The Garden at Night

Austin got a little rain yesterday and today. None to speak of reached Elgin, but we did get 2 days' worth of cooler weather. High today: only 89F--woo-hoo!

In celebration, tonight's blog will be all about happy things.

(1) Favorite Justicia (shrimp plant) cultivar, 'Fruit Cocktail', now beginning its third year in our garden, has taken on a particularly tight, compact, round little form--very cute.

A pleasingly plump shrimp plant

(2) A mere 13 years after originally propagating them via tissue culture, I finally get to see one of my 'Ellen Bosanquet' crinums blooming in my own yard. Almost blooming, anyway. V-e-r-y, v-e-r-y close now.

Crinum 'Ellen Bosanquet' buds

(3) Both the Echinacea and the '4th of July' roses are doing quite well, blooming and growing (and, unfortunately, clashing horribly. Didn't really think that color combination through when I initally plopped everything in the ground).

'4th of July' rose in the background; Echinacea in the foreground

(4) Our passionflower is about to put on its first blossom. Will it be the deep purple of my dreams? Or that washy pale periwinkle that I find so ho-hum? We shall see.

Our passionflower's first bud

(5) Despite the unprepossessing season in which it was planted, the snakeweed(?) Matt brought home a couple of weeks ago seems perfectly chipper--green and blooming. You can't tell in the picture, but the flowers are actually a nice medium purple.

Rugged little snakeweed(?)

(6) Miraculously, the 'Kaiserin Friedrich' rose lives! It was shipped to us late (the growers forgot our order)--in May, I think--in a very, very expensive 1-gallon ($40! Sheesh! It's a very rare cultivar, unfortunately, so I didn't have much choice) that was poorly rooted. We gave it a couple of weeks in the greenhouse to bulk up the root system, even though that meant planting it in the garden even later than was safe. It's had a few crispy leaves, but it's got plenty of new growth, lots of healthy green foliage--I'm amazed. This rose is named after a British princess who spent her adult life (poor thing) in Prussia--both rather brisk climates. Yet her rose is so far remarkably hardy here in the punishing heat of Central Texas.

Our little 'Kaiserin Freidrich' rose

(7) And finally, our red-leaved crinum has put on its first, eerie, decadent, spidery flowers of the season.

Red-leafed crinum in bloom, possibly C. procerum splendens

But I Had Scheduled a Weekend of Utter Slothfulness!

Against all my principles and my better judgment, I worked outside this weekend. It started innocently: I just wanted to dump a few bags of mulch over the dead bermudagrass in the rose bed. Just to make things look tidier. It won't take a second...

But the new mulch was so much darker than the old mulch that one corner of the bed was black, while the rest was light brownish-grey. And thus one thing led to another, and I ended up buying 20 bags of mulch from our nursery-around-the-corner, Bloomers. So I spread a lot of mulch yesterday. And then today, I felt (grudgingly, unwillingly) morally obliged to help Matt out with the water on the 'Mutabilis' bed--my part of the effort took till around noon (his took till about 2:30). Among other things, I learned that I have no talent for trench-digging; mine meandered and veered all over the landscape, while Matt's cut from Point A to Point B with the precision worthy of a Roman civil engineer.

The whole thing was a massive pain, but we hope to see ecstatic, lush plant growth towering audaciously toward a harsh blue sky. And then it will have been worth it.

Some Blooms
In other news, our Mystery Pink Globes rose bloomed recently. The oddest little pink balls of flowers--unlike any other rose I know, yet also completely unidentifiable, so far. This is how they look at full bloom.

Mystery Pink Globes rose

Also, during one of my many trips to Bloomers this weekend, I happened to spot the same unknown plum-colored perennial that I bought at Finch's Farm a month or so ago. Its name is Angelonia, possibly 'Serena.' You know what's amazing about the Angelonia (and its buddies, the little leadworts)? They aren't dead, despite having been planted in May/June in our meanest flower bed. Good little Angelonia!

Our tough little Angelonia

Requiem for Four Pines
Finally, a refresher on why I hate drought:

Sad stumps of once-proud great big trees

This, of course, is not our house--it's an utterly adorable little bungalow "downtown" (i.e., two blocks away). Until last summer's drought, it had 5 massive, ~50-year-old pine trees in its front yard, of a stoutness that is pretty rare for pines in our area. Then four of the them succumbed to drought after surviving decades of scorching Texas summers. You can see the effect that the loss of those trees has had on the lawn, and you can imagine the effect it's had on their electric bills. It's drastically changed the feeling of that block of the street, as well, which went from a shady green tunnel to a bleak and exposed bit of desert. Hence our watering efforts. And hence the need to water even very established, adapted specimens in the midst of a really ghastly drought like this one. Do you have a tree that you take for granted, that's always been there, unobtrusively providing shade and cooling your yard? For the love of Mike, water it!

In the midst of prolonged dry spells (let alone a really vile drought like this one), I always think of the passage from Out of Africa, in which Isak Dinesen describes a drought that felt "as if the Universe were turning away from you...

Everything became drier and harder, and it was as if all force and gracefulness had withdrawn from the world. It was not bad weather or good weather, but the negation of all weather, as if it had been deferred sine die. A bleak wind, like a draught, ran over your head, all colour faded from all things; the smells went away from the fields and forests. This feeling of being in disgrace with the Great Powers pressed on you. To the South, the burnt plains lay black and waste, striped with grey and white ashes...

Our droughts are a little different from Kenya's, I think, but the sense of joylessness and blight--we know that all too well.

CSA: What Do I Do with All This... Zucchini, Chard, and Beets?
I made another attempt at CHARD, the vegetable that loathes me. This time, I boiled it with a little red wine vinegar, browned some butter and then browned a cup of leeks in the butter, and then stirred in the drained chard (A variation on this recipe). Matt, when pressed persistently, gave this one 3/4 of a star out of a possible 5 stars. But, he hastened to emphasize, it's way better than my last attempt at chard. Well. Progress is being made.

Also, I'm making some ice cream cookie sandwiches as a treat to my hard-working Spouse, and I folded in a cup of finely grated ZUCCHINI. These were double-chocolate Andes Mint cookies (mentholated and adapted from here), and the zucchini gave them an interestingly cakey texture. We'll see how they react to being frozen and slathered with mint chocolate chip ice cream and then frozen again.

And this evening, I'll make my BEET-and-beef meatloaf (a beet-ified version of this). I'll let you know how it goes.

Floral Purpitude

Purpleness
Busy Memorial Day weekend. I added a bunch of plants to the blue & purple garden, which has hitherto been a bit sparse. I planted
(1) leadwort
(2) society garlic
(3) 'Ophelia' egglplant
(4) 'Twinkle' eggplant
(5) 'Classic' eggplant
(6) mystery plum-colored perennial

The existing plants were
(1) Blue butterfly plant (Clerodendrum ugandense)
(2) white-flowered jasmine
(3) plumbago
(4) Crinum macowanii
(5) young X Chitalpa tree

When we (someday) build an arbor over the kitchen patio, we'll grow skyvine up it, producing even more lovely bluey-purple. It shall be SO serene.

Door Work
So that was Saturday. Sunday I sanded the three antique doors that Javier sized for us. I used 220 on problem areas (stains, bits of paint, &c.) and 600 everywhere else. I used my little hand sander, which really works reasonably well, though it was an undeniably long and tedious process to finish all three doors.

Then on Monday I stained (using a color called "Gunstock," to match the shelves in the study. Sheesh, that name is silly. If the stain could talk, it would say to me, "Wal, howdy ma'am." See? Silly.) The door to the master bed was darker than all the rest when stripped, so it naturally came out darkest when stained. The others are not only lighter, but brighter, so I'm thinking of applying a quick coat of a color I think was called "American Cherry." Inexplicably, it was quite light and distinctly greyish in color (shouldn't a "cherry" stain be dark and red?). I'm hoping that little bit of grey will dull down the orangey red a bit--but only a bit. Best test on the hinge side first.

The varnish will have to await our next paycheck (not to mention a resurgence of motivation). At the moment, the mere thought makes me despair (multiple coats, complete sanding of all sides between coats--faugh!--as medieval knights sometimes say when faced with a particularly foul-breathed dragon).

Even in their incomplete state, though, the doors look ever so handsome. I've always appreciated them as being solidly built, pretty, strong chunks of wood, but it wasn't until I was vacuuming off the dust--painstakingly, inch by inch--that I was really struck by how very solid they are, how smooth and satiny the surface is, how perpendicular all the pieces of wood are, and just in general how very satisfying and admirable the doors are, particularly when you consider that--unlike contemporary doors--they weren't extruded from some machine and steam-molded into a flimsy simulacrum of wood. Some person or people shaped them by hand. And--amazingly--everything fits together and all the angles are square and nothing is warped or caddywhompus. The things some people know how to do.

The Bard
And finally, I witnessed my new favorite Shakespearean reference of the year the other day. Jon Stewart and John Oliver were discussing the expenses abuse scandal in Britain:

JO: I'm from England, Jon. And even mid-scandal, I'm proud of this royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle and its moats, yay, its unwittingly public-funded moats—

JS: You—you’re gonna go Richard II on the moats thing?

JO: Fuck, yeah. Strap in.

Sing it, baby.