And The Winner Is

The entry for Gardening Gone Wild's November photo contest is



Into The Wilderness - Back Home

Thank you so much to everyone who voted. The final tally was:
Into The Wilderness - 10
The Edge Of Winter - 7 and
No crossing - 3.
As best as I could tell with some votes just as indecisive as I was.

The funny thing is the chosen winner was only added to the choices at the last minute. It was good, but not the most striking image to me.

I'd have to go back and count but I think The Edge Of Winter would have won as everyone's favorite photo. I need to win me an Amaryllis though so many of you voted for the most likely to win, not necessarily your favorite. That is so good of you.

Thanks again for the help in picking an entry. There is some strong competition and you never know what will strike the judges interest. It is fun trying, more so with a little help.

You would not believe how long it took to make this post with the heinous Hughes satellite internet punishing me with mega slow speed that drops the connection half the time. I keep mentioning this so it will come up in searches when people are looking at this service. Bad publicity. Take that Hughes, you lousy ISP that charges the same price as reliable high speed internet.

The Punishment - Phase Two

Adobe patiently waited its turn. It has now contacted its Mother Brain and is downloading updates. Hughes satellite internet service detected a breach in its stingy access to the internet and BAM! My computer is now back to slower than dial-up speeds.

Time to step away again. I will put on some long underwear to go plant mums before it really is too late and do some more work on the cozy cabin's sewer insulation box.

One of the good things about my own computer is that it has the photo files from a former life.



A garden on Maui in the third week of November toys with the idea of snow in the form of a Philippine Poinsettia, Euphorbia leucocephala.

Nobody's Home

Another day of paid work - I am grateful for massive quantities of fallen leaves - so I stopped to get a closer look at the house at the end of the holler. Nobody is home.



It is a tidy abandonment. A few boarded up windows, screen door frames on the porch and a rock by one door to keep it from blowing in the wind no doubt gave its emptiness away. It looks like it should be a home and I can picture my own grandparents living here though their home was quite a bit different.

Kind of like how my Hughes satellite internet service was the other day. Nobody was home.

I switched computers and hooked my own back up. It immediately began to talk to the Mother Brain to find out what it had missed while it was dormant. Massive uploads of updates and repairs ensued and that stinking Hughes network punished me by slowing the speed to a crawl. I thought it best to step away during my punishment so the monitor didn't end up smashed.



There were no animals in the barns and no cows in the pasture.

And when I got home late this afternoon there was no Crawford and no Collar waiting to be let in and fed. I called and called and didn't hear even the faintest stirring. Yesterday they were sitting on the front deck waiting when I arrived. Today they were no where to be seen.

When I left this morning the hunters and the surveyors were parked at the turnout. This afternoon, no kitties were home. My heart sank into the pit of my stomach. Where oh where are my sweet kitties now?



Normal fluctuating Hughes internet speeds have returned. My punishment is over. The computer is still updating itself from all the data supplied by the Mother Brain and has to be restarted several times a day.

One reason to switch computers is that the other one has issues with the graphics card and some sites can cause it to freeze up. When that happens I won't visit those sites anymore. Kylee's Our Little Acre was one of the places that froze up the computer. I will have to visit her now and see what happens.



An hour after dark Crawford and Collar decided to come home. Were they hiding some where afraid to come out? Had they gone for a really long afternoon stroll? Oh why oh why don't my sweet kitties come the moment I call?

A Very Late Fall

Dense fog usually follows the rains.



You just never know if it will be down there or up here and if it is down there it could be anywhere. Go over a hill and you can be entering or exiting the fog. Go up or down and you could be entering or exiting the fog. Fog has a mind of its own.



I drove through it and found it was fog free in town. A sunny and cool day that was quite pleasant for garden tidying and leaf raking.

There will be more leaf raking to come because the Liquidambar styraciflua 'Rotundifolia' is just now deciding that it is fall. This Sweetgum has rounded leaf margins and is fruitless, so it does not have the spiny balls which is nice. It is also putting on a much better fall showing than last year.



There was even a bit of actual fall color on some of the Japanese Maples. Just above the top of this picture the leaves were all a crispy brown in a rather distinct line.



Seeing this and another Japanese Maple in a different garden in a blaze of color has me convinced that the marginal hardiness of these maples here often means the fall color is lost to early freezes. It seems these maples need a longer time to turn. The blast of snow and patchy frost we have had so far froze the leaves of entire trees, parts of some and missed others all together. Then it turned warmer and has stayed that way for the most part. The ones that were not frozen are now putting on a color show that I have not seen before.



Even this camellia was zapped last year in its prime. The plant is quite hardy. The flowers are not. It might even manage to finish blooming before the next blast of winter arrives. Good thing it sets flower buds at the end of the summer growing season.



Quite the nice camellia at the edge of its hardiness zone. It does have a good south facing exposure, half day full sun actually, not a camellia preference, in a planter bed in the parking area. Definitely not a planting situation I would recommend for a camellia further south.



It was nice to come down from the naked mountain top and see bits of fall left over and very late in the season.

Undergarments

Misty rains have returned on brisk winds. Despite their southern origins, these winds are anything but warm. I add another long quilted layer beneath my jeans before heading over to the cozy cabin to keep plugging away at having my own home.



I bundle up as the earth gets naked. The stark bareness reveals a hidden layer of the forest. In the lush greenery of summer, the lichen covered tree trunks just don't catch your attention.



The grey skies and wet bark accentuate the chiffon lime green of the lichens. Most of the larger tree trunks are mottled to greater and lesser degrees with this living apparel. There is always something to see when you look, even in the solemn hues of winter.



The sky rises and falls and the resting forest beyond the grassy knoll changes mood with it. Small changes become more evident within the larger seasonal changes over watchful time.



The winter undergarments of the front roadside bed have been revealed. The tall Iron Weed, New England Aster and some of the Goldenrod were cut down to show off the golden hue and dried plumes of the Miscanthus. Next year I will try not to divide them just to see how much bigger they will get. At least I will not divide all of them.



This bare earth reveals just how much ground a new garden really needs to cover.

Borders

At the top of this first rise, about eighty feet past St. Francis is the property line and the Haywood County line. From there you descend into the Kingdom of Madison. Sometimes I think the water over there must be a bit off. It is a land filled with characters.

Through the trees, the mountain on the far horizon is Sandy Mush Bald. It is another 1000 feet higher in elevation than this low spot on a North Carolina mountain top. I am fairly certain that ridge forms the Buncombe County line. I guess I live in the tri-county region.

After Saturday's hubbub of activity, Sunday was a very quiet and peaceful day. Sundays are nice. It is illegal to hunt on Sunday.

Just over that line is an old road that runs parallel to the county line and for a mile or two into the woods. It is no longer drivable, but it is used by hunters who actually get out of their trucks and walk into the woods. These hunters don't have hounds.

The activity resumed today. Something else with orange highlighting was going on over there again today as well.



Good progress has been made on covering the sewer line insulation box. One end piece and the bottoms will complete the job. Then I will be left with all kinds of intricate borders needing trim. I could be lazy and leave all the box edges and corners untrimmed. They have fit together nicely with next to no gaps. But I will not have mices in my house. Every conceivable entry point no matter how tiny the sliver will be sealed. There is still a mouse up in there now.



The piece that went around the sewer line as it exits the cozy cabin fit in nice and snug. I even primed it before screwing it in place. It looks good, but there is a very generous, mousezilla sized hole on the left side of the sewer pipe where it rests on top of the cement foundation column. Some thinking will be needed to come up with the best solution for this hard to reach grand entry for mice.



This is one very busy intersection beneath the cozy cabin. With everything going on in this space you wouldn't think one thing would have stood out and been bugging me for months.



Well I couldn't stand it anymore and removed the offending element. Back in the post Hurricanes and Beadboard is a shot of the diagonal brace between the two posts of the kitchen stoop that had been making me crazy. Instead, the space between the posts will now have horizontal boards forming a lattice of sorts. I started with one 2 x 6 at the top and bottom. Next will be two each 2 x 4's at top and bottom and the center will be five 2 x 2's. I hope that turns out nice. If not I'll just rearrange the pattern.

The railings and banister for the long stairs still have to be put up and that will be the end of the busy intersection.



Speaking of busy. Bulbarella complained that something was digging around in her newly planted stoloniferous tulips and all along the fence and property line. Someone needed to go up there and figure out what was going on up there. That is when I noticed the bright orange ribbons of plastic tape tied to the fence about every forty feet. Someone has been up there surveying and good lord it looks like a huge herd of deer has been camped out in the ridge top garden for a couple of days.

We do not normally have deer issues. There certainly isn't much left for them to eat, but in the hurricane wet ground their sharp pointy hooves were churning up the ground big time. I even found places where it looked like they had laid down to sleep and left body imprints in what is left of the garden.

Poor deer. On one side are hunters. On the other side is a house full of people. I wonder is this the perfect spot for them? They are too close to a house to be shot at and just out of sight of the house. No wonder Crawford has been so freaked out and jumpy the last few days. I've had to push him outside with my foot. There has been a major commotion going on at the border.



This afternoon I heard a clanging and pounding sound. I had seen two trucks parked at the roadside pullout when I pulled in. I went to investigate and found the surveyors next door. Hi there, we really want to know why this land is being surveyed. Is it going to be sold?

I have walked back there often enough to know the only good place to park a house is right at the top of the hill just on the other side of the fence. Below the old road it gets mega steep.

The surveyor man said no it was not going to be sold. The owners had passed away and the children would be keeping it. They just needed it to be surveyed to know what they had, all 200 acres of it.



Bulbarella and the Building Contractor will be happy to hear that their only new neighbor is still going to be just me when I finally move out of the luxury basement accommodations of the resident gardeners house.

Twinkle

Click on the image for the full twinkle.

I Have A Bloom Day

Let's face it. This is what my world pretty much looks like right now. What are the chances I will find anything blooming in the wild cultivated garden at this time of year after an early freak snow and several rounds of freezing?



Even the big box mums are past their prime. I have been instructed to plant them. Maybe they will come back and maybe they won't. I lean towards the won't side thinking all the hardiness and durability of these florist type mums has been bred out of them. It won't kill me to dig a hole and plant them though.



Low and behold, there is a Blue Wood Aster, Symphyotrichum cordifolium still in bloom. It even has a little pollinator foraging for nectar.



My, here is another flower. These Viola cornuta, Johnny Jump-up have been appearing in random pots and random places. I know Bulbarella has made several attempts to introduce them here. It seems more have arrived as hitch hikers since so many gifts have been transported to the mountain top from Fairegarden, Tennessee.



Now this was a surprise. A group of mums was purchased on a visit to the arboretum and planted in the sunny utility meadow last spring by the resident gardeners. They all grew tall and leggy and flopped over when it was time to bloom. I thought they were as done as my own Sheffie Mum. There was a late red arrival.

There is a nice assortment of blooms in this batch. I don't know if they are not getting enough sun or if they are just taller by nature. The floppage is a definite minus. Full sun is a relative term in the forest. Maybe come spring if they show up I will move a few sprigs towards the roadside vegetable garden.



The Mediterranean Pink Heath, Erica x darleyensis is looking good after the year of the monsoon, neglected as it was and half buried in a big clump of grass. The blooms are not much to speak of, but hey it is the November 15th Garden Bloggers Bloom Day. I officially have a Bloom Day. I think Carol our curator of blooms would be proud.

I do like the heath's texture and form and think it will make a good low mounding evergreen component of the hillside tapestry to come. I have seen some of them in gardens that looked pretty ratty and was having second thoughts on this plant choice. If it stays this short, unlike the taller woodier versions I saw, it can stay.



That is pretty much my bloom day. I was expecting to have some Witch Hazel, but it is already bloomed out.

Vibrant color and striking form will have to be sought out in other ways in the months to come. A basement patio is really taking shape for the rubberneckers passing by. I am now thoroughly exposed. Exposed enough that a compliment was given on my perfect dry stack stone walls. If she only knew how much I would be willing to knock down the first wall and rebuild it.



The spotlets and I had a very nice stroll in search of blooms on a sunny and rather warm November day. It feels like ages since I have had a proper stroll. Shorter days, manic cabin construction and many days of leaf raking and cleanup in clients gardens hasn't left much time for a good stroll.



When the last bloom is finally gone I can always rely on the sky for some natural drama.



Way up here it is hard to miss it.