oo what a lovely garden

Before I start to work in my garden I do 'rounds', assessing and admiring and generally looking like a vagrant nutjob or a fashion photographer as I comment and kneel and stand and judge and adjust. Not that my garden is a setpiece, oh lordy no. I just want to enjoy it for a little while in depth, you know, before I fuck it all up. That's what I was doing up until just a little while ago, and now I must brag. I cannot stop this urge. It is uncontrollable.

My garden is BEEYOOOOOOOTIFUL, dahling!

Where a huge Lombardy poplar stood dividing my driveway there is now a circular area of blue and pink linnarea and cornflower mixed in with periwinkle and the odd lychnis coronaria. This not only serves to hide the stump* but it works as my trap crop by keeping the neiborhood kids from coming into my yard to pick the flowers. That, I planned, and it works like a dream. There's nothing growing there that they could possibly damage, and so when I do accidentally bust one with a fistfull of blooms, I can smile and be the nice neiborhood lady and help them cut a few more, instead of being the mean neiborhood lady chasing them and yelling.

This area grew up like a monster this year. So did everything else in the front yard, now that it's free of the shade and the poplar roots sucking away all the good from the soil. Poplar roots are rather alarming in their ability to wick damp-I've cut them in half in years past, and the far side just kept on drawing, leaking a thin skim milk trickle continuously into the hole (until I got ooked out and flipped a handful of dirt over it.)

The first large bed in my yard is devoted to red flowers. This is sheer exuberance on my part. My house is a light blue grey and so red has no business being anywhere near it, but dammit, there are just so many great red flowers! So I put them where they wouldn't foreground the view of the house continuously. At least that was the plan, and we all agree that it worked really well, don't we. Yes we do.

This bed actually pulls a great magic trick every year-due to no planning on my part whatsoever, to be quite honest-it goes from blue to red in a period of 4 days time with almost no overlap. April and May see it cool with aquilegia, veronica and periwinkle, viola and blue-toned pinks and chilly jade foliage. June pulls the hemerocallis and the papaveracaea up from the ground like silk scarves out of a magicians sleeve and all the blue petals blow away.

I played around with crossing my papaver the last couple of years trying to make a silk vermilion nudicaule using Flanders poppies as the 'male'. What I ended up with is a vermilion nudicaule with a sienna pollen. (I think it was me. I'm pretty sure it was me. Who knows what the sneaky bees have been up to.) But it's in the place where I planted the crossed seed, so maybe. Very pretty and a good middle ground between the clarion orange of the californicas and the hard reds thrown up by some of the nudicaule.

Ok, lets translate that. I used a Flanders poppy, which is small and orangey-red and has a single row of petals, and pollenated a red Iceland poppy with it, one that was as close to orange as I could find in my garden. Icelands have a larger blossom and more petals, and the petals are of a beautiful, 'crumpled silk' texture. I actually opened a bud that was ready to pop, immediately dabbled the center with my Flanders poppy, and then isolated the Iceland blossom with a little bag made of a nylon stocking so nobody else would visit. When that blossom ripened a seed capsule I planted those seeds in a cleared and marked spot. And it worked!

I have a variety of poppies. They are so generous. I grow one Orientalis; a dwarfed orange with a black throat that for all its' modesty-for an oriental poppy, that is- still wants to take over the earth. It is a perennial, and it will easily outlive me as the Orientale commonly reach the three digit years.

All the rest I grow are annuals. Clear lemon Welsh poppies for the spring with their herbal looking foliage, Californians for the sheer love of everything about them, Himalayans on occasion, Flanders, Icelands, and Somniferums.

I have a time with the somniferums. The things come up everywhere-even in my houseplants!
Some are an ill, washy, liver-and-lights pink, some are lavender. Most are dreamy rich pink like a raspberry milkshake. Some are single and tiny, and some are so huge and fat and doubled that they resemble silk ribbon pompons. These fell themselves, being so greedy. Some are a peculiar color-I call it 'heart patients' lips purple'-and these are the ones that bleed milk at the slightest scratch. The seed capsules look like tethered Perispheres or upside down jade Montgolfier balloons bobbing above the garden...Kind of a faery, bubbly effect that I like against the whipcracks of the serpentine garlic I let go nuts in my front border.

Yes, you can get nice and ripped on raw opium grown right in your own garden. Ignore the' only the scarlet ones; only in a hot climate' bullshit. You can grow it right in your own back yard; hell, you can grow it on top of your car; the shit's profligate. You can also subsequently experience the perfect joy of a perfect and instantaneous constipation, one which will magically transform the contents of your bowels into perfectly hardened oatmeal made with epoxy glue. Lacking opium poppies, you can easily duplicate this effect at home in your spare time by packing a burlap sack up your ass as far as you can reach with a broomhandle. Skip it. Get drunk instead.

And in fact I like to garden with a beer or three going. It is important to stay hydrated when engaging in summer outdoor activities. Wandering around the flowers with a can of lager and a rose shears; speaking of looking like a vagrant nutjob, hell, I fit in perfectly. Sumas, I am home.


* We cheerfully await the day when somebody decides to whip a bitch through the flowerbed ha ha! oh, how incredibly funny! And gets their undercarriage high centered on the hidden stump. Oh come on, baby! Yeah!

oh allright fine. here is a picture taken last year of me and the goonybird in the strawberry patch. as fast as i'm picking them, he is eating them. this is in the backyard and there are yellow columbines and serpentine garlic coming up through the strawberry plants.