Here comes the ice!

We are moving into one of my favorite times of the year... when the ice starts to form and build up on the shores of Lake Superior! Its a bitter cold time of the year, but I look forward to it anyway. Ice is easily one of my favorite things to photograph. In the last week of January there were numerous interesting ice formations to photograph. I'm sure there will be much more on the way!

Loved Those Wildflowers!

About this time last year, there was a proliferation of wildflowers here, but today, it looks like a mudslide occured. A lot of people and pups are sad, but the Corte Madera creek that runs by the path is nice, especially when the rowing clubbers are out skulling. Hope you all had a great Tuesday!

Keeping up... 83 year old makes summit bid

The climbing season is rolling along nicely. Today, an 83 year old started a summit attempt via the Kautz Glacier and he's no stranger to Mount Rainier. Bill Painter of Richland, WA holds the record as the oldest person to summit the mountain (both in 2004 and 2005). Last year, he smoothly ascended the Emmons Glacier... More on his attempt early next week.

It's been 3 weeks since I've been in the park... Thankfully, some of the climbing rangers have been helping w/ route and condition updates. That said, we still love your climbing reports. Over the next day or two, I'll upload many of the great reports climbers have been sending. Of significant news was an ascent of Willis Wall, Mowich Face and new information on Kautz and Success Cleavers. Photo by Loren while on the Willis Wall. YIKES!!!

Busy, busy days

I didn't post at all last week, because my life right now is super busy; busier than I like it to be. But what do you say when your daughter wants you to keep her four boys for four days so she can have a little r & r with her husband? Yes, of course.
And what do you say when your son calls from Ft. Benning and says that he's coming home for the weekend? Yes, of course!
And what do you tell a twelve-year-old daughter who wants to enter things in the fair which means taking those things there one weekend and picking them up the next? Okay, I reckon.
So now with all those things behind me and my birthday coming up on Wednesday, I'm heading for the mountains! It'll be a short trip, but I don't care. I HAVE to see the mountains in the fall and get apples at Mercier's Orchard in Blue Ridge, Georgia. Check them out on the internet.
After tending to so many family needs these last two months, I'm going home to be pampered by my parents. It's nice to be little again every now and then.
P.S. The photo is one taken last Christmas of us and our five children. It's a photo of a photo, so the quality is pretty poor.

Waiting...

This morning, in about ten minutes, Laurel will give birth to baby Wilder. As I'm sitting here praying, worrying, and trying to keep myself from losing control, I wrote this in my journal.
Laurel
You, first child of my heart and your daddy's love, now wait to give over the fruit of nine long months-months of ripening, ice-chomping, sleepless nights,wonderings, and fears mixed with anticipation.
The other day when we were talking about people with strong personalities,you said, "I don't think I have one."
That got me thinking about your life up until now. Out of five, you were my most stubborn andstrong-willed child. I think that over time, you've learned to have self-control and the wisdom to keep silent. Don't mistake that for weakness.
When I think about what you're going through at this early morning hour-the self-sacrifice necessary to bring forth a child by unnatural means asyou have three times before-it takes my breath away. I hope someday to have yourcourage and selflessness.
Until then, I'll stand back and observe you in your little world with three small sonsclinging, colliding, and jumping around you, their center, while you stand firm and tall-new son in your arms, with bright brown eyes looking straight ahead to the future.

Passalong Plants - The Book

Passalong Plants -the April/May Selection for the Garden Bloggers’ Book Club.
By the time this book came into my life, my world was already filled with plants passed along by other gardeners, so Felder and Steve [we were instantly on a first name basis] didn’t introduce me to the concept, but they gave all of us a great name for what we were doing, validated our experiences and filled an entire book with objects of desire. We were introduced to some quirky yard art as well as some truly odd plants.
The two authors, Steven Bender and Felder Rushing talk about individual plants in a neighborly, anecdotal way, sometimes lurching over the line into Jeff Foxworthy territory, but with genuine horticultural information under the kudzu. I have no resistance to this kind of Southern- style writing, treasuring old paperbacks by Lewis Grizzard and Celestine Sibley, enjoying the YaYa Sisterhood, and loving movies like Steel Magnolias and Fried Green Tomatoes. If you can’t swallow garden writing served with a side of cheese grits, you may need a lot of iced tea to get you through the pages, but the plant stories are wonderful. I love my copy, sometimes rereading the book for fun, and sometimes using it as a reference for specific plants.
Many of the most tempting stories are about plants that won’t grow above zone 7, giving the Northern gardener a case of zone envy. Felder and Steve are currently considering a new book about Passalong Plants for colder zones, so if you live where camelias freeze, read this book first and hope they’ll write a companion volume in the future. Last March, I posted about meeting Felder Rushing, and mentioned that my copy of the book was written-in, and stuffed with notes. The extra pages at the back of the book were blank when I bought the book, but were soon covered in lists of plants and people. I noted daylilies named ‘Timeless’ and ‘Charm Bracelet’ as coming from Bernice, that Sweet Autumn Clematis was given to me by Ruth, whose plant came from Sophie. The Malva moschata was from Dorothy, Iris from Lorraine, Peonies from Patty, Sweet woodruff from Sherry, orange lilies from Laverne and that the Jack in the Pulpit was passed along to me by my mother. Most of the passalong plants in our Illinois garden stayed there when we moved to Texas in 1999.
But among the passalong plants in my present garden are two that traveled long and winding roads to live in Austin, Texas.
Look into the photo above and you’ll see some tall while phlox, cavorting with a white Echinacea and some Perovskia last July. The family legend says that my great-grandmother grew the phlox in Michigan in the early 1900’s. By 1924 she'd given a division to her daughter, my Grandma Anna, who took them to Chicago. Grandma passed them along to my parents in the 1950’s. Decades later, I took some of the white phlox with me to a rental townhouse, then to our first house. Another four years passed, I redivided the burgeoning clump and took some to our second house, then repeated the process and planted them in the square garden at the third house, seen below.

The phlox are blooming in the upper left corner of this decade old snapshot - with the head of an 'Annabelle' hydrangea flopped artistically across the center.
In the mid-nineties our son M. took some of the white phlox for his garden and after we moved to this house in .., M. returned the favor, bringing a division of the heirloom phlox down here - to make this the fifth home where we’ve grown them.
The journey of another plant began on April 13, 1992, when a garden club speaker in Illinois gave me wands of corkscrew willow - extra greenery from an arrangement. I managed to root one of the slender twisted branches and grew it in a whiskey barrel. The wand eventually expanded into an attractive tree, from which I rooted more cuttings, one for my son M. and a couple for my friend Barbara. We left the original tree in the whiskey barrel in Illinois, but after a while I missed it, and wanted one here. Both M. & Barbara gave me wands from their now larger trees, with no luck at first, but this piece from Barbara finally made roots in ... The young willow now grows in a big pot, placed so any drip of condensation from the roof will land in the container. Also in the container are some passalong agapanthus plants from Pam/Digging. I started writing this while waiting for a couple of passalong daylilies to bloom, but as I waited, the draft grew longer and longer, and now the daylilies need a whole post! Since I want to tell the stories of the passalong plants in our garden and the people who shared them with us – let’s call this Passalongs/Part One.

Milldale to Tissington and back

With Harry. Cloudy and drizzly to start with, then cloud lifted. Muddy in places. just under 8 miles.











Cross Viator's Bridge out of Milldale village, and follow the steep path up to the left, signposted Tissington.

The path climbed up quite steeply, but the usual zig-zag path wasn't too bad, nor too long! At the top the signed route was fairly clear, though it turned muddy, and I think we may have taken a path slightly too far to the north of the route we intended.

In any case, up a bit and down a bit, it led to the (unmarked) minor road to Tissington, just across the A515 Ashbourne to Buxton road.

We walked into Tissington, as far as the Tissington Trial, but on a dankish Monday at 3pm nothing of interest (i.e. a coffee shop) seemed to be open, so we made our way back, following the same route mainly. The views were good, but not great - a little too misty, though the cloud did lift a little later in the walk.