Summertime and the Livin' is Easy

While May was a bit of a sloggy struggle here at Mutton Hill, June has been bliss. We still have had some odd temperature fluctuations, including a heat dome where the temperature reached 98F (~37C) for two days, and a few unseasonably chilly days at the beginning of the month, but nothing is perfect. Despite this, we have had plenty of long sunny days and languorous evenings on the patio under the stars. Best of all, the flower gardens have been abundant, brimming over with a riot of flowers each more brilliant than the last. The peonies, iris, foxglove and the roses have been at the height of their glory. The poppies have started to pop, and everything is bursting forth with exuberant growth. Is there a more perfect month in a flower garden than June?

There is always at least one fly in the ointment

Unfortunately, June's prolific growth is not limited to the flowers, fruits, and vegetables. The weeds also take part. Much of the month has been devoted to my efforts to tame the weeds, allowing the stars of the show to take centre stage. I am an imperfect weeder at best. I have far, far too many garden beds to keep them perfectly weeded by myself, so instead, I do my best to keep the weeds at bay enough to allow the plants I am cultivating to thrive. The silver lining to my haphazard gardening practices is that it turns out that this is good for the environment. This means that when someone admiring my flowers turns to me to ask if that is a clover they see amidst the roses, or if they comment on a particularly ginormous chickweed, I can reply with a straight face that I allow a base level of weeds in my garden to help the pollinators. I mean, I really do want to promote pollinators, even if the benefits of my weeding style are a happy accident. In fact, it is a lovely thing when currently accepted best practices align with what you were already doing anyhow.

Serendipity abounds

Another happy accident is the serendipity of the goddess garden. This garden started off as a large, unnamed flower bed across the driveway, at the top of the hill, above the terraces that overlook our patio. (The preceding sentence should give you a good idea of why I name different areas of the garden.) When you sit on our patio, you look straight up the grass path between the terraces and until late last summer you were looking at a patch of weeds growing over ledge at the edge of the woods. One evening, last July, I decided that this was a missed opportunity and took the tractor out into the woods to start foraging for rocks to create a raised bed. Several weeks and many square feet of cardboard, and yards of compost later, I had a new flower bed to develop as a focal point above the terraces. I still had no idea what I was going to plant, but as I was thinking about a design, I happened to acquire a statue of the Indonesian Goddess Dewi Sri.

A brief aside...

In addition to gardening, I also love auctions and frequently combine these passions by finding treasures to grace my gardens. These range from the practical - garden furniture, terracotta pots, and planters to the more esoteric - myriad statues, a Narnia-style gas street lamp, a Victorian lion-embossed fountain, and a child's sleigh. The last three are still waiting for me to find them a home, but just because you don't know what you are going to do with something doesn't mean that it isn't a good idea to purchase it. Right? Right???

Returning to the goddess

When I say I 'happened to acquire,' I really mean purchased, but it felt a bit like an accidental purchase, in that I put a bid on the statue, but didn't exactly expect to win it. I liked/like it a lot, but assumed that other people would too. I put a bid in online at the starting price just on the offchance the stars would align and then went off to garden. Several hours later, I was astonished to discover that I was the proud owner of the statue. Apparently, there isn't a large demand for Indonesian goddess statues in Vermont. When I went to pick it up, I was told that it had been in somebody's garden for 50 years and that their children hadn't wanted to keep it. I was also informed that it was very, very heavy. It took four brawny individuals to load it into my vehicle. Let us just say that when I brought it home, my husband and sons were less than enthusiastic about moving it.

Finding the perfect place

When I initially saw the auction listing, I envisioned the statue rising above irises and primroses and flanked by angelica on an island in our swimming pond. The only problem with this is that our swimming pond currently only exists in my imagination. I have the perfect spot picked out below the gardens. I have begun clearing it, and have made some test excavations so I am certain that the location will work out, but life keeps getting in the way, and we are probably still several years out from being able to swim in said pond. Given the frustrating parameters of reality vs my imagination, I thought that for the time being, we could keep the statue at the edge of where the pond will go, centred in a bed of ferns alongside a woodland path. However, my husband correctly pointed out that it was very muddy there after a rainy summer (hence the perfect spot for a swimming pond!), and that given the weight of the statue, combined with the weight of the tractor necessary to move the statue, there was a decent chance of getting stuck and it was pretty much guaranteed to be a muddy nightmare. I could not argue with this logic, and decided in the meantime we would put her in the new flower bed above the terraces.

The goddess finds a new home

Once this decision was made, I backed my vehicle as close as I could get to the flower bed, and she was heaved and levered into place on a stack of garden bricks. Sometime shortly after this, I saw a lovely picture of foxtail lilies shimmering in the sun on Instagram and became captivated with the idea of a stand of them rising up behind the statue. All of a sudden, I had a plan and a design, and the new garden had a name. So far, the goddess garden has been everything I hoped for, even if I arrived at it all by accident.

Elsewhere in the gardens

Beyond the goddess garden, the tomatoes and peppers are developing little green fruits, and peas and garlic scapes are currently gracing our table. Dinners are often tiny flatbreads embellished with produce foraged from the garden, cooked, and eaten outside; simple food, easily prepared, and the perfect cap to long days working in the gardens. We have been picking strawberries here and there, but it has been a tough year in strawberry land after our bed was inundated with gravel after several washouts the past few years. A solution is in sight, however, as we finished another tier in the new vegetable garden and have been slowly moving daughter plants from the old bed into their new home. Hopefully, next year our harvest will be measured in gallons instead of handfuls. On the other hand, this year's raspberry crop looks like it will be epic as long as we keep the birds away. I also have loads of biennial and perennial seedlings that I am about to set out in the gardens, and I have been sowing a second set for this fall, in addition to sowing seedlings for the fall veg rotation.

In other words, life in the gardens has been abundant and good. Of course, there have been the plants/seedlings that have died, and bug bites, thorns, sweat, and dirt under the fingernails - you know, the standard fare of gardening, but those are all part and parcel of a life in the garden, and for me, without them, the bliss of summer wouldn't be nearly as profound.