Returning from New Orleans last week, after reports from family and friends that the week of our absence had been seasonally cool, it was a shock to wake up to an unseasonally warm and profusely blooming Bayview garden. All the roses had, in our six-day absence, commenced to burst their buds in a coordinated show of color, the mulleins had added a foot or so to their spires and popped out purple and yellow buttons to decorate them. The golden columbine sent shuttlecocks of bloom skyward, the Nigella was in mad production of both misty "love" and bushy "devils", and the regal lily towered, pagoda-like, over the blue saucers of tri-color Gilia and the bright yellow disks of Pt. Reyes meadow foam.
It seems ages ago (actually, March 19) that I had brought home the Gilia and Limnanthes (meadow foam), Phacelia and columbine (Aquilegia) from Annie's Annuals nursery in Richmond and planted them in ceaselessly falling rain. When the rain finally stopped in late April I thought the plants would be near ready to bloom but they just sat there, no bigger than when I planted them, as the snails and slugs threatened to reduce them to stubs. The weather continued rainless but grey and cold. The sweet peas were still no higher than six inches and I despaired of their ever reaching the bottom ends of the twine and wire trellis I had imagined them covering by now with fragrant flowers.
The fact is, this year's weather may not be so unusual or the ominous harbinger of imminent Global Warming (though I have my suspicions) and it is simply that in the larger, and longer, scheme of things it's just Nature in one of her countless guises and moods. What is unusual is how much my life, and others' lives have been affected by weather in the last eight months, from the half million residents of the city of New Orleans and Gulf coast residents hit by last September's hurricanes to my own month-long duty as basement bailer during the Bay Area's March "monsoon". Now startled New Englanders are watching the flood waters rise in places nobody alive has witnessed before.
When I surveyed the heat-scorched borders this Sunday in my mother's garden where I had so excitedly installed exotically colored poppies in late March I wasn't prepared for the scene. Amid the fading clumps of moulting Iris leaves, finished for the season, only the plant tags remained of the poppies I had planted: "Persian Princess", "Drama Queen", and "Poppy of Troy" were no more than names on yellow plastic stuck in dry dirt and surrounded by empty snail shells. It's not The Grapes of Wrath, I admit, but a gardener's heart can break at such a sight.
Posted by briggs at May 15, 2006 9:11 AMSluggo does a nice job containing the population, and it's supposed to be super-safe. Of course, when it's pouring out you have to re-apply once a week or so.
Posted by: max on May 24, 2006 11:36 AM