This has been a year for weird things around here. No fireflies but lots of mosquitoes; carrots won't grow but potato plants are popping up from peelings, etc. And then there is the butterfly garden which has it's own weirdness going on.`
I planted lavender in the garden the year it was made. While I worried it wouldn't come back, every spring it did! Over the last five years I lost only one plant out of the six. Last winter was very mild in comparison to others so I didn't really worry about the lavender. I mean if it could make it through the harsh winters, it should be fine, right? Wrong. Not one plant re-newed itself this spring. Weird.
The butterfly garden is a changing thing, that's one of the things I like about it. The only real constant in it is the old wooden wagon wheel I found on the property when we moved in. It has changed places in the garden but in the garden it remains, may-be a little more worn, a couple more missing spokes and few more loose ones but it's still there, hearkening back to days long since past. The paths are completely gone now. The little white rocks buried under new compost and soil. The back of the garden where I once placed rocks and tree logs for the butterflies to rest and sun on are totally overgrown by vegetation now. I transplanted all the perennials to the back of the garden to make it a little bit maintenance free. Lambs ear, sage, lovage, asterbees, bee balm, comfrey and common lilac all are doing well under the shade of the crabapple and snowball trees.
In the front part, which is much sunnier, only the lupins are perennials. I've had different annuals over the years. I tried something different this year. I remember my dear Mom (Eileen) collecting cosmos seeds and successfully planting them the next year. So last fall, I collected cosmo seeds and the seeds from the brown and white daisys that spring up in different places around here. This spring I planted them in the butterfly garden along with the calendula seeds. Before I planted the seeds, I dotted the garden with the stepping stones an other whimsy objects collected over the years via Christmas and Mother's Day gifts. I thought the mix of plants and the whimsical would look really nice. I imagined a sea of tall, slender plants swaying gently in the winds and cresting with white, gold, pink and purple. Only the sturdy, stubby Calendula plants came up. Weird.
I stopped re-filling the humming bird feeder I had because I couldn't do it regularly and I know the sugar/water mixture will go mouldy and that's not good for hummingbirds. I originally put the feeder up because I noticed one or two hummingbirds last year. This year, with no feeder to attract them, I have bunches of them hanging around. Weird.
I'm not sure these things are all that weird, really. I'm pretty sure if I researched and poked around a bit I could find reasonable explanations for all these things. But things are very busy around here now so the "Gee, it's been a weird year around here." will have suffice for a while longer. At least next winter, when everything huddles and closes in on itself, I'll have time to go through my books and find out what I did wrong. Unless, of course, we have a weird winter that keeps me hopping.
