{"id":3059,"date":"2020-05-18T08:59:06","date_gmt":"2020-05-18T16:59:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/?p=3059"},"modified":"2020-05-18T08:59:06","modified_gmt":"2020-05-18T16:59:06","slug":"flowery-mead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/flowery-mead\/","title":{"rendered":"Flowery Mead"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Flowery<\/a>Back in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, European weavers created large tapestries that depicted tales from history or mythology.\u00a0 They adorned the backgrounds of those tapestries with hundreds of small, irregularly-spaced flowers, often against a green or dark background.\u00a0 This style, called \u201cmillefleur\u201d, meaning \u201cthousand flowers\u201d was meant to suggest a flower-filled field.\u00a0 The best known example is the famous \u201cThe Lady and the Unicorn\u201d tapestry series created by Flemish weavers around 1500 and now housed in New York\u2019s Metropolitan Museum of Art.<\/p>\n

When I look at my backyard in spring, I think that all I need is a unicorn.\u00a0 The grassy area\u2014which is not large enough to be called a field, or even a proper lawn\u2014is dotted with hundreds of common violets\u2014Viola soraria– in white, purple and bi-colored varieties.\u00a0 The violets are augmented by an abundant number of ajugas or Ajuga reptans, with dark purple basal leaves and plump blue flower spikes rising six inches above the floral fray.\u00a0 Elbowing the ajugas are a host of Spanish bluebells or Hyacinthoides hispanica.\u00a0 \u201cBluebells\u201d is a misnomer, because the majority of them are pink with blue overtones.\u00a0 Some are true blue and a very few are white.\u00a0 Crowds of forget-me-nots or Myosotis surge around the edges of this flowery mead.\u00a0 Every once in awhile, a few pink forget-me-nots manage to prevail over their blue-flowered relatives.\u00a0 They are just numerous enough to draw the eye for a moment.<\/p>\n

People who like putting green-style lawns would be appalled at this array of perennial weeds and weedy perennials.\u00a0 I love them and even if I didn\u2019t, I would have to acknowledge that they are the colorful lemonade that Nature and I have made out of the lemons of thin soil.<\/p>\n

Grass is hard to grow in my lower backyard.\u00a0 Roots from the neighbors\u2019 large trees have spread through the area, guzzling nutrients that would help nourish conventional lawn grass.\u00a0 I have enriched the surrounding garden beds with organic material to encourage mixed plantings of shrubs, perennials and annuals, but have not invested that kind of effort in the lawn.\u00a0 To be perfectly honest, lawn grass is one of the few plants for which I feel almost no affinity.\u00a0 I can\u2019t imagine communing with it in the way that I commune with my ornamental plants.\u00a0 I am not particularly interested in its history.\u00a0 Lawn grass, in short, does not sing to me, though it often produces curses when it strays into the garden beds.\"Flowery<\/a><\/p>\n

So, I let the spring flowers rampage over the lawn area in the backyard.\u00a0 The purple violets appear first, followed by their white and bi-colored relatives, which are then joined by the forget-me-nots.\u00a0 The ajugas and Spanish bluebells, being larger and showier, arrive last in a wave of color.\u00a0 In a cool spring like this one, all the flowers hang around for a lengthy period, producing a tapestry-like effect.\u00a0 I wait to mow what little grass exists in between all those volunteer plants until the flowers have faded.\u00a0 This means that parts of the lawn\/tapestry look a little untidy from time to time as grass tries to grow up in its midst.\u00a0 I put up with that, or rather, I choose not to see that, because I am so enamored of the flowers.<\/p>\n

Where did all these plants come from?\u00a0 I would like to take credit for them, but I am responsible for little other than encouraging them.\u00a0 The white and purple violets were here when I arrived.\u00a0 They multiply faster than rabbits and I have let them have their way with the property.\u00a0 The bi-colored violets, which are white with blue\/purple freckles, are descendents of a blue-centered white violet given to me by a friend years ago.\u00a0 I installed it in my garden and it returned the following year with freckles instead of a central blue patch.\u00a0 Go figure.<\/p>\n

The ajuga were also on site when we bought the house.\u00a0 Ajuga spreads via runners and the runners run wild at my place.\u00a0 The Spanish bluebells were also here.\u00a0 They grow from small bulbs, with the bulbs producing offsets that expand the clumps.\u00a0 I think the squirrels, virtually brainless, but ever ready to transplant anything, have helped the spread of the bluebells.<\/p>\n

The forget-me-nots are descended from a single clump donated by a friend shortly after we moved in.\u00a0 They have self seeded and jumped around like fleas on a dog\u2019s back.\u00a0 If I pull some out accidentally, they come back twice as vigorously the following year.<\/p>\n

The best part of all this verdure is that four-legged plant predators do not eat any of it.\u00a0 The resident groundhog, which has already taken on the dimensions of the mature Orson Welles, ignores them as it waddles rapidly through the flowers.\u00a0 The deer may walk on the ajuga, but the flower spikes generally spring back up and the basal leaves are unaffected.\u00a0 It would take a nuclear attack to deter the bluebells.<\/p>\n

I call my flowery mead a success.\u00a0 Since it is in the back, most people don\u2019t see it.\u00a0 Slaves to garden tidiness would probably turn up their noses, but since their noses are rarely on the premises, I am free to enjoy both the flowers and the absence of guilt that comes with them.\"Flowery<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, European weavers created large tapestries that depicted tales from history or mythology.\u00a0 They adorned the backgrounds of those tapestries with hundreds of small, irregularly-spaced flowers, often against a green or dark background.\u00a0 This style, called \u201cmillefleur\u201d, meaning \u201cthousand flowers\u201d was meant to suggest a flower-filled field.\u00a0 The best … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,2,3],"tags":[909,2305,2299,2300,2302,2301,2303,1861,2304,2064],"class_list":["post-3059","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall","category-general-interest","category-spring","category-summer","tag-ajuga","tag-ajuga-reptans","tag-flowery-mead","tag-forget-menot","tag-hyacinthoides-hispanica","tag-myosotis","tag-spanish-bluebells","tag-spring-garden","tag-viola-soraria","tag-violets"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3059"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3059\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3063,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3059\/revisions\/3063"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}