When my wife died, quite a few people told me I should move out of my house. Move out of a paid-for house and get another mortgage, with no job? Totally insane. And I’d probably have to take the shed we built together with me, wherever I moved.
she carved this in the shed
I can just see me living in a shack in the Portland area, getting calls from the bank about the almost daily activity on my debit card going to this place as though there were something wrong about living in a shack and surrounding yourself with plants.
Fortunately for my need to eat and feed the dog, there is a vague delineation, not even hinted at on the hardiness zone maps, between what I can reasonably expect to be able to overwinter here and what is completely hopeless. In truth, oversummering new plants is much more of a challenge.
Some plants I got from Digging Dog and of course Cistus, the latter possibly representing a whole boxload of zonal denial, but what fun is gardening if you stick to things that are “safe”? And if the plants don’t make it? Look at the first four words of this post, Mister Winter, to see if I really care. I’ll just buy more plants; probably the same ones, too, because I’ll rationalize a reason for their demise that has nothing to do with the ultimate provenance of the plants. So there.
Meanwhile, in the real garden, the first autumn crocus opened today.
Crocus kotschyanus ‘Reliant’
the miserable gardener 