I have such a tendency. Thus, this week we are in the midst of several weeks of spectacular July weather. It might be that there are a bunch of things that need to be done indoors, but it does not feel like indoors is the place you ought to be in a place where so often the weather is a tad on the dour side; beautiful, but damp, grey, etc. Right now, though, the world is glowing and it seems, at the very least, best to be out there watching it glow and maybe even glowing with it.
Also, in the summer, people come to visit and bring you round to activities you might not engage in at all or at least not so much as when they have not come to visit you. This past ten days, we have had a daughter visiting who comes with the skills of an engineer and the enthusiasm for projects of, well, I don't know...of a project enthusiast? In this case, she has joined in with her father to restore great swaths of order to our somewhat disorderly doings: outbuildings and porches are cleaned and organized; tools and lumber are made orderly and accessible; things that should go to the dump are identified and transported. So much work goes on every day that not working very hard seems a very slacker way to be living.
And, finally, another daughter sends a book about shade gardens. In the first few chapters, which I idly read about 6 days ago, the author explained how he came upon the need for creating a shade garden adjacent to his house, a 'green room,' as he called it. If this book had arrived in my life in May, I would have read it and enjoyed it and put it away. But this past week, what with the weather and the project mood, the book forced me to follow its lead. That's what I mean by suggestibility.
Thus, over the past four days, I have taken to renovating a 20x20 foot space adjacent to the back of our tiny house and turned it, or begun to turn it into a 'green room.' This area has never been cultivated in any organized way; it was covered with bushes and vines and grasses and buttercups and whatever. The project required, of course, that all that be removed. For two days, I simply dug up everything. Then I began to find things to give it more shape (e.g., an elderly 8x4.5 foot metal roof that was lying around was pressed into service as a wall to create a corner with the existing wooden fence). Half a dozen marble slabs that came from some other project that belonged to somebody who lived here before we did were lying around and were moved in to provide some paving. Various stacks of rotting wood were moved out and other pieces of more useful wood were moved in. Now there is a little deck where a chair can sit in case I want to sit in my shady green room. And there is a rock.
And, said the book's author, don't buy plants; just transplant them from somewhere else in your garden. Thus have I moved a hydrangea and a bunch of foxglove and lunaria plants, as well many little ground cover plants cuttings with roots or rootlets (creeping jenny and ajuga and lilies of the valley) into a concentrated area. And some potted parsley and feverfew. And a driftwood 'gate' that was providing no good in the back of the garden is now supported by a big alder and is being used to shelter my driftwood collection.
