Such Was My Day

This is the time of year for the most frantic and constant activity in the garden.  Unlike those gardeners in snowy places who are stuck inside, forced to sit by a warm fire reading seed catalogs, I am out there until sunset, trying to get the entire garden pruned, raked, and re-mulched.  This year those projects are especially urgent.  Since we have puppies coming at the end of January, I want all that stuff completed and out of the way when puppy-chaos begins. 

The Fall Project path is completed (not the project, just the path), and I bought a new Naval Orange 'Cara Cara' on true dwarf root stock to replace Climbing 'Shot Silk', which has been in the wrong place for eleven years--it never had a proper support.

Unsupported:


I will move the rose if I can, kill it if I can't.  The new dwarf orange tree will go approximately where its pot now sits, or a little farther out from the wall.  It should get all day sun with some reflected heat from the stucco walls.  Heat = sweeter fruit.  Sweeter fruit = yum.  I saw 'Cara Cara' oranges for sale at the grocery and bought some to try them--they were pretty sour.  I hope mine will do better.  Those are my eleven year old dwarf lavender buns on either side of the path.  They bloom only in spring but are exquisitely sweet-scented when they do:  well worth the wait.  Mixed with orange blossom scent...ahhhh!  


Otherwise, this week and next, I'm frantically pruning.  The warm, even hot, dry weather is hard on the gardener, but it is a good time to make pruning cuts--they will heal fast and have less chance of canker infection in this low humidity and hot sunlight.  


The Agaves are not doing much, possibly waiting for warmer nights:



Though there are plenty of bees around to pollinate them.  Bees in the Aloes, in the Chamelaucium, in the Limonium, in the Rosemary, in 'Rozanne':



Some roses are still blooming;  the house is full of what I call "pruning bouquets"--all the flowers I've cut off to get the rose cleaned up and cut back.  If I waited until the roses stopped blooming to prune, I'd be waiting forever.  



With the foliage stripped or fallen off, tiny details are more apparent.  I always forget rose sepals often have a fuzzy inner coating.  The brilliant light of winter shows it off.



Running from rose to rose, like a bee, I notice other winter events only briefly.  Cooler nights have pinked up the Coprosmas.



A bunch of Hellebore (I think) seeds have sprouted:



I find a fallen nest, beautifully crafted last spring from the long grass in a neighbor's yard, unfortunately lined with invasive Pampas grass bloom fluff.  


I marked a spot on the wall with a brick, so I'd get a pittosporum planted in exactly the right place to screen out a window.  A Phoebe started using the brick as a perch, so now I feel obligated to leave it, as a courtesy to the Phoebe.



As I continue to run around, I notice Agave ellemeetiana still needs potting up.  

Such was my ordinary, unglamorous day.  I saw no celebrities, made no financial killing, made no history. 

A peaceful, glowing, gardening day.  Now that I think of it--a gardening day is never an ordinary day.  I'll leave glamor and greed and history-making to the fools, and grow roses, and feed bees, nurture birds for their song and fruit for its sweetness, and be at peace and one with the green, breathing world.  Such was my day.