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.