“Someday When”

It is Memorial Day in the United States. It is a dedicated time to remember all the people who have made incredible sacrifices to form and establish and maintain this wonderful republic we call the United States of America. I am so very grateful.

This past week we remembered the anniversary of my Father-in-Law’s passing. A loving husband, father, family member, friend, community member, and World War II veteran. We are so thankful to have had him in our lives. We were truly blessed and our memories with him are a treasure.

Memorial Day weekend also kicks off the “unofficial start of summer”, and we take time to enjoy gatherings and relationships. We can accomplish all the things in the world, but there also needs to be rest and fellowship. Those times form sweet, sweet memories.

And, as it falls, a couple days ago it was also time to renew my blog domain for another year. I am officially in year 9 of this blog. But full transparency, I almost let the blog go. It isn’t that there is nothing to write about. The garden is absolutely beautiful. It is living its best life and doing a wonderful job of providing all sorts of beautiful moments and opportunities. And it is a place for many types of moments – moments to rest and moments to challenge myself and moments to contribute. It’s just that I have been in the rest and enjoyment moments so much that I haven’t gotten back into a good (contributing) pattern of posting again. I take the pics, I consider what would be fun to share, and then I relax and think “I’ll post tomorrow” 😉

For historical reflection, I am recognizing I truly am at what could be called “Someday When”. So much of where I wanted to go with the gardens is now here. I am enjoying it more and more and adjusting it less and less. And yet, there is always room for “one more” when circumstances provide. As some 20-year-old seeds recently taught me.

This winter I decided it was time to see if the 20+ year old Malva Zebrina Hollyhock seeds I had harvested from my gardens at our first house would grow. I planted those seeds indoors in a pot and watered them, and they did nothing. I thought I had my answer. But, as I often interject into posts that daylily propagation from seed is a long game, so appears to be the journey of at least a few of those Malva Zebrina Hollyhock seeds. It appears they were still viable. They were just needing more time to show up for the 2026 garden. But, thinking the seeds were not viable after all those years, when I began to plant my 2025 harvested daylily seeds, I took the dirt from the pot I planted the Malva Zebrina Hollyhock seeds in and used it in planting the daylily seeds. Fast forward two months, the daylily seeds are emerging, albeit slowly. And along with them, some “familiar looking” seedlings have also been showing up in those trays and pots. They are definitely not daylily seedlings, but since they were so familiar looking, I decided to leave them in place and see what happened. I may be mistaken, but I am thinking they are Malva Zebrina Hollyhock seedlings. Time will certainly tell, but I am thinking they are from that 20+-year-old seed!

And I realize those seedlings are a garden bridge from the house where I started my own gardens, to today. If they survive, they will have a chance to grow at the back of Sandy’s corner, a backdrop to the 35+ year story of my gardening experience. All these years later, a story of different eras, still thriving. I hope the hollyhocks do well. That would be super fun!

And it brings back so many memories! A few days after we closed on our first house, my Mother-in-Law and Father-in-Law came with buckets of irises, dug from their garden. They knew how much I loved their gardens. They were sharing. We kneeled down in the dirt on the west side of the house and planted 40 irises together. Three years later when it was time to divide them there were hundreds! Those irises were gorgeous!

And I remember the first seed catalogues that arrived after we bought our first house. My husband teased me as I spouted off scientific names I was learning from poring over gardening catalogues so much. But it wasn’t just that. Those catalogues that came in the mail were so enticing. I imagined beautifully lush gardens coming out of tiny seed packets. It all looked so wonderful. And so, I bought seeds and started growing them. And I began to dig out grass and lay down mulch all around the periphery of our back yard, much to the chagrin of my husband who thought the sod we had laid was the final frontier. Oh, I sooo remember the aching muscles from laying that sod! And I sooo remember the aching muscles from tearing out that sod, too 😉 Anyway, I planted layers with shrubs at the back of the beautiful gardens I was imagining, and I planted tiers coming forward from that. Seeds, bulbs, tubers, wild roses. And some food. But mostly perennials. And every morning, sometimes at 5 am, I walked our black lab around the gardens, discovering what the new day had brought. Wonderful!

Then one year I stumbled on hostas. My love of hostas started very innocently, from bringing home (“saving”) a few discarded corms my Dad was sweeping up off the driveway after we did some dividing and transplanting. My husband doubted they would grow. They were teeny, tiny. But oh! did they ever take off! And thus started a long journey in “Hostaville”. Lots of years. Hosta of the year, buying backwards into that collection, in multiples of 3-6, yah. That was fabulous. Many of those hostas are still in my current gardens.

Then I got some daylilies. That, like seeds, was me succumbing to successful garden catalogue marketing. The same company that was successful at getting my seed business from catalogues also featured 1-year daylily seedlings. The pictures got me. I imagined a lush garden full of beautiful blooms. That came, eventually, but it took a while. Quite a while. Nevertheless, over the years, as the daylilies began to fill out, I fell in love with those ‘Purple D’Oro’ daylilies, and then ‘Marque Moon’. I also bought some more bare root varieties, sometimes in big box stores – ‘Autumn Red’ for instance. And I bought some stock from a couple large local garden centers. I was chugging along, adding and removing things as they worked or didn’t work in the gardens, and then it happened.

In retrospect, it was a wisp, a vaper. A wisp, a vapor that became another wonderful memory. Here’s what happened. Our son brought his new girlfriend over to meet us for the first time. Kindred garden spirits, it took us just a few minutes to start chatting everything gardens. I do remember the smiles on my husband and our son’s faces. Yah 😉 Some minutes in, I was saying I needed to deadhead the drying daylily pods. Our son’s girlfriend’s response was, “Don’t throw those seeds out. You know you can make new daylilies from those.” And those few words started the daylily propagation journey I am on today. That very year I harvested my first daylily self-seed and began to try to bring them to seedling. Direct sow led to harvesting and storing and stratifying and various iterations of crosses and planting to eventually get to seedlings and then, very eventually, daylilies. And yes, our son’s then girlfriend is now my daughter-in-law 🙂 We still chat gardens, all the time. Most recently as she realized one of our grandsons was pouring grass seed into the dirt for her flower planter lol. Oh yah 😉 It’s all good 🙂

And 9 years ago, in a bit of a “state”, I started this blog. Our younger son was hiking the entire Pacific Crest Trail (from Mexico to Canada) and blogging on that. I was a bit concerned about that adventure, and in an effort to focus my energy positively, I created my own blog, about gardening. And so this blog began, 9 years ago.

So, my craft room is the garden, my plant storage is in the ground or in little envelopes of seed, and my contributing springs from that. Last year I harvested hundreds of daylily seeds, and they are now planted in pots and in various stages of seedling and pending germination. What I hope will be daylily “Hannah Cowles’ needs to be planted soon. There is just one seedling from that cross. Among hundreds of seeds from that cross. VERY unusual for me. But fitting, as Hannah Cowles was the first woman American settler in our lineage, going all the way back to the 1600s. And potential daylily ‘Hannah Cowles’ will be planted right next to two large bunches of what I hope will be daylily ‘Molly Cowles’. Those seedling bunches were new seedlings last year. Molly Cowles was wife to Sgt Asa Cowles, a Patriot in the American Revolutionary War. Asa’s brother Jabez died in a British prison as a Prisoner of War.

And so, the history melds with memories with the gardens through the years now down to our grandchildren.

This year does, however, feel different. Last year was a pivotal year for me. I was setting some new groundwork, and as so often happens, the gardens were a big part of that. I was marching happily, even exuberantly down the daylily crosses path and feeling very creative. An analogy would be going to the crafts store and buying a bunch of very cute embroidery or knitting or crocheting or finger weaving or scrapbooking supplies. Soon it is time to properly store those supplies and organize them so they are ready for use and then it is time to actually get about using them. Actually work about getting the imagined thing to be real. Uh-huh. And that part, realizing I was definitely over my threshold, led to me saying I will only do four planned daylily crosses in 2026. It turned out that 19 varieties of crosses produced so many hundreds of seeds I was just counting the days until it was all done. And truly it is not done even now. I watch every day to see what new seedlings emerge, I document information on my voluminous excel spreadsheet, and soon I will start planting in the ground. But what I truly enjoy is exactly where the gardens are at right now. And though I know that learning and experimenting will always be there, I am enjoying having the “Someday When”. I like the slower pace, the early morning tour around the garden areas. I like relaxing on the patio, watching the veritable plethora of birds and bees and butterflies and dragonflies, and just enjoying the Now.

So right now:

• The Weigelia is starting to bloom. That Weigelia looked pretty bad a few years ago. I have been working with it and this year it is looking great.
• The pines are budding out.
• The Ninebarks are going through their beautiful color morph sequence.
• The stonecrop out front looks awesome right now but will soon “donut”. I am sure I will talk myself out of pulling them out again this year lol.
• The Elegans hosta that was a tiny rooting from before we lost the 18 hostas last Spring is doing very well.
• The Blue Mouse Ears are loving their new locations.
• And the Pink Asian lilies are making an unexpected comeback. (Still forming bloom buds. More to come.)

And not just the townhome gardens are doing well.

At the historic cemetery the irises are mid-bloom. The yellow blooms first and then the purple starts. In 2023 they were in an old garden inside the fence and were just begging for a fresh start. I dug some, divided them, and planted them in an area that was grass but had “iris bed” written all over it. They are so fun now! Yes, we definitely did not add any mulch to that section this year. It is plenty full 🙂

Not everything is roses, though.

In the townhome gardens:

• The 7-year-old South Seas self-seed daylily that only bloomed one year (last year) does not seem to want to come up this year. And I had 3 of the total 4 daylily crosses planned with it. Ouch. Only one cross this year? Really? We shall see about that.
• The original South Seas daylily clump will need dividing and transplanting this year. It is starting to fail.
• The Carpenter’s Choice daylily doesn’t look good to me, and although I had hoped to get self-seed and experiment with ploidy (a parent is a diploid), it may move out. If I am going to work with it, I don’t want fussy.
• And, sadly, the stonecrop under the Linden by the pavers have gone the way of the disappearing hostas. They will not be replaced.

And working at the historic cemetery gardens is no different:

• Daylily seedlings don’t do well there, and that was a loss of quite a few good seedlings.
• Additionally, fall is not a great time to plant bare root purchased daylilies there. Most of them disappeared and it looks like they are not coming back – probably moles.

Today I will go over to the historic cemetery and see if the purple irises are starting to bloom en masse like the yellow irises have been over the past couple weeks. I’ll share next week.

For now, I’ll wrap up.

I hope you have a wonderful weekend, and if you are in the United States of America, I hope you have time to observe Memorial Day.

Be blessed!