Beyond Knitting
A Garden Ramble
Dear Kay,
I seem to be out in the yard a lot these days, staring at the ground. Anybody else out there watching the grass grow, or the lettuce grow, or the seeds you planted and almost forgot were there?
I’ve gone sort of nuts for gardening lately, and I think it’s a pretty good hobby when the day job is knitting. When I’m knitting, I’m thinking about gardening. When I’m gardening, I’m thinking about knitting. It all intertwines. Maybe these quiet obsessions are all the same thing.
Come along for a tour of all the things coming up in my garden.
I spent most of the weekend staring at this.
This is an anemone.
It and six siblings lived last year in my back yard, in a sad nook that got little sun and less rain. I’ve been watching for this little fella all spring, wondering if it was going to come back at all, feeling guilty that I let it languish for a whole summer.
I’d assumed it was a goner until last week, when a minuscule bit of green seemed to be coming out of the ground.
Right? Isn’t that amazing? I moved it to the front yard, where it will get sun and water all summer.
Meanwhile, two very small bunnies eat the asters most mornings. Feeling like the asters have the upper hand at this point.
The bees got to the sage in record time. (Thanks for the ID, Nancy and Lisa!!!!)
The magnolia is not fooling around. A foot wide, one of these will fill the house with its astounding fragrance.
The amsonia is such a try-hard. Calm down, amsonia, we get it!
Buying half-off allium bulbs at Home Depot = massive payoff.
Hats off to the hundreds of tiny cedar volunteers that could set me up with a pencil factory if I just leave them alone.
The red buckeye tree has been here for three springs now, and it’s just getting into gear.
I am spicebush‘s newest fan.
And fothergilla! Such a Dr. Seuss kind of a shrub with its tufty, early flowers.
The milkweed is always a stealth return. Boops up all over the place, incorrigible and a favorite because it actually did bring some monarch butterflies to the yard last year. How. Did. They. Know. It’s not like I had a field of the stuff.
And the surprise return of baptisia, that bunny favorite! I truly thought this was a goner, but since this photo it has bloomed its sweet pea-ish false indigo blossoms, and it’s a glory to see. Ha, rabbits! You missed it! Too busy with the asters, were ya?
And finally, the willow oak is my dearest companion. In April, it’s one of the last trees to leaf out.
And then, in a couple of weeks, it does its thing.
When I find I’ve been staring at the ground too long, I look up and see once again what happens to a seed, a hundred years later.
Each plant is its own drama. Feeling like I’ve got thirty soap operas going in my garden, an eternal Stay Tuned For The Next Episode.
Thanks for coming along! What’s the thing you like to do when you’re not knitting?
Love,
Ann
( Yes, I’m up early again.) What a lovely way to spend a morning. Don’t think I will ever catch my grandmother’s gardening bug, but I do find I like to cook and bake more these days thanks to her. Very refreshing after a mile of stockinette.
Baking and cooking are meditative in a similar way to knitting, with the bonus that you end up with cookies!
Beautiful garden Ann! I think the lavender colored flowers in the photo under your bee comment are sage, also a bee-happy plant. You can tell by pinching off a piece of a leaf and rubbing it between your finger and then sniffing your hand. If you think of turkey probably sage, if you think of your grandmother maybe lavender
I also thought it looked like a sage or salvia rather than a lavender. Either way, Ann’s garden is beautiful! When I’m not doing fibery things, I’m answering gardening questions for our county’s Master Gardener helpline that spans Zones 9a & 9b.
Yes! Thank you for the ID!
I love to bake bread . In fact I’m baking 2 loaves today!o the
Wonderful! Is there any scent more comforting than bread in the oven?
Beautiful! Here on Cape Cod (also zone 7b!) lots of the same are coming up though at a slower pace than where you are. Asters must be bunny caviar. They and the false indigo get chomped down as soon as the tender shoots appear.
Yes, totally agree that gardening and watching green things emerge out of nothing is a wonderful complement to hours of sedentary knitting.
Pulling weeds is my varsity sport at this point.
Love that! Someone somewhere said if it comes out easy it’s a weed. HUH!?!? Have you actually pulled a weed? Most don’t come up with intact roots so they come back.
I’d take a stroll in your garden anytime. Right now my tomato plants are shivering in the cool and rainy spring. I, like you, love to stroll the garden which is often full of surprises, like, where did that plant come from? This is the garden time of the year for me, knitting is a joy all year. Thanks for your article, just what I needed as I wake up to another dark and dreary day, maybe a walk in my own garden will cheer me up, it surely always brings hope.
All respect for your growing tomatoes! Vegetables and tomatoes are a stretch goal for me… someday I’ll have the courage to grow them! The stakes are so high! And yes, the balm that comes from seeing a zinnia seed sprout is something I’m needing so much these days.
Don’t buy plants from Home Depit!!!! They are famous for spraying their plants with a substance that kills bees
Hi Lyn and Lynn, Such an important topic. These plants are all from local nurseries—bulbs are from White Flower Farm, Longfield Gardens, and seeds from Eden Gardens. Plus my half-off allium bulbs from Home Depot! If you want an amazing surprise, plant some allium bulbs in the fall, wowie.
I looked this up. It was true 10 yrs ago, when their use of neonicotinoid pesticides were discontinued I’m sure from public pressure. I have nothing to do with Home Depot, don’t have one anywhere near my area but always good to ask these questions even of local establishments.
As somebody who works at a local (Ontario, Canada) Home Depot, I can tell you emphatically that our plants are NOT pretreated. HD Canada is separate from HD US and our local/provincial/federal laws are different too. Sadly, our stores still carry & sell glysophate but I do everything I can to NOT sell it. I actively campaign to get it OUT of our stores. It is restricted here & only available for use on poison ivy & giant hogweed so unless a customer says exactly THAT I do not unlock it for them. Go ahead & complain to my managers. I bring in far more business than they will cost us if they choose to go somewhere else (see my other post this AM). Even when I do unlock that case, I reiterate EMPHATICALLY how very dangerous glysophate is & to be exceedingly careful for themself, but especially so for any small beings (children, granchildren, pets) who may use their yards now & generations yet to come.
Thank you for your strong defense of our pollinators! I’m working with you!!
Enjoyed your garden tour! Meanwhile, in Asheville…
The weather has been a bit strange. Hurricane in September, prolonged cold during the winter and little rain. So many of my perennials didn’t make it through. My Roald Dahl rose reverted to root stock but the weeds are thriving! Time to do some tweaking!
Oh yes, and it’s our year for cicadas. All over the place!
Hi Lorrie! Oh, I hope your garden rallies. You have all been through so much, it has been so heart wrenching to see what North Carolina experienced.
Thank you for this, Ann. I felt so happy wandering with you through your plants.
I do some gardening. Started tomatoes and peppers from seed and waiting for a decent day to plant them.
I spend more time birding. I try to go out every day either to a local park or one of the nearby forest preserves. Last week I went down to Montrose Point Bird Sanctuary in Chicago for the spring migration. Saw 70 species total, a record for me. 24 of those were warblers. I count all the birds and submit my checklists to eBird, a site run by Cornell that collects data from around the world for scientific and conservation purposes. I’m a citizen scientist!
70 species is a cornucopia! I heard the weirdest knocking sound in the willow oak the other day, and I dug out my Merlin app to find out what was going on. Turns out it was a yellow-billed cuckoo. Wow! That was a new one for me. Anybody wanting to try out birding, the Merlin app is incredible. Listens to bird calls, then identifies the bird.
I saw a yellow-billed cuckoo in my back yard for the first time this year. What a nice surprise!! I live in Central Maryland.
I have the greatest admiration for you and am so glad you do the birding!!
Same Ann, same!
I loved walking through your garden with my morning coffee – what a great way to start the day. Thanks so much for sharing
I have garden envy!!! I hope you have lots of seating out there to take knitting outside while you watch the growing and listen to the birds! I love to sit out and do that – so relaxing!
I’m zone 6a. When I moved here from Southern California 16 years ago, I had to relearn gardening. I never had to deal with winter hardiness and went from beautiful sandy soil to awful clay. A few years ago I started seriously embracing the native plant movement and it has made it easier. I fill pots with non-native pretties to round it out. I love getting into the “zone”.
I also love to bake. I recently started playing with a sourdough starter. I have yet to actually bake a loaf of bread with it – I’ve been playing with the discard too much. Yesterday was scuffins – a cross between muffins and scones.
A scuffin sounds absolutely delicious.
I’m weirded out by this zone 7(b) thing in Nashville. It was 6(b) when I had my first garden in 1996. Not good …
My local Southern Ontario zone 5a/b snickers (admittedly jealously) at your ample & oh-so-easy 7a.
My local bunnies have devastated SO many young trees here thanks to a whomping of late Feb 24″ of snow (on top of an already existing 24″+ of compacted seasonal accumulation). All those poor bunnies could access for weeks were the young trees that still reached up above the ice encrusted scourge. As that melted, they worked their way down the trunks, ARGHHHH!! We are gratedul for the infusion of spring melt into our reservoirs & ground water but…
So I, working at a local Home Depot garden centre, have been soothing customers’ grief at the devastation to their Japanese Maples, fruit trees and Star Magnolias (we don’t get the Grandifloras like you do… sniff) to bunny-chew girdling at the snow line. Many of those trees actually have survived, but are now oddly shaped, basal sprouting, multi-trunked forms, not the lovely strong central leader TREES that their proud owners tucked into dormancy at the end of last season. We’ve found many creative work-arounds to protect what is left & are now focussing on how to prune & retrain what is regrowing to make a more optimal surviving tree for future seasons.
Nature IS strong, but that strength may not accomodate our aesthetics, at least not easily.
Enjoy what you have & think of us to your North, waiting for the last frost date to arrive so we can FINALLY get our tomatoes & peppers into the ground!
Thank you for such an informative comment. We planted two serviceberry trees last year, both of which the bunnies started chewing. We didn’t notice immediately, so one of them sustained more damage than the other before we added tree protectors. The lesser chewed tree has blossomed and leafed out. The more heavily girdled tree has healthy looking buds that don’t seem to want to grow any longer. It also looks to have some basal sprouting, based on what I learned from your comment. We’re new at caring for any kind of landscaping. We did a full installation last summer and truly marvel at what’s coming back after the bunny carnage. The serviceberry is the only one that seems to be struggling among the large number of new plantings. Thanks to you, I can head to The Google armed with a new search term. Thank you! Hopefully we can save the tree.
Loved this! Simply wonderful! I too garden and am always delighted to meet a fellow gardener and knitter to boot! Thanks for the tour. Am looking forward to finally meeting you this summer at Shakerag!
LOVE your garden, thank you for this post. Ha! When I’m not knitting or gardening I like to look at others’ knitting and gardening or read about knitting or gardening. Also planning travel to places with sheep. Dog, grandkids, etc. Life is rich and full!
Greetings from zone 10 in the suburbs of LA. Your garden is beautiful Ann and yes, how do the monarchs find it? My favorite thing to do is garden knitting and listening and tracking the birds visiting my yard via the Merlin app. I break up my knitting with minor garden activities. The best way to spend an afternoon imo.
A little zone envy from 4-b. Although with climate change, it might be 5. I do have a lovely mature baptisia, and if you leave the seed pods they dry and you can pick them for a fall dried bouquet of bittersweet, dried grasses and what have you. Who needs Joanns? We finally got rain, 3.5 inches of it, so I’ll be alternating weeding and knitting.
We’re 4b to 5-ish as well. We planted 3 baptisia last summer as part of a new landscape installation. The bunnies chewed them to the gound–to the point where you couldn’t tell anything had been planted. Much to our surprise, they’ve started to emerge from the ground! Hoping we can get to the seed pod stage with them this year since we didn’t even get to see them bloom last year. We’ve put cages around them and are hoping the bunnies decide they’re too much effort, especially with so many other things available for them to eat right now (weedy grass, dandelions, and some scraggly day lilies they’re welcome to devour). We’ll see.
I’ll ramble along with you on this kind of walk anytime. Thanks!
So crazy to think that I am also zone 7B in Baltimore, with a microclimate of possibly zone 8 on the south side of my home where the dahlias I never bothered to dig up have reappeared after a rather cold winter. I have the same things blooming in my yard, but it all seems so early. Peony trees, irises, fringe tree, and fothergilla have finished flowering. Peony plants, baptisia, geum, salvia, cranesbill, sweet bay magnolia and clematis all in full bloom, and I am seeing flower buds on hosta and hydrangea quercifolia. For some reason the bunnies here don’t touch the baptisia. It must have a different flavor profile here in Maryland 🙂 Either that, or all of the foxes that I love seeing are keeping their numbers in check. Thank you for sharing your garden with us, Ann! My favorite hobby next to knitting of course!
How delightful ! Knitting and Gardening are two of my favorite “thought controllers”. Thank you for sharing your beautiful Spring garden. I live in the Pocono Mountains of NE Pennsylvania. It is obvious to me that you do not have deer enjoying your garden. However, by spraying a deer spray, my plants are starting to bud and open, encouraging my Hummingbirds to enjoy the plants as frequently as the feeders.
When I’m not knitting, which is almost never…I do like to garden, read, (or listen to books), bake and cook, but knitting really is all I want to do!
Gardening is a challenge, as we have a very shady yard and live in Minneapolis (zone 5), but we’ve filled it with hostas, Solomon’s Seal and other shade loving plants. I’ve been trying to naturalize my front yard with daffodils the last few years, interspersed with tulips and iris. They do fine in the spring since the trees have not yet leafed out to block out the sun.
This year, our neighbors have allowed us to use their raised bed for some tomatoes and peppers, so I’m looking forward to that! I long for being able to have a huge vegetable garden, but I’ll make due with what I have!
Your garden is gorgeous Ann…thank you for the tour, and introduction to many plants I’ve never known about!
Ann,
Thanks for sharing your garden. I’m a big fan of perrenials and I’m so glad to see them return. My husband put light mesh fencing around some of the garden plants. We have trouble with deer coming to munch on our hostas and. daylillies.
I still love gardening, but I’m unable to get down and weed, but I love the joy of the flowers when they bloom.
Gardening and knitting!!
Beautiful! Thank you for the lovely article and pictures. Here in Wisconsin, my perennial flower garden has reappeared to my delight! We planted vegetables for many years, but have pulled back in retirement to flowers and tomatoes. Our local farmer’s market takes care of the rest. I lost a few plants, including my beloved thyme, due to overly-cold temps and not enough snow, but overall most came back for their second season. Roses, salvia, creeping phlox, bee balm, sedum and more to brighten our summer. Just added some cosmos and yellow paper daisies for splashes of color. Working on the Love Letter Top in the evening, pattern by Kika. Happy knitting and gardening!
Love this, Ann!
I enjoyed every bit, but especially your comment about the soap operas.
You and Kay are simply the best!
Also a gardener. Curious about the location of your anemone and baptisia though. My Japanese anemone and my cream color baptisia bloomed out weeks ago. (My biggest frustration with the baptisia is that it doesn’t re-bloom.)
I’m only about 25 miles NE of Nashville, so maybe it’s that my patio is south facing??
Love hearing about your garden! I wish I had a willow oak, or pretty much any kind of willow.
It says I’m zone 7a or b but the high desert of New Mexico is quite different from your climate. Average annual rainfall is 8″ and we’ve been below average for quite a few years. I’m a laissez faire gardener: I’ll plant and prune, and water occasionally. Native plants do well and I just love cactus blooms, they are so bright. But very hard to weed around. Right now is peak rose season, they are going all out! Bringing in fresh ones daily makes my living/knitting room smell so sweet! The hummingbirds birds buzzed my window reminding me to put out the feeder. Like the monarchs, how do they know each year?!? Itching to go buy too many plants this weekend.
I also like to garden when I’m not knitting, painting, or hiking on our property. Most of it is in hay, so walking is a problem right now, as the grass is very, very tall. They should be cutting and baling soon. We are also in zone 7b. I haven’t had to water in a long time, and had shoulder surgery last week, so I haven’t seen, except through the windows, how tall my sunflowers and tomatoes are getting. It will be time to start tying things up soon. It’s time for summer knitting, which is a very short window for me, along with dishcloth knitting, before heading right back to fall knitting. I don’t like being away from wool for very long. Be well!
If you are the one that said yesterday on the Zoom that your ambition was to get a sheep or two- give up gardening! They make it difficult to have garden time. Add knitting- something gets shortchanged. And- leave the goats, even cute ones, in the other guy’s pasture. The garden would be decimated. ….
Thank you for this, Ann – especially the wonderful photos! It’s interesting to read about garden progress in much warmer zones, and even a few apparently colder! (I’m in southern Maine, nowadays in zone 5b). I’ve been an avid gardener for my whole life – or at least with my first garden at four years old (and I’m now 74). Gardening has led to so many other interesting subjects, like botany, entomology and photography. And it does pair so well with knitting, especially when I’m pooped out gardening and can come in to nice relaxing knitting. (Incidentally, the purple-spired plant in question is actually Salvia, though it is a close relative of the kitchen herb Sage. I’ve grown lots of both over many years, and I don’t recommend adding Salvia leaves to the soup pot!)
You have an incredible yard!
Magnolia jelly is back in fashion, but I don’t know which varieties are favored for the best flavor. Baking, knitting, gardening, foraging are family favorites, but the gazing (at the ground, at the moss, at the gift of the first green sprouts when a perennial returns) is my pastime of choice. It’s like meditation!
Gorgeous! and inspiring.
As a fellow gardener/knitter, you made my day. I definitely am going to use your line above, “When I’m knitting, I’m thinking about gardening. When I’m gardening, I’m thinking about knitting. ” I really hope you won’t mind the appropriation.
Janet
Thanks for the tour of your beautiful garden! We’re enjoying the first spring after a new landscape installation last summer and are marveling at the plants returning after some heavy bunny carnage. We honestly thought we had lost much of what we planted (we’re new to caring for garden/landscape plants). We’re also enjoying the
migratory birds returning to our back yard, including hummingbirds and orioles. I went all in (for me) at a couple local nurseries by adding seven blooming planters to our outdoor space to attract even more pollinators. Watering and weeding are on tap for me this summer, intermingled with knitting, sourdough baking, and my newest distraction: sewing. Thank you for offering such engaging daily content. MDK is such a balm these days.
Exactly what you were doing here! Looking…so relaxing, amusing, astonishing (where did that dill come from?), teaching,….
I don’t have bunnies but I do have a mower. His name is Carlos. He thinks daylilies are weeds…a dormant, newly planted hydrangea, a fallen branch.
The good news is the skunks and raccoons and I have forged peace. I sit unfazed while they explore.
Love that Willow Oak. Wow
I’m not sure what there is about it, but I love your willow oak!