Today in the Garden: Looking for Hope

This is the kind of thing that keeps me sane in these horrifying, violent days:  Gardening.  Well, that and not watching TV.  At all.  Ever. 

I find sanity in gardening because digging and pruning direct my attention in a more peaceful, and hopeful, direction than the dark tunnel of despair that is the news these days.

These are the bulbs of Siberian squills, scilla siberica.  But they look like tiny red onions. 

I'm choosing to shift my focus away from the New York Times and take a longer view.

 Read not the Times.  Read the eternities.

--Henry David Thoreau

I confess I do read the New York Times.  Nevertheless a person needs to pull away from the paper.

By inserting these tiny red onion-lookalikes into the ground, I'm not just looking ahead to, I'm investing in spring.  I'm putting these purple-red spheres into the ground under the row of roses that separates our driveway from our neighbors'.  I want to see these bulbs produce squills.  If they do, they'll look like this.  Eventually, anyway:

When bulbs carpet the ground like this, that process is called naturalizing, or spreading informally and even haphazardly beyond the place of their original planting. Squills do that, as do snowdrops.  Crocus do too, but you have to squirrel-proof the bulbs first. To do that, I buy a spray bottle of Ro-Pel (a rodent repellent that makes anything they want to eat taste awful) and pour the contents into a bucket.  Then I soak the crocus bulbs in them over night. Then I dry them on layers of newspaper.  This works.  Also, the Ro-Pel tastes vile, if you ever get it on your lips by accident.  Bitter.

But I didn't want to deal with squirrel-proofing crocus bulbs this year.  Instead, I bought a bag of 50 Spring Beauty squill bulbs (scilla siberica) from White Flower Farm:

I planted them in five groups of ten under the roses:

The roses aren't doing much right now except displaying their hips:

These hips are growing because I didn't deadhead the roses last summer.  If I had deadheaded all summer --cut off the spent blooms--we would have had more of a display of flowers over a longer period of time.  Instead, I was distracted last summer by the necessity of producing a 30 x 50 piece for a high profile exhibit at the New England Quilt Museum.  Deadheading the roses wasn't real prominent on my radar screen last summer.

Besides, I reasoned, the fruit-eating birds can have the rose hips all winter.  Well, I haven't seen any fruit eaters on those rose hips.  We have families of catbirds that live in the Norway spruces behind our garage, attracted by our grapes and blueberries.  But the catbirds must have migrated, because nobody is getting these rose hips.  Well, at least the hips, growing between two driveways, are providing a jolt of color against the black of the asphalt.

I've never been thrilled by these roses.  They came with the house, so I take care of them.  According to the late Donna Fuss, the former rosarian at the Elizabeth Park Rose Garden, my roses were the product of a breeder named Walsh, and are a variety called either Minnehaha or Lady Gay.  She wasn't sure which.  In either case, they're extinct, she said.  I guess that means that growers no longer produce them commercially.  That's no big whoop.  These roses are small and thorny and a dozen to a thorny stem, about 1 inch across.

This is a photo of the Walsh rose, Minnehaha, which may or may not be the name of the one growing along my driveway. Mine are more of a garish shade of fuchsia.  And you can't pick just one.  You have to pick a whole gnarly, thorny stem of about six or eight.

 

I'm not crazy about them, but I take care of them.

If I had chosen a rose to grow along my driveway, I would have chosen a long-stemmed, cup-shaped, David Austin beauty like this one:

This is a David Austin rose called Teasing Georgia

Nevertheless, I wasn't around in 1927 when this house was built and (presumably) these now-extinct roses were planted.  Instead, I inherited the roses, and I do what I can with what I have.  I'm certainly not going to rip them out.  I prune them hard every spring and feed them every summer.

By planting squills under this row of roses, I'm throwing a line out into the future, knowing that the line will be caught.

And so amen and let it be so.