Gardening in the Rain
What a difference a couple of days and half a continent distance makes! I left Oklahoma City Friday afternoon, where it was a humid 88°F, and returned to Bellingham where it had been 37°F that morning. My body still hasn’t completely adjusted, but I’m back to wearing a wool sweater.
Yesterday I tackled a long-delayed gardening task — digging up a crowded clump of Crocosmia and the mass of large yellow daffodils that were mixed in. I ended up with a large pile of Crocosmia corms and a big bucket of daffodil bulbs. Today I dug out a clump of Miscanthus that was too close to a big variegated Ceanothus. I divided the grass and Natalie replanted the bed. We put half of the Miscanthus back in, but with better spacing. Then she planted lots of daffodils where they’ll once again make a brilliant show in the spring. We decided there wasn’t really room for the Crocosmia so we put it in the back of the car to take to her mother’s garden.
After lunch we headed up the street to do more planting. By then it had started raining lightly, so we donned raingear. In addition to the plants we divided from our garden, I also had several pots of plants I hauled home from Garden Writers. These are mostly new introductions that we’ll test to see how they do in our climate and whether the deer like them.
I planted a ‘Pinky Winky’ Hydrangea in the back bed, a couple of clumps of Miscanthus toward the back of the garden, a ‘Rozeanne’ Geranium near the front of the wide border, and a couple of new cultivars of Baptisia on top of the berm. I put a clump of little bluestem grass nearby. Natalie planted two big clumps of Crocosmia near the back near a big rhododendron and I put in a couple of clumps of Amorphophallus that I’d dug from our garden a couple of weeks ago.
By this time the rain had really started coming down, no longer a mere drizzle but a real soaking rain. We were getting rather damp so we decided the daffodil bulbs could wait for another day. Gardening in the rain is OK, but keeping at it until completely soaked just seemed foolish.