Ghostwater Garden

But I'm Not Dead Yet...

I have a bad habit of not properly winterizing large portions of my garden.  I have the philosophy for the plants in the ground that it's sink or swim.  I will move them around a few times in the summer if they don't thrive where I plant them, but come winter?  No coddling. 

Potted plants, however, really require at the least a bit of thought.  The general rule of thumb is that anything you are leaving in a pot for the winter should be a zone hardier than the zone you are in.

I am in zone five.  Acer palmatums (various hybrids) are hardy to zone five, some only marginally.*  This means when I lost my Atropurpureum (above) a year ago, it was my own damn fault.  I was sad.  I moved on.  Last winter was even colder than the one that preceded it, and even with the death of the one maple, I still left my Viridis out on the drive in the cold.  Duh.

This spring it did not leaf out.  I've been horrendously busy everywhere but in my garden, with the end result that it wasn't until a few weekends ago that I got around to dumping all the winter-killed pots.

And:

The Viridis was sending out little bitty buds about midway down the trunk.  I'm really happy about this.  I like this tree.  So now I get the interesting challenge of figuring out what it will look like in a few years, and grooming it accordingly.  But I think I will wait until next spring before I start hacking off anymore of the 'dead' branches... just to be sure.

The tree before I neglected it looked like this:

Oops.

*{And many only to zone six, or even seven.}

A Weekend Camping (finally updated!)

We went down to Pennsylvania for the Memorial Day weekend, and while there spent a good part of an afternoon at the Wildflower Reserve.  We were late in the season for the spring show, but I still have 51 photos from the weekend, a few of which are actually from camping in general.

Here's a teaser photo of our campsite:

Few are altogether deaf to the preaching of pine trees. Their sermons on the mountains go to our hearts; and if people in general could be got into the woods, even for once, to hear the trees speak for themselves, all difficulties in the way of forest preservation would vanish.

-John Muir, naturalist, explorer, and writer (1838-1914)

Pictures are here, of people, and here, of plants and things.  Any help identifying many of the unknown plants I have listed would be muchly appreciated!

{photo links are also on the sideboard - scroll down!}