Tag Archives: home gardens

“Oh, for a bee’s experience …

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Of clover and of noon!” – “The Bee” by Emily Dickinson

Trying to savor the summer while having some restraints on my activities, I have been thinking a lot about the bees. I have been watching them a lot, keeping in mind alarms about declining bee populations. Specifically, I have been staying at my mother’s house full-time, so I shifted focus from attracting bees to my own small yard in Rocky Ridge to observing the activity around her garden home community on the steep west slope of Shades Mountain.

A late freeze brought the demise of a large loropetalum shrub encircling a tall crape myrtle in Mother’s front yard. When the loropetalum was removed, we decided to plant a variety of blooming and leafy plants in its stead. It turned out to be a good move – with compact bidens, calibrachia, rosemary, vinca, and Japanese painted ferns putting on a frisky, flourishing show beneath the deep crimson blooms of the crape myrtle. I keep a careful watch over the volunteers – some are welcome; others will take over if left alone.

On the porch, a yellow begonia holds court in a hanging container, with lysimachia flowing toward the ground. The large blooms of a braided mandevilla in a unique coral and golden hue are a favorite of my mom’s, but the blooms drop after one day, leaving the plant leafy without flowers on occasion. It shields an always trustworthy heuchera which was joined this year by a lacy volunteer that was just too charming to eliminate. The lacy foliage will wither away in late-fall, but the heuchera, if it acts according to habit, will still be flourishing next year.

As you come into the entry space, a ruellia – commonly called a “wild petunia” and known for an invasive nature – stands confined in a container, grounded by impatiens and lysimachia. Its delicate morning blooms fall off daily, to be replaced by new blooms the next morning. The roses in a bed next to the house have seen better days, but they are hanging in there. Bees, butterflies, and the occasional hummingbird show up and regular rainfall and diligent watering are keeping everything happy so far in the stifling July heat.

But here’s the kicker: There’s a Rose of Sharon in my parent’s backyard that grew from a sprout and is probably in excess of twelve feet now. It’s covered with fuchsia blooms and – at any given time – hundreds of bees. I know Rose of Sharon is a common name used for a number of plants – this one is a hibiscus – but I like the tradition and antiquity of the appellation and plan to use it until the plant police come knocking. Bees have always loved this specimen, but this year seems to be a banner year for its bee population from early morning to sunset. There is a constant low buzz from the tree when we wander into the yard.

Slightly to the side of the Rose of Sharon is a raised bed my dad created. I haven’t had a chance to properly tend to it this year, but it is lush and beautiful in its wildness anyway. Purple heart and yellow lantana grow in a bed with four less-than-stellar rose bushes. The in-ground Easter lilies bloomed late and those plants have taken their time fading away. Like many other plants, the odd weather seems to have confused them; one healthy looking lily has developed three new bulbs (in the middle of July!) but I do not expect them to bloom.

It hasn’t been a great few years for the roses of any kind and my grandfather’s ancient rose bushes, grown from cuttings of the mother plant, have struggled to flower. The hummingbird feeders do not seem as busy as usual, but an occasional hummer is spotted at the feeders and among the bees in the Rose of Sharon. It’s a challenge to keep the bird feeders stocked; it’s a bigger challenge to keep the squirrels away, but Lulu, the prancing chihuahua, likes nothing better than to chase the squirrels. Mourning doves are the primary customers at the feeders, but a pair of cardinals are frequent visitors since late-winter, as are an occasional bluebird and blue jay and a red-headed woodpecker. Wrens and chickadees are also in evidence, I think, but I hesitate to say much since a reader pointed out recently that I don’t seem to know the difference. I pay my annual due diligence to the Audubon Society and the Arbor Day Foundation but I’m not always good at the identification part of the test.

These are the things that inhabit my alternate garden in summer 2023.

In a Summer without Peaches

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This year’s first trip down to Chilton County to get peaches at Jimmie’s Peach Stand on Highway 82 was delayed a couple of weeks; it usually happens on Mothers’ Day weekend but when I arrived at the stand near the end of May there were few baskets left for the day. Mrs. Harrison and her son, Lynn, told me their peach crop was going to be truncated this year.

According to news reports, the same sparsity occurred throughout the 2017 Southern peach crop.  I had worried about the effect that a late brutal cold snap might have on this year’s peaches but the Harrisons assured me that it had not been that but the lack of enough cold weather in the 2016-17 winter.

So, I bought all of the peaches the stand had left that day to try to satisfy the promises I had made to people in North Alabama.

For years, I have tried to save a Jimmie’s peach to have on Labor Day night. The people at Jimmie’s said this year’s crop would likely be finished by mid-June; it usually lasts until the end of July and has been known to go deep into August. I promised to make one more trip to Chilton County before the stand closed for the season; I never made it back down but the one basket of Jimmie’s peaches I had this year was as delicious as always and quickly gone.

In the meantime, I tried to satisfy my peach cravings with the offerings of the Tennessee River Valley closer to my house and by trips to the Saturday morning Pepper Place Market and the Alabama Truck Farmers Market in Birmingham. Often, when I got to Pepper Place, the vendors with peaches were sold out early in the day due to smaller than usual supplies.

And the prices went up – sometimes drastically – for what peaches there were.

My favorite Tennessee River Valley peach vendor, Isom’s in Athens, was a no-show this year at the Thursday evening Greene Street Market that I frequent in Huntsville. I settled for a couple of other Greene Street vendors with peaches but was disappointed in the product. So far I’ve had the best luck with Reeve’s Peach Stand on highway 36 outside Hartselle.

I haven’t seen a single local fig this year but that has become commonplace. My friends with fig trees have been lamenting the lack of figs for several years now.

My time spent in my own yard has been limited during the warm season due to travel back and forth to Birmingham but the drought ended this summer and my back yard, which is usually pretty hopeless by the heat of August, is still lush and green. The grass is being cut weekly and needs it more often than that.

That very late freeze in the spring killed off some of the house plants that had already been moved outside and many of the outside plants were already in bud and bloom when the freeze got them so the schedule has been off this year. The Brunson begonia, an ancient begonia that I grew from cuttings friends gave me several years ago, was a casualty of the freeze as were a schefflera and nine-foot ficus, but other things sprang back to life, I acquired new plants, and “volunteer” plants filled the gaps.

My grandfather’s wild rose took the freeze as a minor setback and then took off with a vengeance. Its blooms and buds have occupied my back yard and occupied a small bud vase on the coffee table in the living room all season. Another wild rose at the back gate that my friends Scott and his daughter Cecilia foraged with me from the lake across the street from their house has had to be pruned back several times already; it produced exactly one bloom this year, which is exactly three less than it produced last year – but it is still a welcoming and lively green and thorny thing outside the gate.

The small beds and containers in the front yard recovered quickly after the freeze and have reemerged more prolific than ever. A pony-tail palm that I have nurtured for almost twenty years in the same concrete container given to me by my Granddaddy Harbison almost thirty years ago lives in the house most of the year and had just been moved outdoors when the freeze hit while I was out of town. I had given up on it but now it seems rejuvenated by its near-death experience and is coming back even more elegantly than before.

The four crape myrtles outside the back door were flourishing until the freeze killed them back; they have only just now recovered and begun to bloom. The Rose of Sharon – which has become a tree – is still full of white blooms but is cowered by the neighbor’s towering cherry tree which encroaches on its sunlight. My Rose of Sharon seems to be dying away slowly. I sit and wonder how to address the situation: My neighbor loves her cherry tree and it puts on a magnificent show for the two or three weeks it is in bloom in early spring. I appreciate the opportunity to share the view and shade as it overhangs my back fence.

But it is becoming very evident that my Rose of Sharon can’t compete much longer and I contemplate how to fill in the gap in the back corner of my yard that its loss will create.

The season’s greatest surprise, though, is the redbud that I picked up at a plant giveaway at Mother’s church over a year ago. It was essentially a stick in the ground with one struggling leaf when I got it. I put it in my back room with a lot of light and nursed it through the winter with no success. I moved it outside and it was trying to bud until it became another of the casualties of that late freeze.

It sat there, in its container, in the corner of the yard by the house like a dead stick because I didn’t have time to get rid of it. The guy who cuts my grass assured me that there was no hope. By June the little redbud began to bud and now it’s flourishing. I think I’ll let it winter inside for one more year and put it in the ground next spring. 

My time enjoying my little postage stamp of yard has been limited this year, but it still has provided hours of stolen pleasure with many weeks to go. I’m already hatching plans for next year’s improvements and looking forward to next summer being one with an abundance of peaches to savor; I will have to make up for my summer without peaches.