The Old Year Passes

Posted on January 4, 2015 by composerinthegarden

Fast away the old year passes,
Hail the new, ye lads and lasses ~ from Deck the Halls

Reflection and anticipation vie for my attention at this time of the year. Like Janus, for whom January is named, I look back at the year that has passed even as I look ahead to the new year to come. A busy fall semester and the hubbub of the holidays has kept me away from my blog until now, but in the lull before the new semester begins, I have been reflecting on this past year in the garden. It was eventful, partly because of the work done on the garden paths and the deck, and the day I welcomed visitors to the garden. I’ve created a few “time lapse” slideshows of the seasons passing in the garden as a way of sharing my memories of the year’s delights.

The gravel paths that were installed this summer have been a joy to walk on in all kinds of weather; more than ever, they define the shape and the structure of the garden.

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Some areas of the garden change more dramatically than others as the seasons bring new colors, new blooms, and new heights of growth. I was particularly happy with the border below the deck, set off by the new path, and the meadowy bed outside of the gate that I call the “herb circle” anchored by a terra cotta birdbath.

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Perhaps the most iconic element in the garden is the arbor that connects the outside garden to the garden hidden inside. Designed to echo the roofline of the house, its simple shape becomes the one unchanging element as the seasons pass.

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As for hailing the new year, seeds and plants have already been ordered and plans for the garden are in the works. I hope that you enjoyed the “time-lapse” images of the garden (all photos ©2014 Lynn Emberg Purse). A special thank you to each one of my visitors this past year, and especially my followers and fellow bloggers. May you have a new year filled with joy, beauty, and wonder.

To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring. ~George Santayana

Endings and Beginnings

Posted on August 12, 2013 by composerinthegarden

I awoke early last Monday morning, feeling as if I were on the “champagne stage” of the Tour de France, where the victorious pedal into Paris for the last leg of a long race while sipping champagne. I had just finished composing my saxophone concerto the night before; all that was left to do was a little tweaking and formatting. Angel and I took a walk at dawn, witnessing a spectacular sunrise through storm clouds that were passing away, an apt visual metaphor for the intense few months I had spent writing this piece. I was on the champagne stage now – just a few more hours of studio time and I would indulge in a glass of prosecco at the end of the day.

The world changed while I was preoccupied in my studio. I vaguely remember seeing the garden when I came out to visit for an hour or two each day, but my head was full of music and I wasn’t really paying close attention. Now that I’ve had a week to reorient myself, I’m a bit taken aback. I feel as if I’ve gone through a magical revolving door from the gaudy splendor of the July garden to the mellow pace of August. A few daylily blooms persist but the color banner is carried forward by the large blowsy flowers of PeeGee Hydrangeas, Rose of Sharon, tall stands of garden phlox, the bright daisy forms of Echinacea and Rudbeckia, and the fresh rebloom of roses.

It is now a more relaxed garden, requiring a relaxed attitude towards the insect damaged leaves of blooming plants and a tolerance for the gradual disintegration of carefully crafted color combinations. The quiet of dusk and dawn have been filled with a raucous chorus of cicadas by day and the bold throbbing songs of tree frogs by night. Flocks of butterflies cover the Buddleia (butterfly bush) by the deck and hummingbirds in two’s and three’s feed on the Salvias nearby.

July has ended, August has begun and their sights and sounds are distinctly different. It has taken me a week to begin writing in words instead of notes, and of raising the camera to my eye once again. Here are a few portraits of the garden in August. Enjoy, and perhaps join me in a glass of champagne to celebrate the beauty of endings and beginnings.

Echinacea (coneflowers)

Echinacea and bee

Hydrangea ‘Limelight’

Black swallowtail butterfly

Rose of Sharon ‘Diana’

Rose of Sharon and Hydrangea

Late blooming daylily

Pink Carpet rose

Lavatera ‘Pink Blush’

English rose ‘Sharifa Asma’

‘Winter Sunset’ rose with Phlox

Daylily ‘El Desperado’

Rudbeckia ‘Viette’s Little Suzy’

Oakleaf Hydrangea

Sunrise

When you’re young you prefer the vulgar months, the fullness of the seasons. As you grow older you learn to like the in-between times, the months that can’t make up their minds. Perhaps it’s a way of admitting that things can’t ever bear the same certainty again. ― Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot (courtesy of Good Reads)

Except My Roses

Posted on June 21, 2013 by composerinthegarden

You steal my roses, the things I love most in all the world. . . You could have taken anything – except my roses. ~ from Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast

A perfect first day of summer, the solstice, the longest day of the year. The roses are celebrating, having a raucous party in the garden while they soak up the sun and feed the bees. The height of rose bloom always brings to mind one of my favorite movies, Jean Cocteau’s 1946 masterpiece “Beauty and the Beast” (La Belle et la Bête). In a magical film that still delights and intrigues me with its whimsical imagery and cinematic beauty, the scene that comes to mind is when Beauty’s hapless father plucks a rose from the Beast’s garden as a gift for his daughter and is immediately confronted for his crime.

How ironic that I moved here twelve years ago so that I would have more gardening space for roses, and all of the roses I planted the first year died over the winter. The daylilies that I brought thrived in the heavy clay soil and shrugged off deer and rabbit attacks. Not so the lovely English roses, who were far too genteel to survive this robust and challenging garden microclimate. To be without roses was unthinkable, so I began a long experimentation with roses safely ensconced behind garden walls – who was sassy enough to survive in an organic garden with no spraying and no artificial fertilizer?

Old roses, a few of the hardier English roses on their own roots, stalwart Griffith Buck roses, a few Canadian and shrub roses – all became part of the garden landscape, surrounded by geraniums, lambs ear, and other gentle plant companions. The summer sun triggers the rose perfume; each morning begins with thousands of petals of color, heady fragrance, and the songs of bees nestling in for a little more pollen. You could take anything from me- except my roses.

Knockout Rose

Carefree Delight

Pink Carpet rose

Mary Rose (English)

Veilchenblau (old climbing rose)

Darlow’s Enigma hybrid musk rose

Darlow’s Enigma blossom

Rose de Rescht (old rose)

Rose de Rescht in border

Blanc Double de Coubert (rugosa)

Blushing Knockout and lamb’s ear

Blushing Knockout in the garden

‘Amber’ Carpet rose and blue geraniums

Margo Koster polyantha rose

Marie Pavie polyantha rose

Remastered and released by Criterion, La Belle et La Bête is now available on DVD and Blueray. (B&W, in French with English subtitles) A film treasure.

I buy most of my “own root” roses from Roses Unlimited, they are shipped in pots in beautiful condition. Wonderful source!

Let the Rain Kiss You

Posted on June 7, 2013 by composerinthegarden

Let the rain kiss you. Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops. Let the rain sing you a lullaby. ~ Langston Hughes, American poet

The garden glistened this morning with a thousand silver liquid drops of rain, lingering from yesterday’s storms. I’ve been absent of late, preoccupied with finishing a large music piece due in July and with testing and refining my video techniques for the Penn’s Woods project.

This morning, I gave myself a ramble about the garden to capture the sudden wealth of beautiful scenes of raindrops on leaf and bloom. I have been trying to develop a cinematic approach in capturing video, using selective focus (depth of field) and composing images using a spiral Fibonacci curve. Today, I challenged myself to shoot still photos the same way, using one lens (60 mm macro) and publishing only those photos that needed no cropping and minimal technical prep. Here are a few images of the garden in a magical moment and hopefully a reflection of my current goals in capturing images. Click on any photo to trigger the gallery view. Enjoy! (All photos ©2013 Lynn Emberg Purse, All Rights Reserved)

Kiss me with rain in your eyelashes,
come on, let us sway together,
under the trees, and to hell with thunder.
~Edwin Morgan, Scottish poet

We Must Be Mad With Joy

Posted on May 24, 2013 by composerinthegarden

“People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.” ~Iris Murdoch, Irish author

Garden after rain

The thunderstorms passed by quickly, leaving a few large drops of rain in their wake and some empty threats of weather violence. We have fared far better than our neighbors in the American West, those unfortunate victims of extreme tornados who still struggle to recover their lives. Even as I grieve for them, I celebrate my own small corner of land in the foothills of western Pennsylvania.

Tonight, the garden in twilight is luxuriating in its richness of leaf and flower and I cannot end my stroll. It is bewitching. Leaves of every shape and form spring out and blend – all of the plants in my garden touch and jostle each other – no Puritan “touch me not” unplanted spaces here! Oh, this is an excess of green and growing that sings a great chorus in the dusk of a warm early summer day. Yes, many plants bloom in May – the insignia of iris, the globes of allium, the stars of clematis, the blooms of columbine, lilac and others. But May is feckless in its headlong plunge into green growth from the carpet beneath one’s feet to the canopy among the trees. May is fragrant and headstrong, the vibrant green path leading and spilling us into June.

Lamb’s ear rising up to bloom

The silver lamb’s ear have risen to a foot high impossibility in the past few days, ready to bloom and nourish the bees –their bright foliage outlines the beds in the garden. The swords of daylily leaves create circular swirls of green blades, predicting their July bloom – a promise of color and form to come. Beauty bush and lilac burst with thousands of tiny flowers, mounds of color and scent that greet the morning and bless the warmth of the evening, alive with the buzzing of bees seeking nectar. And so it goes. May is so full of voluptuous beauty and scented flowers that it sends the senses reeling with the experience of it, making us mad with joy.

Wild black cherry (Prunus serotina)

The surrounding woods are filled with the blooms of native black cherry, dangling white racemes that scent the air with their sweetness. Every day, a dozen new flowers awake and open and bring a new shape and scent to the bounty of the garden. I can hardly keep up; I mulch and trim and plant seedlings but it is as if I were on the end of the “crack the whip” game – I can only hold on tight and try my best to serve the beauty of the garden as I am flung and swung through its spurt of green growth and scented flowering. Here are a few images captured that may share some small part of this beauty; click on the first image to open the gallery. (All photographs ©2013 Lynn Emberg Purse)