Report From PIA – September 12
It has been a wet day, complete with torrential downpours and thundershowers. My dog is a quivering mess, and I’ve spent most of the day not writing.
I’d planned on weeding today. I’ll be speaking to a group of master gardeners from Michigan on Tuesday evening, and they’ll be touring my garden before the dinner gathering. A busload of plant people will be wandering around Poison Ivy Acres in three days, but because of the rain I’m patschkieing around the internet, making oatmeal cookies, and not writing. I should be working on two articles with approaching deadlines, the book, or for most of the day, this blog.
I did spend some time appreciating my rain garden. Shortly after we moved to Poison Ivy Acres it stormed, and I watched the water run down the long driveway. From the top of the drive, it’s a straight shot to the lake. As the water flows over the asphalt it picks up oil and other car residues…we built the rain garden so that these deposits wouldn’t be washed into the lake. In a small way a rain garden is an attempt to make up for the fact that our cars aren’t so environmentally friendly.
The plants that are growing in the rain garden are winterberry holly (Ilex verticillata), Japanese anemone (Anemone x hybrida ‘September Charm’), assorted Japanese pcommon rush (Juncus effuses), red twig dogwood (Cornus alba ‘Bailhalo’), green and gold (Chrysogonum virginianum) and golden creeping Jenny (Lysimachia nummularia ‘Aurea’).
I know, I know… the Lysimachia is now banned-in-Boston, and the rest of Massachusetts. I’ll probably tear it out once the Chrysogonum spreads enough to start smothering the weeds. In the meantime, I’m loving its color and the very characteristic that got it restricted: an ability to choke other plants out.
It could be that this day is as refreshing to me as the rain is to the landscape. It could be that I’m rationalizing my procrastination. Whichever it is, today, I’ve given myself a rain check.
When it rains, a great deal of water pours down this driveway...
and the water pools in the rain garden that's to the back of the grape arbor.
I told myself I was taking pictures of the rain-soaked garden for this blog, or for a future talk... but I think I was really just taking some down time. Here, the drops of water on the 'Sticks of FIre' Euphorbia and the netting over the figs caught my eye.
