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Text of the page (random words):
how i can put a photo of one of my first stumpery logs right below these gorgeous pictures of heronswood and ginkaku ji but here it is as a teaser for my next post all about the beginnings of a stumpery at garden in a city and here s the best part i ve already written the post and it is queued up to publish about 48 hours after this one are you ready to rush off to a stumpery right now are you looking at your local trees with new eyes or are you wondering if winter isolation has driven me batty as always please let me know in the comments share this tweet email a link to a friend opens in new window email like loading i m stumped 18 comments posted on august 22 2024 by judyatgardeninacity in late july i took a six day trip to the pacific northwest to the 2024 garden fling it used to be the garden bloggers fling but some of us are using instagram and even tiktok and so we have a new name and then i got covid for the first time and was totally out of it for awhile nothing alarming just sick and then very tired all of which explains my very slow responses to comments on the last post sorry now that i am finally recovering i really want to tell you all about stumperies i ll come back later in the fall and winter and tell you more methodically about the various marvelous gardens we saw in three days of wide ranging tours based out of tacoma but my heart was stolen by a bunch of tree stumps and it s really all i want to think about right now and share with you i m smitten so i will get straight to the point look how magnificent these old stumps are in the rhododendron species botanical garden it may be that in order to fully appreciate this stumpery you have to be standing in the woods with trees towering over you have you been to the pacific northwest the trees soar not to mention the scent of the woods and moss and forest floor compost in your nose our eyes are truly wondrous because we can adjust and pick out the details in both shadow and light in ways that photography struggles to duplicate and stumperies are all about shadow and light and atmosphere let me back up and tell you a bit about stumperies first of all they are obscure enough that wordpress is quite annoyed with me and keeps trying to autocorrect to stumper or stumped for my own good i am sure the missouri botanical garden says that a stumpery is a garden that re purposes logs driftwood and the root wads of dead trees to create a unique garden display roots wads if they say so these wood elements also provide a structural counterpoint to ferns mosses and other woodland plants which are planted on in and around the stumps and logs to soften them a little dry and technical if you ask me but okay as far as it goes i was slightly horrified to learn that stumperies first arose in victorian england not the time or place that much of garden in a city is patterned around but i can t honestly say i m surprised the first one apparently was established in the 1850s i am just relieved that they are not apparently related to the vogue earlier in that century for cemetery gardens one of the most famous stumperies was created by then prince charles at highgate in england the website calls it tranquil and other worldly and notes that victorians liked to grow ferns in tree stumps not everyone agreed with the prince s taste apparently because the gardens trust blog notes that prince charles father upon seeing the stumpery at highgate for the first time asked his son when are you going to set fire to this lot i do like the idea that perhaps prince charles installed the whole thing to annoy his father much more interesting than a victorian restoration project yes i know he s the king now but he was the prince when all this happened the stumpery where i took these photos a part of the rhododendron species botanical garden is the largest public stumpery in the world according to their website the stumpery is one small part of a much larger pacific northwest woods we were of course there at entirely the wrong time to see any rhododendrons blooming there might have been a few but it was quite a fine woods particularly for a midwesterner unaccustomed to trees of such height also on the same grounds is the pacific bonsai garden which i only got a chance to look at briefly i m not quite sure how these areas came together but flingers who did manage to look at the bonsais were very impressed i m going to make this into a two part post on stumperies because amazingly enough there was another stumpery the next day splitting the post will give me space to show you more photos and the second stumpery was quite different it is called the renaissance garden and is a stumpery with a story and a purpose also as an added incentive to read the next post i ve been daydreaming about adding a stumpery to garden in a city and i ll tell you all about that too you can help me decide if it is just post covid fever dreams so have you been to a stumpery are you with me in admiring them or with prince philip ready to burn it all down share this tweet email a link to a friend opens in new window email like loading ain t misbehaving 32 comments posted on july 19 2024 by judyatgardeninacity this is a post i wrote a year ago but didn t publish i ve made a few edits and additions and i am posting it now i feel a little less at sea this year but i m sure the plants are still giggling behind my back i saw a social media post recently about creeping bellflower campanula rapunculoides and ran outside in a panic to see whether the lovely purple spikes i had welcomed into the garden knowing that they were sneaking in from the alley rather than invited guests were invasive update my gardeners wanted to pull them maybe they are the invasive who knows i ll keep a good eye on them and see how they behave thank goodness no this gentleman from the university of wisconsin went over creeping bellflower leaf by leaf to teach us how to identify it and my plants are innocent well mostly innocent not a total thug never been indicted as a certain chicago alderman used to brag i believe he is now headed to prison it has spread in from the alley into a couple of places in the backyard and i do recall that jason didn t like them as much as i do and would pull them out when he wanted to plant something else but there are a lot of good plants in chicago alleys that s a post for another time and i m keeping this one for now let me tell you however how much some plants have taken advantage of jason s absence to sneak into all sorts of spots in the garden beds uvularia waltzed around a corner jumped across the driveway and over a border into the bed with the ostrich ferns mr golden alexander is setting himself up anywhere he thinks he can get a foot in the door or a root in the ground about a third of the plants in the garden are taking advantage of the regular gardener s absence to tiptoe around and visit each other leap into each other s beds and have a good time yes they look great but those yellow celandine poppies are thugs the worst offender by far is celadine poppy stylophorum diphyllum looking so innocent and decorative above this is partly my fault as i am a soft touch when it comes to discipling wayward flowers jason noted a few years ago that celandine poppies can be quite a bully to smaller plants but that taller and hardier plants like wild geranium can fight it off i think i need to contain it to only certain beds or it will take over everything it even set itself up in a flower bed at the neighbor s house this year fortunately they welcomed it i did warn them about its promiscuity in addition to the celandine poppies everywhere look closely and you will see a bit of the uvularia which is hiding behind and just to the right of the daffodil leaves in the very center of the photo it s taking advantage of the fact that it is yellow but you can see the inverted v shapes of its flowers well camouflaged indeed another group of plants have vanished altogether well some have just vanished and i regret to say some were probably hollering at me to be saved from rabbits and thuggish plants and i heard their cries too late the flower bed above with the ferns and poppies for example used to be full of bleeding hearts did they gradually just decline or were they throttled by the celandine poppies i m not sure a few years ago jason planted golden groundsel in a blank spot at the back of the garden with a direct sightline from where i sit on the sunporch it bloomed gloriously and i loved it it vanished in 2022 but we didn t have what it took to investigate in 2023 i was watching for it closely i thought this shot above is from may 11 2021 so i knew when to be looking i didn t see it and i asked kasey from vivant to take a look she didn t see it and we made a plan to replant it for next year maybe it accidentally got pulled because it looks too much like certain weeds or maybe it just failed to thrive well i went back later and here s what i found left photo first day leaves and buds right where they should be next day on the right stumps dang blasted rabbits and probably the groundsel was hollering for my attention the whole time and i just didn t know what to look for and got out the anti rabbit powder too late i got a bit of bloom out of it in 2024 but not like before next up we have the mystery of the allium caeruleum here they are in 2022 blooming along with the allium christophii i remember planting the bulbs not long ago sigh not a one in 2023 did they die out did they get pulled as weeds because i didn t know to tell someone they were there hard to imagine either of those possibilities completely wiping them out but there you are a garden mystery one of many we replanted for 2024 but they were not as glorious as they had been i think these blue allium caeruleum are just gorgeous i ve replanted them but they have never looked this good again meanwhile the asters seem to have planted themselves all over the place by ones and twos poking up where they are not meant to be on the other hand i m worried about where the goldenrod is but maybe it s there and i just don t see it i feel a bit like a substitute teacher i now repent about how wicked we were to substitutes our favorite game was to make up new names the whole class would solemnly swear that the kid in the front of the middle row was and always had been tex i can hear the flowers giggling behind my back you jump over here she won t notice and look let s all crowd into this bed and see what happens wait i don t recall monarda in this flower bed and the borage has moved to a new location crossing the driveway jason was not a strict disciplinarian and he knew that flowers needed to be grown in spots where they were happy but he also knew how to keep them from completely running amok he would not have fallen for the tex gambit even the pots on the patio drat them are getting into the act look at how these impatiens are overwhelming the caladium the caladium started out with plenty of space and should have been just fine but no i turned my back and one day i could hardly see where they were under the impatiens i know we ve always planted them together in the past it was one of the tasks i generally did let s end with two slightly more upbeat happenings from 2024 in the photo below a number of alliums have decided to try out a new bed without waiting to ask my permission but they have chosen well crossing both the driveway and the driveway border and ending up in the central island bed in the front yard excellent placement i should have thought of it myself and last but not least a visit from a scarlet tanager who stayed and posed very nicely while i fetched the camera and who didn t seem too horrified by the state of the water in the birdbath i am getting better at keeping it refreshed i promise does your garden sometimes pull tricks when you re not watching do you feel like a substitute teacher in your own yard share this tweet email a link to a friend opens in new window email like loading what is going on an update 54 comments posted on july 13 2024 by judyatgardeninacity well you might ask what is happening since i haven t posted in nearly a year i have composed the beginnings of a hundred posts in my head and i am often in dialogue with you in my mind but i ve had a mental block about sitting down with the computer and writing and hitting the publish button i m sure part of it is because this was always jason s space as much as i shared it by taking most of the photos and of course i miss him desperately the garden misses him too many weeks the goings on in the garden have left me mystified i wrote a draft post last year just about this time but didn t publish about how badly the plants are misbehaving in jason s absence it s still mostly true and i ll publish it early next week after i give this post a few days in the limelight this plant below is one of the poster children for the garden run amok it s in the middle front of the driveway bed four feet tall growing in the kind of small but healthy clump you might expect from a first year plant i have struggled to learn the identities of many of the plants in the driveway border in particular as they have emerged in june and grown into july more on that in a later post i have also become aware that i was mentally only half here last summer i listened to the gardeners and expressed opinions and thought i had at least some idea what was going on but i was in a bit of a fog it s hard to get a great photo since it is green on green so for the last several weeks i have said to myself huh i know i wanted some more grasses that must be one that i asked the gardeners to plant last fall and i just forgot about it well this week as this fine plant is coming into bloom the gardeners and i looked at it and they told me that it was an interloper it saw an opening and took it it just planted itself in my nice comfy flowerbed with everything a plant needs except a feather comforter and a bedtime story my iphone says it is probably some type of wild rye i think it looks good and there is just a little comfort in the fact that mr wild rye fooled the gardeners for this long too i think perhaps it s also a comment on gardening by committee meanwhile a lot has also been going well in the garden you can see at the top of this post that the giant wall of purple clematis jackmanii is still going strong the spring ephemerals were spectacular as ever and the bulbs only get better and better as i indulge my desire for an eye popping display that announces spring to the whole neighborhood i have spent much of the past twelve months in a major learning curve trying to cram the names of plants into my head and reading books and studying gardens here and there in person online in books and yes i ve become a devotee of the bbc s gardeners world i thought i knew a lot but of course it is one thing to observe a garden someone else is managing and quite an...