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Poisonous beauty
Once I bought small lupin plants to add them to my flower bed, they are such lovely flowers. But soon I found out that they are not only lovely-looking but also quickly-spreading and deep-rooting. If you don’t keep them at bay, they shamelessly displace other more modest plants. The other day I read an interesting and actually quite alarming article describing how mountain meadows in the national park Giant Mountains (Krkonoše) get overgrown with lupins preventing the smaller original plants from thriving and rendering the hay worthless because of their poisonous properties. Would you believe that only 100 grams of lupin seeds can poison a sheep? If I just imagine…
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Our rebuilt rock garden 2 years later
Two years ago my husband and I devoted lots of time and effort to rebuilding our neglected rock garden, you can read about the whole process in this post. I was quite surprised to see how quickly the seedlings that I used from the original rock plants settled and spread. Only the Sempervivum varieties – especially the smaller ones – seem to need more time to cover the space which I assigned them to. On the other hand, some of the other plants have already tried to occupy neighbouring areas… Here are a few photos of and from the rock garden. It looks rather flat in the pictures, in reality it…
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About changes and beginnings
Sometimes, when I make a change or begin something new, I wish I could go back in time and apply the change to the past as well so that all the previous occurrences were tinted with it. Yeah, I know, it’s nonsense. How could that ever be a change or something new, if it was there all the time? But sometimes I find it really difficult to resist and make a bold line between what was and what is going to be…. even in the smallest unimportant things. For example, I’d like to go back through all of my posts here to improve their photos based on my current skills…
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Do you like lupins?
Lupins are in full bloom in our garden now and that is a joy to behold, I love them. But the truth is that if you didn’t restrict them, they would force out and displace other less expansive flowers. I’ve learnt that in gardening as well as in life one needs to remove even what is beautiful when it’s out of place and doesn’t add to achieving balance…
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Sempervivum fantasy
I used to think that life has to be crystal clear and sharp, with obvious edges and unambiguous shapes. Yet gradually I’ve learnt that life can also be fuzzy, with undistinctive curves and curious colours, and still be nice and enriching. One simply needs to grow to appreciate some aspects of the existence…
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Rock garden rebuilding
Wherever you dig in our garden, you most probably hit a stone. There are so many of them hidden beneath the surface that after each building work in the garden we get a new heap of stones of all sizes. What can you do with all of them? You can either use them or throw them away but you can’t simply dump them into a bin or somewhere, they are heavy and too many. No wonder then that one of our ideas for using the superfluous stones was to build a rock garden and place many of them there, so about 14 years ago my husband and I created our…
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Thoughts on maintaining order
When we got stuck at home during the corona crisis, I decided it would be a good time to remake our rock garden. We created it long time ago and throughout the years its weaknesses became evident and it got somewhat neglected. With my husband helping me doing the most challenging work, the reconstruction was finished in about four months and three weeks ago I planted fresh cuttings from some of the old plants. The cuttings settled well, faster than I expected, and even started to grow. But with them, new weed appeared, spread quite quickly and needed to be removed to keep the earth clear. So I’ve done the…
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Appeal of gardening
Is gardening an acquired taste or do you need to have particular genes to enjoy working in the garden? I loved my grandma’s garden since childhood but for our children (who actually are not kids any more), our garden represents just hard and repetitive work. Yes mom, the flowers are nice, the gooseberries are good, but don’t pressure us to waste our precious time by performing those tiresome and boring gardening activities… How could I make them understand? Perhaps YOU understand? OK, I won’t torture you by asking such questions, I’ll rather share some of the beauty I find worthy of the gardening effort. First, would you recognise the plants…
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Build up when creating your art
I make the same mistake all over on my photography path. I always want and almost expect to get my camera out, take a photo and be a witness to how great an image I created. Stupid, right? It happens here and there that the first photo is good, sometimes better than the following ones but much more often I need to start somewhere, immerse myself in the photography mood and build up. The same applies to editing. I edit a photo or two and don’t like any of that, but the process may give me an idea for editing an absolutely different photo. Like in case of this lawn…
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Feel the calm
There are so many unnecessary words written and spoken, the universe hums and resonates with them. So you will surely forgive me when today I won’t add many in this post… … but will share just some colours and the atmosphere of calmness and tranquillity that I found in our garden. May they enrich your day.
