Woke up, got the kids off to school, and went back to bed to finish reading Thomas’s _The Hate U Give_. Finished book, wiped tears away, going to make some notes for my own YA. Then go back to prepping questions for a doctoral student’s dissertation defense @ noon today. Later today, meeting some friends […]
My front yard has dozens of snowdrops now. I would like to have hundreds, if not thousands, but snowdrops are kind of pricey as bulbs go ($5 each from White Flower Farm, for example). They are supposed to multiply fairly rapidly — you plant them in clumps, and then they throw off offsets from
I’ve been up since four — woke up with my heart thumping from a bad dream. It’s sort of ridiculous in retrospect, because it wasn’t anything like my childhood nightmares of being trapped in a house with wild animals trying to eat me (for some reason, that was my recurrent nightmare in childhood, and interestingly,
On January 25th, it was unseasonably warm, and I noticed that my forsythia was covered in tight little buds. I took the opportunity to prune the shrub, giving it a nicer shape, and brought all the trimmed branches inside. I soaked them overnight in a warm bathtub (which was slightly messy to clean up, but
A lot of tropicals go very dormant in the winter, dropping most, or even all of their leaves. I find it a little scary, to be honest, because I’m not at all sure that the plant (a bougainvillea, in this case) is still alive. You can bend the branches to see if they’re still supple
It’s called forcing, when you cut branches from the trees and shrubs and bring them in to flower early, but I prefer to think of it as gently encouraging. We had an unseasonably warm few days last week, and my forsythia was heavy with buds. The contractor who’d planted it for me years ago had
As I headed out to the airport, I had to pause and take a quick pic of this beauty. (I’m safely at the gate now, with plenty of time to spare, but I had a moment of panic that I was going to miss a flight because I was obsessively snapping photos. I feel like
It’s time to plant your paperwhites and amaryllises, if you haven’t yet. Fifteen minutes with some rocks (or soil, if you prefer), and you’ll have flowers in December, January, February, March. You can find them at big hardware stores, like Home Depot, some big grocery stores, or via mail order. I usually get my paperwhites
Back deck tropicals — mandevilla, bougainvillea, duranta, plus a Christmas cactus (slightly different category). It’s lovely going out on my tiny back deck and being surrounded by a little taste of the tropics. I’ll be bringing them in for the winter soon, but not quite yet. I have been limited in my love of
