A little while ago today. . .
The forest behind our house carpeted in wood anemones or Anemone nemorosa, a small white flower native to Germany.
I just noticed that little black bug on the flower petal. It looks like a tick. I feel itchy now. . . .
Spring, the sweet spring, is the year’s pleasant king…
I looked out the upstairs window yesterday afternoon and saw that the woods behind our house were carpeted in wood anemones or Anemone nemorosa, a native flower.
When I went out the back gate, I also found yellow primroses — Primula vulgaris, I believe — along the fence.
Except for the little white flowers and some ivy, the forest is still mostly brown and beige, but that will change very quickly now that daytime temperatures are in the 60s° F.
Flowers in a vase
or strewn in mad profusion
across a meadow. Choose— Tom Disch, from “Memoirs of a Primrose“
Castle garden, Meersburg, March 29, 2015.
I’m sorry that I had no porch for you on Sunday; we spent a long weekend in the town of Meersburg on Lake Constance, about an hour and a half south of Stuttgart.
Aside from its lakefront location (and a beautiful view of the Swiss Alps across the water), the town’s principal feature is the medieval Alte (old) Burg — Germany’s oldest inhabited castle.*
Its sweet little garden, tucked along a high wall, seems to reflect the presence of the castle’s most distinguished resident, the romantic poet Annette von Droste-Hülshoff. She frequently stayed there in the 1840s, when her brother-in-law owned it.
Her pretty rooms with their floral wallpapers have been carefully preserved — she died there in 1848.
You can see the position of the garden along the castle walls in this Wikipedia photo.
*Sections date as early as the 7th century.
Dear readers,
We’re now in Stuttgart (watching it snow), and enclos*ure is on a little break while I unpack all the moving boxes.
Bis später!
– Cindy
I recently discovered the beautiful German blog Gartenblick (Garden View) by Dusseldorf photographer Sibylle Pietrek.
I particularly liked this post about her small, but really lovely, roof terrace (dachterrace). I was impressed that the designer — Karim Rashid — could achieve a real sense of an edge of a meadow (with a lounge chair) in so few square feet.
In her post, Sibylle writes that she uses the space for “early evening aperitif, photo shoots, painting, reading, and painting nails.” And to catch the long autumn afternoon sun. What a nice refuge.
I’m starting to think about the possibilities for the flat porch roof of our house back in D.C. . . .
All the above photos: ©Sibylle Pietrek, used here with permission. Please check her blog before pinning or sharing.
Please check out Garden Rant’s review of October annuals at the Smithsonian Institution’s gardens. Again, why are the S.I. gardens so wonderful and its neighbor, the White House, has this?
Have you seen the online Landscape Architect’s Guide to Washington, D.C., featuring write-ups by 20 L.A.s on 75 historic and contemporary landscapes? I wish it were somewhat more opinionated (see above), but it’s useful for a visit to the Capital.
“The Global Garden,” the weekly series of the Los Angeles Times’s home and garden blog, explores “multicultural L.A. through the lens of its landscapes.” Now it has created a library of its posts, here. In the last year, the series has looked at sugar cane, shiso, loquat, purslane, moringa, sweet lemon, ice cream bean, and more. It will continue to update the archive with new material.
I really like this garden by the firm Covachita in San Pedro, Mexico (I believe it’s their studio). It effectively combines edgy modern urban with antique farm.
The “Urban Jungle” columns by Patterson Clark in The Washington Post are always so interesting, especially this recent one about milkweed (Asclepias syriaca — the light pink one). If yours left pods and white fluff all over your garden in September, consider how — during World War II — you (or your enterprising child) could have been paid about 15¢ a bushel for them. The Japanese occupation of Java had cut off supplies of kapok — a fiber (then) needed to fill life vests.
ADDENDUM: I clicked on ‘publish’ and then found one more. I have to admit I love this sort of thing.
enclos*ure 