TOUGH TIMES

I will preface this post by telling everyone who wrote on my Blog or on Face book that David and I have been been most touched by all the kind things you have written, as we contemplate our move. I thank each and every one of you. Garden friends are a treasure and have brought so much joy into our lives. David only reads my posts occasionally and I told him please read the comments people have made. When he did he became quite emotional.

I will never forget the day that, volunteering at an Austin garden tour, Pam Penick approached me and said how much she had enjoyed my garden when it was on the LBJ Wildflower Center tour. She gave me her card and told me about garden blogging and how much fun it was. On a cold and windy day over Thanksgiving I ventured onto Blogspot with no idea what I was doing. A name? How about Rock Rose?  After all, we do have plenty of rocks a few roses and of course Rock Rose is a native Texas plant.

Purchased at the Rock Rose gin distillery in Northern Scotland a few years ago, a stave from a whiskey barrel. How could we not buy it!

 I never looked back, joining the local garden blogging community and I hope that I will continue to look forward wherever we settle. We are not planning on moving from Austin just yet and will go into an apartment while we decide. It will probably just have a balcony so I will only be taking a few plants with me. Trying to find a place with the right sun exposure is not easy. Trying to find a place at all is not easy. What to do with all those potted plants and pots!

I'll be honest if the deal on our house and the 'back up' offer fall through we have decided not to care. But I can tell everyone the last month or so as we prepared and now the waiting is killing us. We have had to vacate the house so may times in the last week that there has been no time to get out in the garden which, as every gardener will know, would be a big stress reliever.

Two years ago our neighbors told us "Don't leave it too late it is very difficult to do" and we are 10 years younger than they were. Apart from all the logistics of selling and finding and timing, for the first time we are leaving something we created from scratch. From bare pieces of ground. Hardly a day goes by without a walk around the garden bringing me a surprise. Yesterday, it was this pretty little tradescantia, Tradescantia geniculata, given to me by Lucina Hutson. It has the delightful name of Tahitian bridal veil. Tucked under a yaupon tree I caught a glimpse of its shadow on the wall as I walked through the house. This is its first year in the garden.

 

 It is easy to forget all the difficult moments when a new flower pops up in the garden or a cactus blooms or a bird chooses to nest in one or your bird houses. This morning a clump of rain lilies flowering. This one chooses it time to flower. We have had rain several times over the last month so why did it just decide to flower this week. Just a few days ago Pam posted about her pink one blooming and I went out to look at mine. Not a peep. Now, here they are today and  it seems I missed two flowers yesterday. 

And an argiope spider with 2 fecal sacs dropped and caught in its web. It seems late for birds still to be rearing young. I wish I could sit and watch to see if a little web cleaning had been going on as one had disappeared a few hours later. 

 

When I walk out the back door lizards scurry in front of me as if to say " I can run faster than you can" and they can. It almost seems like a game."Here she comes" If the lizards start to disappear then I am thinking that a snake has been around. I know many people have walked around this garden during the day but have little knowledge of who walks around at night. We once saw a ring-tailed cat sitting on the kitchen window ledge at night and a skunk passing through early one morning. Foxes moved into the garden one time when we were gone for 6 weeks. Sometimes I hear the wrought iron gate rattle in the night-a raccoon or possum or skunk or fox maybe. Throughout the pandemic winter we put up extra bird feeders and I spent hours watching them. At one point we had to vacate the patio because a house wren built a nest high up on a piece of art work. If only they had carried away the fecal sacs instead of arranging them around he rim of the nest or sticking them to the wall. We tried to outwit the squirrel getting on the bird feeders until we finally bought the pepper-coated seeds which they won't eat. 

And during the last two years of cancer treatment and pandemic I often sat out there or tinkered a little. One time I sat on a stool and weeded. I couldn't imagine what it would have been like not to have had a garden.

I'm going to miss it all. As you can tell this continues to be a difficult time so please bear with me . It's a sort of release to write about it.

THE TIME HAS COME THE GARDENER SAID

Or I should say that both gardener and under gardener are saying the same thing and have reached the conclusion that the time has come to pass our gardens on to another gardener.

This garden has been millions of years in the making as without the most incredible limestone that we found on the property we could never have given it the bones it has. Millions of years ago Texas was covered by a shallow sea in which lived the creatures who made our garden rocks. On their death their skeletal fragments sank to the bottom where they were compressed over time until they formed rock.  A period of time of which we can barely conceive. We have been rearranging those rock on  this piece of land for 21 years. It has been a labor of love and we will leave it with a heavy heart. No doubt the next gardener will change the plantings but hopefully the bones of the garden will remain the same. 

 

Without the large ledge stone rocks that came from the foundation there would be no sunken garden or terraces in the front courtyard.  These rocks raised the level to the ground to bring in soil to give a decent depth of planting. Shallow soils on the Edwards Plateau limit the growing of many plants. Lime stone and bluebonnets pair so well in the early spring and look wonderful even without all my gorgeous agave which died in the wicked Texas freeze.

 And the smaller flat rocks I collected while building the house gave us the dry stone wall in the English garden, reminiscent of the walls built to divide fields in our native homeland. 

 Those same rocks were used to pave the patio area in the English garden. We have enjoyed many a breakfast here protected from the summer morning sun by the high wall.

We have always been a couple who liked to do things for ourselves and that would be very difficult to change. And yet we know that with our advancing years we cannot continue to do all. All those adventures up ladders cleaning gutters and checking our roofs need to stop. It is with an incredibly heavy heart we feel the need to move on to a simpler house and garden. We have adored our house, designed for us by Dick Clark in 2000. We had given him our brief and he gave us exactly what we asked for. The enclosed spaces outside allowed us to create the gardens. It was all our own work. We woke up every morning to a house with incredible light-filled rooms and with views of the outside gardens we created. 

 What will I do with all those photos I took of the garden and there are thousands. Just like my garden style I hardly delete any. So just like paring down the contents of our house I will get busy on that project. My computer will be so happy.

Bought in England I hung this little plaque by the front door. It will remain and hopefully will bring good fortune to the next owners of our much-loved house and garden.

ALL CHANGE

One thing that never changes in the world of gardening is the need to make changes, and although there is rarely a need to get them done with haste we really felt this one needed to be addressed at once. It is right outside our front entry.

 

The soft leaf yucca, Yucca recurvifolia, which had survived the winter and flowered so beautifully a few weeks ago, suddenly went into a decline. I know when something looks like this that there is no hope for it to recover and my biggest fear was that it had been visited by the weevil. Yes, they are not above destroying yuccas as well as agave. It needed to come out post-haste. David duly sawed it off at the base and used the pick axe to get out the thick root as I stood by. I was ready to gather up any weevil grubs or adults. But there was no tell-tale sign of weevils-usually a hole bored right up through the center of the stem. It's out and it will remain a mystery as to what caused its demise.

 

I pondered on what to put in its place. Another one? No. I had planted one there 20 years ago which died after 10 years and then about 5 years ago another popped up in its place. It is never a surprise to find agave and yucca leave behind some root with a young bud. This is what we found when the extended root was removed...in fact two young ones which I shall plant in another area of the garden. 

We had just had work done on the front entry wall and on the right hands side of the gate I had to remove a few native golden groundsel while they worked. I had asked David if he would just fill in with some flat rocks we had stacked on one side.

 Maybe do the same on the other side instead of planting. This would balance out the area. 

 We did have to keep the area of bull rock because there is a drain from one side of the path to the other. All in all a cost efficient solution.

 

I refreshed the pots on either side of the gate with dianella, Dianella tasmanica 'Variegata' and coleus. This is deer country and my research showed that these plants should survive. We shall see. I have never planted dianella before but I know it is used to great effect by many of my Austin gardening friends.

 Quite honestly the work we have been having done has been a nightmare for a gardener. At least here there was little for them to destroy but nearby is where they had a lot of equipment, mixed their product and then washed out their equipment. Not only did they trample all the native plants that had been growing successfully in the area but they threw their cementitious water over all the plants. My beautiful agarita, beloved of the bees and which gave us such fragrance every spring is completely covered with a fine layer of cement. It won't even wash off. Heartbreaking. I regret now that I didn't go out at the end of every day with the hose. To make the area look presentable David brought it lots of leaves gathered from under the trees in a more remote part of the garden. 

There is much more work to do in other places they have been working but they should be finished by the end of this week and we will have the garden to ourselves again.