Sunday Salon: Reading and Gardening Plans

Welcome to the Sunday Salon! Also visit The Sunday Post hosted by The Caffeinated Book Reviewer; It's Monday: What Are You Reading? at Book Journey. Also visit Mailbox Monday, hosted by Vicki, Leslie, and Serena.

We are considering putting in a raised garden bed for veggies, a bed that will have to be meshed in with wire to keep out the bunnies. I have already bought seeds for peppers, string beans, squash, and basil genovese, to plant as late as early May. The temps will dip below freezing this coming week! A customer at the store advised me to forego wood, which deteriorates over time, and to use concrete blocks to form the beds.

For the April National Poetry Month Blog Tour hosted by Savvy Verse and Wit, I blogged on Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem, "Spring and Fall: To a Young Child," It had been a while since I had read that poem but it came back to me easily.

I have finished three books for book tours/review:
Black Chalk by Christopher J. Yates, for tomorrow
When the Cypress Whispers by Yvette Manessis Corporon, for Wednesday
Murder on Bamboo Lane by Naomi Hirahari, for later this month
and am in the middle of reading
A Tiger's Tale by Laura Morrigan for a May 11 tour

Other books I've started include
The Year She Left Us by Katherine Ma
Death Money by Henry Chang

 A few interesting novel, mixed genres, came in this past week:

Jack of Spies

Dear Lucy

All Day and Night

North of Normal

Eyes on You

Mrs. Hemingway

Click on the title captions for details re the books.

I have my reading cut out for me. How about you?

Sunday Salon: Gardening and Books

Welcome to the Sunday Salon! Also submitted to It's Monday; What Are You Reading? at Book Journey, and  Mailbox Monday hosted by Abi at 4 the LOVE of BOOKS.

I have decided not to plant many veggies this year and so far only a few banana pepper seedlings made it into the ground and into a pot. There are baby bunnies running in and out of the backyard from our neighbors' where they live under a tool shed. A white possum came into the yard for an orange I had left for the birds and was seen again the next morning in the neighbor's yard. A black cat wanders the grounds and gazes into ground cover that hides chipmunks and into the dense euonymus shrub that is the hiding place for a rabbit or two. I don't think veggies would last without wire mesh to protect them, even with a cat on patrol. In any case, we spent the nice, cool and sunny day yesterday pruning bushes and clipping and seeding grass. An uncluttered garden.

New books and ARCs that arrived:

Ten Trees and a Truffle Dog by Jamie Ivey; Skyhorse Publishing
Children of the Jacaranda Tree by Sahar Delijan; Atria Books
A Certain Summer by Patricia Beard; Simon and Schuster
Running with the Enemy by Lloyd Lofthouse; Three Clover Press
Lighthouse Bay by Kimberley Freeman; Simon and Schuster
Gaijin Cowgirl by Jame DiBiasio; Crime Wave Press

Can't wait for summer weather to get out the hammock. What are you reading these days?

Wordless Wednesday: Spring Yellow

Not a forsythia, but blooms early spring. Double yellow flowers on long narrow green stems. Anyone recognize this?

More Wordless Wednesdays

Wordless Wednesday: Sour Cherry Blossoms

I wasn't home to see the bees. Were there any? Will there be cherries this summer?

More Wordless Wednesdays

Wordless Wednesday: Quince Blossom Surprise

Last year, this japonica or ornamental quince bush had three coral blooms. This year, multiple buds.

Wordless Wednesday

Winter berries are still on the bush,
though the leaves have now gone. They stand out in the snow.

The bush is a rockspray cotoneaster, identified for me by Jodi of Blooming Writer: Gardening in Nova Scotia. Click on the picture to enlarge it, and click on the link to visit Jodi's wonderful garden blog.

Wordless Wednesday, Aug. 26

Zinnias show off their bright pink zing! They're garden annuals.

Currently Reading and Gardening

Whiskey and Water by Nina Wright, a mystery featuring a real estate agent Whiskey Mattimoe and her Afghan hound Abra, set on the shores of Lake Michigan.

Next on the list, The Sudoku Puzzle Murders by Parnell Hall, a Puzzle Lady Mystery with crossword and sudoku puzzles sprinkled throughout the book for the reader to figure out. Solutions also included.

I mean to also read The Moon in the Mango Tree by Pamela Binnings Ewen about a young singer in the 1920s whose husband is a medical missionary who becomes physician to the royal court of Siam. She travels around the world to find her place as a singer. The part about Siam intrigues me, especially the Siam of the early 1900s.

I have also borrowed from the library, The Eye of Jade by Diane Wei Liang, a new detective series set in China, written by a Beijing-born woman who took part in the Student Democracy Movement in the 1980s in China, has a Ph.D in business administration from the U.S., and left teaching after 10 years to write for a living from London, where she now lives. More Chinese mystery novels!

In the meantime, I also have to tend to the garden, where spring flowers have finished blooming and summer ones have not yet come up. The spirea bush needs trimming, and the mushroom mulch needs to be tucked around roots so that the roses and clematis start producing flowers again! Trying to use only organic type of fertilizers but will have to spray the rose bushes as they have some sort of brown spotting on the leaves.

Can't wait till winter-spring to use what I learned in a three-hour tree pruning workshop I attended two weeks ago. (How much can you learn in 3 hours?) The Rose of Sharon and the red acer palmatum (Japanese maple) in the back as well as the green one in the front both need some shaping and controlling. Alas, I don't have the skill of Japanese gardeners, but will have to experiment.

Book Review: Down the Garden Path by Beverley Nichols

Be led down the garden path in a pleasant way with Beverly Nichols' 1932 original book on country gardening. I found Down the Garden Path, a hardcover, at a library sale and got it for about 50 cents or so. It doesn't have the original jacket cover but was printed in 1932, when the author was in his 30s. Yes, Beverley Nichols is a "he", and of course, he's British.

Who else but an English gardener would rhapsodize on every page about flowers and plants and pamper them to an extreme, to the extent of sheltering a foxglove with an umbrella during a particularly heavy rain (because, as he says, foxgloves don't like to be wet).

After buying a country cottage in the English countryside, Nichols proceeds to fill the garden with flowers and bushes, and goes on to plant a wood, build a great rock garden, dig a pond, and of course, hire a gardner. Nichols, in his gardening frenzy, competes with the neighbors, in particular a Mrs. M, who never fails to find fault with his landscaping and the health of his plants.

He gets his revenge when he catches her red-handed, unearthing pots of flowers she had bought and planted in her garden, pots and all - the flowers she claimed to have grown from seeds bought in a "penny packet."

Down the Garden Path is entertaining and informative, and at the end, Mr. Nichols promised to write many more books on gardening, and he did. He wrote this book in his 30s and he died in his 80s, so he had a lot of time to rhapsodize some more about the modernizing of his thatched cottage and the development of his extensive garden.

At the beginning of the book, the author is determined to find flowers and plants and even trees that will flower in the dead of winter. He finds the winter aconite, the Christmas rose, mimosa, and others with Latin names he doesn't give us the common names for.

I used Botanica, an Illustrated Book of 10,000 Garden Plants, to look up a few. Of course, the English climate is milder than ours and English gardens will have blooms in winter that we won't have here.

Would you believe that Down the Garden Path is often reprinted, in hardcover! The original is illustrated with garden scenes of cupids, garden tools, and country landscapes, and I think the reprints also have these illustrations.

This book was a lucky find at that library book sale!

Out of the Nest

Backyard birds

This fledgling robin was hopping along on the ground under some hosta and daylily leaves, intermittently squawking. It tested its wings and made it a foot off the ground into this euonymus bush, which must have reminded it of its nest, as it calmed down and sat quietly.

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The young bird allowed me to get as close as a foot away to take this picture. Soon, an adult robin flew in and began a loud squawking, which the young chick answered. I left so that the adult bird could approach, but stayed close enough to continue watching.
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The parent landed on the ground and approached the bush, and the young bird hopped down to join her. It followed her as she gathered insects from the grass to feed it. Soon after being fed, the young robin flew through a gap in the fence into another yard, away from its parent.

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An hour later when I went back into the garden, two adult robins were squawking away on the wires overhead, with no answering call from the ground. One of the adults suddenly became quiet and I noticed the pachysandra leaves (a ground cover) around a maple tree rustling and waving in a straight line. A baby robin soon poked its head out from the greenery and eyed me curiously. I supposed it was not hungry as it made no effort to answer the adults.

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I've heard of newly hatched chicks bonding with the first living thing they saw after emerging from the shell. This bird had been out of the shell for some time, but I didn't want to take any chances, so I left just in case it decided it should follow me for food!


When I checked later in the day, the yard was empty - no adult or baby birds within sight or hearing. I presume they all went together where birds go in the evenings to shelter for the night.

May Showers. Spring Flowers, and Migrating Birds

onymus

My early summer garden is visited by birds and lots of squirrels, but also by critters that take the heads off some of my flowers!

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In the garden early this morning, using new birding binoculars bought on International Migratory Bird Day at a local state park, I saw blue jays, robins with worms in their beaks, a cardinal preening on a really high television antenna, a young hawk, and a pigeon with its beige under-feathers ruffling in the wind.

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I heard lovely warblers but couldn't find them among the thick leaves of surrounding oaks. The migrating songbirds are miniature in comparison to the larger robins and blue jays that stay in this area all year round.

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In the garden, the rambling rosebush in the photo will be full of roses by the end of next week. The bleeding heart bush in the forefront has finished blooming, but the yellow-green ornamental euonymus bush behind it lasts all summer and into the winter. A hosta edged with yellow and a sedum plant peep out to the right of the bush.

Here are my new efforts at digital photography! Hope you enjoy the yellow-green colors of my late spring garden!

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For some lovely and very artistic nature photos, see the site of photographer Blue Heron: http://www.exploringnature.blogspot.com/