Daylily Haiku Thursday | Screaming Yellow

explosion in light!

the searing throat screams yellow-

and then softly fades.

(photo is a Dan Bachman seedling.  It blooms like nothing else in my collection.  Its scape is short, which I like and its flowers are big and wispy.  The throat is seriously screaming yellow and the sepals cutesy-curl as seen in the photo consistently.  One day this past summer I counted 12 blooms open on one day.  The best $10 I have spent on a seedling.)

I do write in hearts and flowers- I admit that. Some readers have commented about how annoyingly "perfect" my gardening life seems.  Au contraire, mon frer!  There are a thousand challenges in my brain and in my yard that I just cannot overcome, and most of what I would call "issues" stem from buying into the sterile stereotype of gardening magazines and their ideal representations of what a good gardener does or what a good garden looks like. 

 

At one time I did dream in 4-color glossy magazine style- filling binders with clippings of inspiration for a later day and finding fault in my gardens. I became quietly disappointed that I didn't measure up.  I'm over that now, soooo over it.  I'm okay with my own interpretation of "good."  I am not a perfect gardener. Here are a few points that prove that statement true: 

1. I leave garden tools outside all summer. My hand pruners rust shut and my shovel handles rot. A lot.
2. I do not plant my daylilies at the recommended spacing. And that's okay.
3. I always let volunteer trees that sprout grow. I cant bear to pull them out.
4. I have too many gardening books, magazines and website bookmarks and nowhere near enough land to make any of these ideas a reality. Yet.
5. I buy plants at the nursery or through the mail before I have a spot in which to plant the new purchase. This is bad. The end result of this problem this year was 13 various perennials still in pots when the first snow fell. I hope those "new" purchases make it to Spring when I can hopefully find room for them in the garden.
6. I have ruined more office shoes and office clothes just running out to the garden for "a second." No one goes out into the garden for just a second.
7. I have serious gardening ADD. I can go out to water the containers and go inside three hours later without ever touching a hose. Sigh.
8. I do not soil test. No time for science here.
9. I insist on hand-watering almost every day in the summer. That is bad on so many levels, but I cannot stop doing it. I call it therapy; it really soothes me after a long day at the office.
10. I am an impulse garden art/junque buyer. This gets me into trouble. Just ask the bus I was on during the Long Island national convention, when we ended up at a yard sale in the tour gardens neighborhood and I found a Bryn Maur mirror that I couldn't resist for a wall in my garden. Nevermind I would have to pack, carry and wrestle this ornate 3' X 4' mirror on the three flights home. I needed that mirror. (rest of the story: the mirror broke in a freak accident two years after it made it to Detroit safely, but it looked AWESOME in the garden until it broke...)

The good news is that all these imperfect facts keep gardening FUN for me. My husband yells about the tools, my neighbors and green friends yell about my watering habits, my co-workers laugh at my stained hands and sometimes muddy high heels, my financial planner crabs about the line item called "Nikki's Horticulture Therapy" in our budget, but...it's all perfect to me.