Pollenatrix

Sunlight Lomantica

This lovely yellow floribunda rose is growing in a large pot on my patio. It's called Sunlight Romantica, a floribunda from the house of Meilland in France. Meilland's Romantica roses are considered France's answer to the old English rose, and supposedly blooms better in hot weather than the English David Austin varieties. Makes sense, I guess.

Sunlight Romantica has a gorgeous old-rose style bloom and a heady old-rose scent, which is why I bought it. Roses are fussy prissy things and I normally wouldn't bother with them, but this one smells heavenly, and blooms continuously. It does have a little bit of black spot but in spite of the cold rainy weather we've experienced lately, the plant seems to be fending off serious infection without chemical assistance.

What's more, this is a rose that has inspired a Japanese man to break into song and post it on You Tube. A German song.

Awesome.

Ghost pain of a gardener

There is most definitely a hint of autumn in the air, a certain crispness and energy that urges me to get out into the garden. It's an instinct really; a strong sense of needing to be out harvesting and tending and working the soil, preparing for a coming change of the seasons.

It's a strange and misplaced feeling. Strange, not just because it's mid-August and at least a month early for this sort of thing, but also because I don't have a garden. I find myself irresistably pulled to the shops, trolling the aisles for perennials, investigating the shiny tools hanging on the walls, checking out the selection of seeds. It's the same urge that causes me to gather seeds from plants that I come across during my wanders, even though I have nowhere to plant them. My fellow apartment dwellers point to my patio and tell me what a lovely garden I have; I see a bunch of pots. It does look nice, but pots on a patio are unsatisfying in a way that only a passionate gardener can understand.

A gardener without a garden. Kind of like an amputee who can feel and move his limb, a long long time after it's gone.

Repeat bloomer on steroids

Twice is nice. Three times is just showing off:

A magnolia has flowered for the third time in a year, possibly due to climate change and the unpredictable weather.

John Anderson, 47, head gardener at Exbury Gardens in Hampshire, said the pink New Zealand-bred Apollo hybrid normally only blossomed once a year, in spring.

Any low-rent allotment gardens around here?

A few days ago I mentioned the proliferation of allotment gardens here in Germany, and by coincidence I came across an article in the Telegraph by an expat who has actually rented one.

You have to understand, these allotment gardens are no ordinary garden plots. They're pretty much summer cottages in the middle of the city. I'd post a picture but the grounds are surrounded by double rows of thick shrubbery, and are securely locked up at entrance gates.

I've toyed with the idea of renting one myself, but after reading the article I changed my mind. Clubs? Rules? Thousands of euros? Uhh... don't think so. I'll stick with my pots and a little guerilla gardening for now.

Spaghetti grows on trees too, I hear

When I see an article in the Irish Independant newspaper called "How to keep the green in your garden", I figure it must be worth reading. I mean, who would know better than the Irish?

Alas, it's not a terribly exciting article. She does recommend something called a "strawberry tree". Now what the heck is that? Do strawberries now grow on trees? How did I miss that one?

Slow blog day. Sorry.

Foundation plants

One of the things that makes me smile is the older generation's attachment to foundation planting. The traditional suburban variety -- cypress and cedar and other assorted evergreens marching in a stiff row, disciplined into tortured balls that grow into ridiculous oversized balls over the years, and dotted with solitary annuals standing guard at their bloated feet.

It gives me the urge to initiate some guerilla gardening. Like rip out the steadily inflating bubbles of shrub and turn that foundation planting into something that looks like this:

Garden Makeovers

Fashioning in a garden

I normally don't think much about my attire while I'm out working in the garden, but today I was caught out by a young work colleague who dropped by to return some stuff he'd borrowed. At the office I'm neatly dressed, usually in jeans and no fashion queen but generally quite presentable. Today, I realized, I was quite a sight. It was a drizzly day and I had light gray track pants on that were soaked to the knees, one muddy trouser leg half caught in the top of a crusty Australian boot. On top I wore a couple of layers of disreputable t-shirts, nothing matching, topped off by a dirty and wet red rain jacket. My hair was pretty wild under the broad rim of my once-beige Tilly hat, the crowning glory of an eccentric attire, and I had mud on my face - a nice broad streak where I'd wiped my runny nose with a filthy glove. The poor fellow caught me while I was in a death roll with a large weed tree that I was trying to extract, and when I realized he was there I turned around face-to-face with some very wide eyes. Ha. He didn't stay long.

Strangely enough, it didn't bother me in the least. An image flitted through my mind of another gardener I once knew, a beautiful slender blond herbalist who always floated through her fairy gardens in flowery sundresses, looking tanned and magazine gorgeous. But I instantly dismissed the image with a grin; no matter how I may appear, I am never more beautiful than when I'm outdoors in my ridiculous hat playing gardener in the mud.

I couldn't leaf things alone

Last week I noticed that the thick layer of fallen leaves was gone from the lawns around my building. The Hausmeister had taken advantage of a warm sunny day to scoop them up with his riding mower and dump the chopped-up leaves into a big pile beside one of the buildings. I found the pile, and the little gardening fanatic in me drooled. Just drooled.

Black gold, that's what it was. The thing I'd been fantasizing about all summer while the plants in the beds outside my doors drooped and struggled, while the Hausmeister grumbled about having to water those same beds during hot spells until he finally asked me to do it. That poor, stoney, parched, starving, packed-down soil. It needed a good thick mulch and some compost, much more than I could ever hope to drag home in a bicycle cart. I had tried to start a discreet compost pile under some bushes, but was caught and asked to put compost in its proper place: In the brown bins that are emptied and taken away as waste each week. Truly, what a waste.

Neat vs. Nature

Gardeners are hard at work on the grounds around my apartment building, and I have to say I have decidedly mixed feelings about it. There are lots of jungly plots around the place, flowering bushes that over the years have grown out of control and melded into wild and impenetrable batches of shrub. The gardeners are pruning hard, untangling the impossible growth and scraping the ground around them bare of leaves and branches and other accumulated debris.

On one hand, the gardener in me appreciates the return to order, and looks forward to a nice display in the spring. On the other hand, the wildlife lover in me grieves. The birds use those little wild places for cover and nesting, and I've seen hedgehogs run in and out of those bushes in the dark hours of the evening. It's a tough time of year for a hedgehog to be evicted from a warm nest.

Living Tree Art

This is a new one on me -- living trees shaped into sculptures, and even furniture. Two Australian artists have mastered the art of training and grafting growing trees into amazing shapes they call "Pooktre". Check it out: www.pooktre.com