Front garden in the rain, and with new lighting
Summery temperatures (Ha, ha, who am I kidding?)—OK, spring-like temperatures, plus a stubborn bicolor iris, nearly had me beat on Saturday. It was 83 degrees by early afternoon, and with no shade yet in the front garden it felt hotter as I struggled to uproot the overgrown (4 1/2-feet tall), straggly iris. Wielding a shovel, a spade, loppers, and even an axe, I hacked and dug and yanked on it for more than an hour, succeeding in prizing only a third of it out of the ground. Taking pity on me, my husband came out, showed the iris no mercy, and had it out of the ground in 20 minutes. Take that, iris!
I like bicolor iris, and this one had performed well for about 6 years. But dividing a bicolor when it begins to die out in the center is hard work. I’m glad I have another one in the back garden—it’s a great evergreen filler—but I think I’ll plant something new to replace the iris I pulled out of the front garden.
After dispatching the iris, my husband and I got to work on a project I’ve been hankering to do for a couple of years. We installed low-voltage landscape lighting in the front garden. No easy project this, despite assurances from my electrician. Sure, the hook-up was easy, the layout was easy. Even the hour spent at Lowe’s, picking out fixtures and calculating the electrical load, was fairly easy. But installation involved tunneling under a sidewalk to run the cable, plus digging a shallow trench all through the garden to hide the cable after we hooked up the lights. In sum, several more hours bending over in the hot sun. By the time we finished, despite my floppy sun hat, sunscreen, and plenty of water, I was sweaty, red-faced, and exhausted.
That evening, however, I knew it was all worth the effort. The timer clicked at dusk, the lights came on, and the garden sprang to life in the warm glow of seven path lights and two uplights. No longer a dark pit at the foot of the porch, the paths and the garden now look welcoming from the dark street and from inside the house.
Today was much cooler, with overcast skies that spit rain throughout the afternoon. As I write this, steady rain is falling, and I feel like dancing a happy rain dance. It’s been well over a month since we’ve had any measurable rainfall, and I can imagine the plants drinking it up. I hope it will be enough to help the wildflowers put on a show in the next few weeks.