More gardening and meditating

When we bought this house in 1999, the landscaping was pretty minimal, although there was a nice picket fence along the front.After me moved here, a local woman befriended me and gifted me with an enormous amount of perennial plants: hostas, Siberian iris, miniature Japanese iris, day lilies and other items she was thinning from her beds. Every June, when the day lilies bloom, I thank her for her generosity. She was also very helpful with getting beds started all along the inside of the picket fence ... about 150 feet of flower beds ... and that's just one of the 16 gardens or beds on the property. Another friend has given us many varieties of day lilies which she and her husband collect and grow.
Here's what it looks like now.
Getting back to the meditating ... as I've been thinning the beds, it's given me time to reflect on lots of things ... getting older, taking control, and how tangled parts of our life can become. It has been a very cathartic exercise because there really IS no plan ... for the gardens, for life, for the future. It is whatever we make it, good or bad. Do we control our own destiny, or was it decided for us before we were born? What do you think?

Gardening and meditating

I've been working in the dirt. Nightly. Daily. Whenever the heat was bearable.

We have had a lot of rain this spring and weeds are everywhere. But so are flowers ... so many that I'm thinning out the beds. If you want to stop by, there's iris, day lillies and hostas to the first comers.

The pictures are the newly reworked plate garden. I've doubled the plates so that it's pretty from both sides now (sounds like a Joni Mitchell song!) ... the gate is a wrought iron creation of cattails and iris from an Indiana blacksmith, Dean Howard.

More pictures later. Back to the weeding.

Apologies to my followers ... both of them!

I had the most wonderful surprise visit this week from Ingrid and Richard from Wisconsin. We had emailed a couple times and I knew they were coming to the area for a vacation and wanted to see the studio, but they really just "dropped in" Tuesday around lunch time. She was "technically" here to buy some rug warp, but we had a great time discussing looms and jobs and travels and anything else that came to mind.
Ingrid is a fairly new weaver and hasn't found other like-minded fiber folk in her area of western Wisconsin so relies on the Internet for support. Including my blog ... who would have thought that? I didn't think anyone was reading this! So, Ingrid, this post is for you!
And Ingrid's visit really made me realize why I have the open weaving studio. I want to be a place where people can come and ask questions and get advice about problems they are having with their looms and weaving. I don't know all the answers, but I definitely have opinions on a lot of topics and do my best to help.