Hot Afternoons

After a cold snap, winter has turned warm again. In fact the past several afternoons have been hot. In February!

The nights are below freezing, but the intense sun heats things up and when the air is 60 degrees with little breeze and no shade, the afternoons are almost summery.

I spent several afternoons in the garden, working slowly and getting almost all my spring chores done. I got pretty hot and actually sweaty and it felt good.

I even transplanted a small tree and it wasn't too hard and it reminded me of the pleasure I always get setting a tree in the ground. I'm still at it . . now 76 years old.

I dug up the serviceberry and put it in the center of the kitchen courtyard where the sundial had been. I watered it in and then made an AI image of what it might kind of look like in leaf. 

I will need to keep it narrow and limbed up to walk under it from gate to kitchen door. It's an experiment to see if I can do that. If it even lives through this winter transplant. But boy did it feel fine to be planting a tree. I played with images of how the courtyard might look . .  before and after.

(Whenever I dig in this little courtyard area I am confronted with roots. They aren't from the perennials I've planted there, they are much too thickly congested and woody and hard to dig through. The long gone aspen roots? The cottonwood's roots reaching this far over? The mature butterfly bush? There used to be roses planted, are their roots still thick in there?)

Here's what else I got accomplished over several hot February afternoons:

✔ Cut back the Karl Foerster grasses (always a messy job)

✔ Trimmed the boxwoods (more is needed for shape)
✔ Pruned lower branches of the crabapple (the start of a many year project)
✔ Trimmed the rose to go over the fence (some canes are long enough to reach the door canopy but I can't figure how to attach them, and damaging ice falls on that side anyway)

✔ Chopped down the butterfly bush in the kitchen courtyard to rejuvenate it (I hope) 

✔ Clipped tips of the fernbush (for fuller shape, blooms on new wood) 

✔ Cut down the caryopteris just above ground (a lot of dead stems, hopefully this will rejuvenate it) 

✔ Lightly trimmed the yellow butterfly bush in front (for fuller shape and maybe more blooms) 

✔ Cleaned up the dining room window garden (most stalks can just be crumbled by hand) 

✔ Took down clematis vines (hard to get Sweet Summer Love untangled from the slinky) 

✔ Tidied up the peony (an easy job)

I also rearranged the newly installed rocks along the fence line and I like the slight change of the shape of the rock border better.

I can't wait now to put some plants in there and soften the rock edges. I will need to get bags of soil to raise the hollows along here and along the upper rock border too.

After I took out the serviceberry I moved the spiral tower to the newly empty spot and dug up the struggling clematis and put it there. There are three emitters right there.

But the clematis rootball I moved was pretty nonexistent, so I may have to simply get a new Jackmanii plant and start over in this spot. A.I thinks it could look pretty nice.

When spring comes for real I will dig up the few remaining heucheras (Weston Pink) that are now behind the fragrant aster and put them where the clematis had been. 

It's an empty spot in front of the bare stems of the Peggy Martin rose and there are emitters there.

They grew well in the potting bench curve. The flower stalks are tall enough to be seen above the amsonias in that corner. 

I took them out of the potting bench curve during one re-do when they didn't fit my plan any more, but they had been nice clumps with visible and long lasting flowers.

Only a few survived the move but I'll move them again to fill this now empty spot.