pavilions, ladies in flowy red and blue and purple silk gowns and men in kelly green tunics and hose--and everything colored with the intensity and clarity of stained glass. Very pretty, very bright and clean and spring-like, and just a wee bit gaudy.

Thank you, Mutabilis

And now for something quite sad: several months ago, some jerkoffs from the phone company decided to prune our trees (and only our trees, I might add, no one else's--conspiracy?). They literally halved our unfortunate ash by the garage (am thinking of pollarding--poor bastard--that's all it's good for now). But worst of all, they took an indiscriminate chainsaw to our 60+ year old pecan. Planted by Mr. M's long-deceased father.

The poor scalped thing now looks like this:

Several years ago, we had a tree pruner out to estimate doing our yard (I think he quoted $1200--ouch). I asked particularly about this tree, but he said that since it was just phone lines, the utility company was unlikely to mess with the tree. And then the business that I worked for closed, so I shelved any arboristy plans indefinitely. Now that we've got a couple of multiple amputees, I suppose we have no choice but to cough up the $1500+ and have the poor things taken care of. Ug. Not a good time for that sort of expense, what with the state budget being how it is and jobs being slashed left and right. Still, if we have to go live in a cardboard box, at least we will have done our duty at tree stewards before being evicted.