Red Cardinal Climber

 

I was astounded the first time I saw this climbing flower spilling over a trellis!  The delicate feathery leaves combined with the bright true-red color of the tiny trumpet-shaped blooms adds splashes of color and conversation to your garden.  It works well combined with other plantings; other varieties of morning glories, of which, it is a hybrid, or the fall-blooming clematis.  In other blog posts, I have featured whichever was in bloom at the time.

  The seeds are very tiny; you see the unripened pods above sticking up on the vine like grandmother's tatting on a handkerchief.  With one seed per pod, you can see why it is outrageous to charge $2.45 for 30 seeds!  They are minuscule, like poppy seeds.  All the more reason to cultivate garden friends so you can harvest now, trade later in the dead of winter when only arm-chair gardening in a catalogue is available.  One of my favorite March-time hobbies. 

 For now though, with the cooler weather, we are back outside yanking old growth, sunflowers that are all spent on the stalks, enjoying the last of the tomatoes from the vine and maintenance chores like that.

  Last week, we had our town-wide yard sale and fall festival.  People come from miles around just for the yard sales so I pitched in with friends to rid myself of clutter.  It takes a lot of work to load things up, set things up and all that, but when someone else can use what you have at a very good price, it is a good thing.   It's bound to happen; that you see something you want at the sale so you slash $5.00 off your total and add it to your friend's and come home from the very sale where you were getting rid of treasures, with a new one.  "But I will use this one!" I say to myself.  Every household needs an electric car buffer if they do not have a garage. Oh, I just made more work for myself, didn't I?

  Well, it's all in a day's work at home.  Puttering in the garden or workshop keeps us involved, gives us opportunity to put our thoughts in order along with the yard and the tools in the shed.

  I love the change of seasons, even if there are parts that I do not like, like the loss of daylight hours.  I can seriously see me being a warm-climate snow bird, leaving here in the winter and staying where it is warm until the spring returns.  For now though, home is here.  The corn is ripening, I am spotting pumpkin groupings on porches.  I am feeling the internal shift from one to another.

  Stand still, smell the earthiness in the air?  We cannot stop it, so we might as well notice and take in every thing that we can, in every day.

  That maxim to "Take time to stop and smell the roses" is a good one!

Bloom of the Day: Fall-blooming Clematis (Terniflora)

  Fall-blooming Clematis (genus) ...here is the pedigree:  part of the Ranunculaceae (family) and the Terniflora (species) that can be found all over the eastern part of the U.S. from Kansas to the East; in both the North and the South, California and then in Canada.  I first enjoyed it in a little community that had a lot of multi-color gingerbread type houses with gables, fish-scale shingles and lovely cottage gardens.  In sun or shade, it mixes well with other climbers.  I put two kinds of morning glory and the tiny red cardinal climber all on the same fence.

  While it is true that it is prolific and therefore invasive, it is also very beautiful and fragrant to boot.  If you can contain it; either by yanking out new growth, or, planting it pot and all into your prepared area; "hole in the ground" by any other name, it will give you much joy for many fall seasons.

  Seasonal change is something we cannot control and so when I begin to see subtle changes in the landscape from one season to another, it fills me with joy to know that I cannot, in fact, control everything about my environment.  Truth be told, there is not a lot that we do control, we just think so!

  Not still High Summer, I am seeing gold appear in the leaves and undergrowth along the highways, not only here in Kentucky, but in the states I travel for business:  Tennessee, Mississippi, West Virginia and Arkansas.  The sky becomes that deep cerulean blue, mornings turn cool enough for a jacket (Hooray!) and somewhere, deep within, I think we are glad of the change.

  We have had a hot summer here, pretty much with adequate water until the last few weeks.  The coolness feels good on my skin.  The light has begun to change not only in its appearance in the color scale but a little bit later in the morning, a little earlier in the evening.

  Did you hear it?  That collective sigh of mothers everywhere with the recognition that "School has started!".  There is something to said about how order and routine affects us.  God put order into motion; big things first, all the way down to the tiniest of the kingdom.  When things are in disarray, we do not feel good, order is really what we crave, I think.  We all work within parameters of what is comfortable for ourselves at home and in office.  I am a preemptive worker.  I like to know what is coming and to control my own time so when I cannot, I have to take a step back and remember that I cannot control all of my universe.

  When the kiddos go back to school there are routines that are followed so that they are successful; play time, dinner time, homework time, bath time, bed time.  As that famous author once reminded us, many things that are successful in life, we learned when we were kids... Say you are sorry before you go to sleep, eat well, sleep well, plan ahead.

  Now that my daughter has graduated High School early, I am watching to see how she orders her own life, or not. 

  "Down the garden path" is a good thing in life, I think. Have a path, stay on it most of the time, allow for vearing off for something new and exciting, expect a few bumps but learn to go around them, over them or through them.   Stay out of the tall weeds, watch out for vipers, plant perinnial seeds, dead-head for vibrant new growth, fertilize, cultivate, ahhhh, rest for a season!

  Starting tomorrow, I am going "Up North" as they say in northern states, with a friend to her family home up on Lake Huron.  I am happily going to participate in a "Work Day" or two at this cabin built in 1933 in exchange for beautiful lake vistas and whatever grows on the shores of that great lake!

  Will send something back during the journey~~