The Fall 2021 Garden Kalendar is composed of condensed and edited excerpts from my daily, hand-written garden journal for October-December, 2020--accompanied by occasional commentaries on those passages. As I have indicated in previous Kalendar posts, the journal records my work in four gardens: the Alumni House Garden at Coe, a 1/4 acre vegetable garden on a small farm adjacent to the Wickiup Hill Outdoor Learning Center near Toddville (a garden typically identified as the Wickiup garden), the gardens and landscape at Buffalo United Methodist Church, and the gardens at my home on Elmhurst Drive in Cedar Rapids. In previous Kalendar postings, I have usually concentrated on journal entries dealing with the Coe and Wickiup gardens. The residential gardens on Elmhurst Drive, prior to the August derecho, were primarily stable, perennial shade gardens populated with several hundred hostas and requiring minimal maintenance. The wind storm, however, profoundly changed that landscape, destroying all our shade trees and necessitating a dramatic redesign of the gardens around the house.
This Kalendar constitutes about half of my journal entries in the last three months of 2020. While most passages are quite mundane and will not likely be of interest to other readers, I wanted this fall Kalendar to provide a relatively thorough record of my efforts to create a new landscape on the Elmhurst Drive property. Accompanying this Kalendar is a map of the new back yard garden design with names for the various beds. While editing these journal entries, I have in some passages silently inserted the bed titles adopted several months later. The Alumni House Garden map is posted on the website’s “map” page. As for the italicized quotations inserted between some journal entries, they come from Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden by Diane Ackerman, a book I really enjoyed reading last year. Ackerman is a brilliant writer, consistently entertaining and enlightening.
Because of the length of this Fall Kalendar, the complete text is posted as a pdf document. ~Bob
“Shaken down by the transitory blackmail of prewinter, I’d like to relinquish all notions of a four-quartered year, in which months chug past like treats on a tank, each one separate and inviolable. For example, the ragged interface of fall and winter (roughly overlapping November) is an entire season in itself. Winds quibble, alternate, and drop. The air is full of the distinct hollow noise of seedpods clattering on the trees like tiny rattles. Rotting leaves mulch into a fragrant stew. And the meteorological surprise of each moment fills the psyche with exhilaration. The sensual experience is unique and indigenous to a hybrid season for which we have no name. It doesn’t exist linguistically, this fall-winter polemic (I suppose we could call it ‘winfall’), and so for most people it doesn’t exist in fact. I prefer thinking of nature as a free-flowing organism, not as a series of doors slamming shut. In a quartered year there are three months of rain and buds, three months of lowers and scorch, three months of leaf rot, and three months of snow.” ~Diane Ackerman
1 October 2020. We’re hoping the Summit Tree crew will come tomorrow to start clearing away our big trees. This morning I spent two hours in the back yard trying to prepare for their arrival:
(1) Cleared an area for the stumpery.
(2) Dug out the big Osage orange post that the falling big oak missed. The post was deep in the ground, but I managed to extricate it without any significant damage. Although the post has been in that spot for over 30 years, it’s still in great shape–just a bit of deterioration at the soil line.
(3) After the post was removed, I could reach under the oak’s limbs and pull out the metal sunflower, purchased in an antique store in Barnes, Kansas perhaps 15 years ago. The oak had smashed the sunflower to the ground. Some of its faded yellow paint had broken off, but miraculously its petals were just bent, not broken. With some gentle massaging, I persuaded the petals to return to their original alignment, looking better than I could have ever imagined.
I spent most of the afternoon at Coe in the “G” bed, working along the north drainage ditch, inch by inch, digging out Joe Pye weeds, vetch, several varieties of grass, gooseneck, goldenrod, horsetail, several redbud seedlings, and other small trees. The vetch is particularly irritating because we had it almost eradicated two years ago–and now it’s expanded to over a 10'swath along the north side of the drainage canal. I will eventually have to dig up this area, remove all the roots I can find, and replant with some tough plants not intimidated by the obstreperous vetch. I just don’t know what plants are my best option for this challenging opponent. While periodically cursing all these unwanted invaders, I also noticed several limestone blocks beginning to slip into the canal. Sooner or later, I will need to dig them out and restore the alignment. Another challenge is to clean up the rain garden, whose vegetation has exploded this past year. The ironweed, river oats, meadow rue, Siberian iris, and cleomes are all experiencing an adolescent growth spurt.
Fall 2021 Garden Kalendar (link to pdf)