A Little Green Post

 While Mom was in, I mentioned how much I'd like to clean up my big shade garden.  Someone at some point planted orange daylillies in there...and those suckers grow like weeds.  In big packs.  Towering three feet tall.  These had escaped the garden border and were making for the hills.



As an aside, last year around this time I planted a mess of columbine, astilbe, and hostas in this garden.  They grew, but not very enthusiastically.  I'm blaming the daylillies.

 Hello, columbine!  Grow, baby, grow!

 See this?  There shouldn't be any lily sprouts on the far side of that rock.

 Mom is such a trooper.  Those sprouts, tender though they seem, were not easy digging.

 She piled them up in the wheelbarrow, trundled them up to the road, and guess what we did with these beautiful weeds?

 Yep, we threw them in the ditch.  Well, sort of...Mom dug up a few spots and we laid big clumps of lilies into them.  Maybe they'll catch on and we'll have a ditch full of waving orange lilies this summer.  We planted a few cannas on the end, too...they're not supposed to be hardy in this zone, but we'll see.

By the end of the day, it turned cooler and rainy.  This was my office view of the shade garden.

 So much cleaner without those little escapees!

*****

While Dave and Mom and I were in the hospital (they kept me overnight), we watched Julie and Julia on the hospital's movie channel.  You know, the one about Julia Child?  So then we watched some youtube of Julia Child's actual TV show, The French Chef.  And Mom turned around on our rainy afternoon and made us this:

 "Fish in monk's clothing."

 With halibut, french bread, sparkling cider, and candles.

 My get-well flowers from all my family.

  I love fresh flowers.  They are never not an excellent idea.

 In the days since Mom went back to Dallas, I've pecked even more at the lilies, a little at a time.  Dave made a great big dent in them on Saturday.  As of ten minutes ago, my shade garden looks like this:

Respectable, right?!  It's such a site for sore eyes, especially after the winter we've had.

And I've made a terrible, terrible discovery.  Terrible.  Did you know...ebay has hundreds of thousands of seed and plant dealers???  I found bareroot trillium.  I've been looking for trillium ever since I moved here!  It's a humble forest wildflower, but very difficult to find, apparently.  Well, I found it.  On ebay.  Guess what's going in my shade garden as soon as it arrives?!