A Double Day Lily Bed

      There are lots of flowers I like better than daylilies, but I have to admit they have some sterling qualities. The plants last for many years and produce new flowers every day for many weeks; they adapt easily to that magical formula - divide to multiply. And best of all, they rarely need to be weeded. With all these attributes, daylilies were what I chose last year when I decided I needed a flowerbed I could see from the terrace at the front of the house.
      I have a perennial border that stretches 100 feet in front of the sheep pasture's split-rail fence, but it can't be seen from the terrace where we spend much of our time. I wanted another flowerbed to weed about as much as I craved an aching back, but the idea of looking across the pond at a colorful display of blooms overcame my common sense. Fortunately preparing the bed was surprisingly easy since the bank on that side of the pond, unlike most areas of Locust Hill, contained no stones or nasty clay soil. It was made up of the excess sand we'd used as a base when we built the pond.
      The field grasses that grew on the bank had very little to hang onto and I was able uproot them with ease. The half-dozen clumps of daffodils I'd planted there in previous years (rarely noticed as they bloomed when it was usually too cold to eat on the terrace) I left in place. In fact by the time I started planting the daylilies, I'd forgotten the daffodils were there, and periodically found myself running into them as I dug my holes.
      I had several common lemon lilies in the perennial border that I divided to make a start on the new flowerbed, and my friend Angie gave me some she'd divided, but I wanted a few really exotic daylilies as well. I waited patiently - no, impatiently - for July when Gerald Hardy has his yearly daylily sale in Falls Village.
      The Hardy daylily gardens on Sugar Hill Road are something to see - two solid acres of daylilies showing off their colors is quite a sight. Mr. Hardy and his wife Marilyn have been raising daylilies for 25 years. They hybridize over 1000 plants from seed each year, producing many unusual and beautiful new varieties. This year's sale has started and will go on until August 17th - Thursday through Sunday, 9-5.
      When I went to buy my daylilies, I kept going round and round trying to make up my mind which ones to choose. Most are sold by the "fan", so a large plant with three or four fans is far more expensive than one with a single fan. There are also very reasonably priced lilies for landscaping. I bought three fancy hybrids, each with only a single fan, and three that were large enough so that in only a few years I'd be able to divide and multiply them.
      The bed still looked pretty sparse after I'd planted all these treasures, but I knew that eventually even the beginners would begin to fill in the spaces. In the meantime, however, I knew just what would fill those spaces - weeds. So, having learned that North Canaan's transfer station offers free mulch to anyone in town, Hank and I drove over and watched as an enormous bulldozer scooped up a bucket load of beautiful looking mulch and slowly dumped it into our pickup. Between us, grandson Eli and I spread it on the daylily bed.
      That fall my friend Noreen brought me a dozen Asian lily bulbs. Not having a better place to put them, I planted them in the empty spaces in the new bed. I didn't have a clue as to their colors, so I just hoped they wouldn't clash with the daylilies.
      Nothing is more fun than watching a new garden project come into its own. I could hardly wait to see what sort of display the new bed would make this summer. The Asian lilies were the first to appear. The pinky red ones were so short they could barely be seen. The yellow ones just grew and grew and grew until some were four feet tall before they put forth their huge blossoms.
      A gardener can't expect to get everything just right the first time around. One has to learn about sizes and colors and bloom time in order to arrange the plants artistically. By the time the daylilies began to bloom I knew I had my work cut out for me. Tall plants were hiding short ones; all the yellow blooms seemed to be planted next to each other; the creamy white lily was buried behind a deep maroon one.
      So yesterday I went out to tie up the stems with different colored yarn in preparation for the big rearrangement come fall. Where to start? An hour later I hadn't tied my yarn around a single plant - too busy weeding all the Queen Ann's lace, vetch and bindweed that had happily moved into the bed from the big meadow just beyond the bed. Tonight I'll make a plan and tie up just the ones I need to move.
      By next summer when the youngest plants have grown up and filled out, and the color scheme has improved, the bed should look much better, but in the meantime, I wanted to show you the unexpected pleasure I'm getting this summer. Whenever the wind drops out and the pond becomes as smooth as glass, I have a double flowerbed as all those colorful blossoms are reflected in the mirror of the pond. At dawn one day last week when not a single ripple broke the surface of the water, I caught a photo of the reflected flower bed showing off its colors in the pond.

A Tiny Walled Garden

        I don't like to tell stories I've included in my book, but because today's column is about the Abitta Garden, I really must explain its beginnings.  It was originally a small stone hut built into the side of the cow pasture's hill by a hired man around the turn of the century, who preferred to sleep in this dank, windowless hovel than in the house. Later someone added a cement floor, making the ceiling so low you couldn't stand up inside. We used the building to store garden tools, broken furniture, old tricycles and trash, and it soon became known as the Alotta as it housed such alotta junk.

        One evening as we were eating dinner we heard a loud crash, followed by the frantic bellowing of a cow.  When we rushed out the back door we discovered one of our neighbor's heifers inside the stone hut, thrashing around in the midst of rotted roof beams and alotta junk. Since the building's roof was on a level with the pasture at its back edge, this silly young cow had lumbered onto it and fallen through.  She was too big to get out the door so we spent the next hour pulling down the front wall in order to free her.

        As we started hauling away the debris next morning it suddenly occurred to me that the remains of the Alotta would make a sweet little garden, a space 8 feet by 10 surrounded on three sides by the remaining walls of the hut.  The fact that there was still a cement floor was a minor detail. At least that was my thought, but as it turned out it was major. We not only had to break up the cement with a pick axe, we had to haul away a deep layer of stones from underneath it.

        We filled the resulting hole with dirt and well-rotted manure and rebuilt the front wall into a foot high edging for the garden. By then it was too late to do much else but dream about what I would plant the next spring to turn the Alotta into the Abitta, a tiny walled semi-secret garden.

        Having had little experience in designing a flower garden, my sweet dreams turned into bad ones as I struggled to create the perfect tiny garden. It took four or five years just to figure out that my flagstone path was all wrong. Entering the garden from the front, the flags were laid out in the shape of a cross, an esthetically unpleasing design.  Eventually I came up with a better arrangement, entering the garden from the side and making a curved path that led to the far corner where I placed a small pool I'd made with cement.

        Over the years  I tried many different plants, both annuals and perennials, but I had more failures than successes. I planted phlox in back of the pool, but in that airless corner the leaves were always covered in mildew by July.  I planted pansies, which looked fine in May but were scraggly by June. I put in sweet alyssum, but  these delicate little plants were always smothered by the annual pink poppies that self-seeded by the dozen.

      As you can see, I'm not exagerating.

The garden became a poppy party because

I never even thinned these annuals.  It's

hard to pull up flowers just because they're

growing in the wrong place, so besides the pink poppies other proflagate flowers sent their seeds to join them -  feverfew, Chinese forget-me-nots, columbine, dianthus.

       Despite all these greedy interlopers there were a few successes.  The nice old-fashioned hollyhocks on the back wall in that photograph, managed to keep coming every year, even though they're biennials - new ones replacing the old.   By pure luck I planted two peonies in spots where they looked well.  Daughter Bridget gave me a little machine to make a small fountain in the pool.

        Daughter Trum brought me five different varieties of thyme from Oregon ( plant prices in Oregon are a quarter as much as they are in Connecticut) and helped plant them between the flagstones where they thrived and spread their tight mats of tiny leaves.  And last year I picked just the right places to plant a white lupine and a stately delphinium.

          Take heart all you inexperienced gardeners.  I struggled for more than thirty years  to get the Abitta garden even close to what I'd envisioned as I broke up the cement floor of that hired

man's hut. The Abitta garden is still far from perfect, but each year it gets closer to my dream of what a tiny walled garden should be.