Rainless

We haven’t been graced by rain for so many months now, that the beautiful and evocative smell of it had been erased from my memory.  My soul craves rain, and it craves and dreams with the cold winds that comes with rain and those cloudy moments when mist and rainwater unite and transform the garden at length; changing it into a strange, dark beauty of sorts. 

I like it that when it rains, trees and things get diffused down, and everywhere you look reminds you of another place… a place you never been to in real life, and yet you know it by heart.  I just love it—love those cool days when the garden looks and feels cozy and dark, like a cave above the sea.

All day long this past Sunday I waiting for a downpour; for the sky turned into a promise, and all day long it remained gloomy and heavy with a horizon looming with rain… Yet, it was only but a tease, and by the end of the day that evening, everything switched back to the usual cloudless blue sky.  Dark clouds dissolved into nothing, giving way to scorching bright light again, and to a deep blue colored sky.  Thus, rain, or the false announcement of it, melted away with any remaining hope left in me. 

I was able to work on half on my garden this past Friday, and all those roses by our bedroom windows are gone. Down to the ground they are. The Mexican Primrose and tall Dahlias are out too. And it didn’t bother me—it didn’t bother me at all to see those beds now looking so desperately in need of life and so pathetically naked.

The roses were doing so bad, that it just made no sense to keep them as they were any longer. It is a lost case with the primrose, however, for these are most annoying little things, and they will continue on coming up and taking over.

I have learnt that one must be careful with how you employ your perennials, for although they are most trustful in the way they come back year after year, they too can be very rowdy and invasive and they can make your garden look a little disheveled, if you are striving for order.

Mom’s little garden was cleaned too.  Shasta Daisy, and garden phlox were pruned down to the ground, and so were the irises and whatever else I have growing there.  I’m thinking I want to have most of the Phlox completely removed.  For how annoying they are, with their tendency to crawl, instead of standing straight up. 

I was only able to worked part of the garden, and not as much as I should have, or wanted to… it is so much; so much is going on out there, so much craziness taking place in the garden this year with everything growing out of control and perennials everywhere quickly dwindling in beauty and bending over against each other.  Now that I work outside my home, I just don’t have the time the garden requires, and things have to be done by area and by moments. 

This is the entrance of the garden and my favorite part of it.

I like to keep things here neatly looking, and clean, but things have gone out of my hands and climbers are throwing long shoots everywhere, perennials are done and they need to be pruned down, or even be taken off for good.  I had it with them.  I had it with the garden phlox and I want to have them all pulled out, but these plants are extra stubborn and they will keep coming up, no matter what you’d do.