MARIETTE'S BACK TO BASICS

Saturday, March 9, 2013

One of our most favorite spring bulbs have been the Double Peony Tulips Angelique & Mount Tacoma. The Angelique is a pink double peony tulip and the Mount Tacoma is a pure white double peony tulip.
First we bought them at the tax free airport of Schiphol, Amsterdam in The Netherlands. So anxious to see those bloom and it was quite a show.

Gorgeous display of Angelique in front and Mount Tacoma in the back with white creeping phlox.
But over time, they did disappear... WHY? Read further below for finding out.

Me touching one of those fragrant Mount Tacoma Double Peony Tulips.
We did learn that they are being eaten as gourmet food by e.g. VOLES.
No, not moles, but voles.
One day when husband Pieter went to fill the bird feeders with seeds, he stepped over those tulip beds and in doing so he just saw one tulip stem disappear into the ground.
So after filling up those feeders, he investigated; with a shovel he dug up that particular tulip and he showed me a half eaten bulb and even the stem with the bloom had been nibbled off and that was the reason he saw it going into the ground.
AHA; we learned that those critters eat all the tulip bulbs and other bulbs; but not daffodils as those are poisonous.
SAD fact but we no longer have these beauties in our garden. As gourmet food they are too expensive for replacing them every couple of years.

This single Mount Tacoma Double Peony Tulip was our ONLY one survivor for 2010...
Those voles left us with ONE bulb; isn't that generous?!
Does any of you have tulips in the garden?
AND have voles to feed...?

While scanning old slides I came across this one from 1994, showing you Our Wood Trail.
Husband Pieter had dug the ditches and build this wooden walk way, all the way from the gazebo to the greenhouse. That was our first water control project to rid the property of some wet spots.

From here you are looking at the gazebo and the back of the house, towards the road.
We only could start with our gardening after we came home from our 3 years of working and living in Indonesia.
This was the beginning of our lush garden with cute wrens bird house on the tree.

Azalea Helen Curtis is blooming here

Same Wood Trail, 17 years later... The wrens bird house still on the tree.
This photo is taken in the opposite direction.
The ditches have been filled up with the dirt that came out of the basement when Pieter dug it out for building the Rose Suite.
That were 60 tons of dirt and it ended up on the side and in the ditches and on the back of our property near the creek. You can't even tell it was that much.

Do any of you have a walk way into the garden?

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{205 Winfield Road Then and Now} | previous post by me

Wow, I'm finally FREE again... after 3 days in Superior Court as one of 12 Jurors for a Criminal Case. I'd been summoned several times before, once by the District Court in Augusta, Georgia which is a two hour drive away from where we live. That was on April 25, 2005 and luckily I got out of it. We had booked our 3 free nights at the Cypress Gardens Hyatt hotel in Orlando, Florida and we did not like to miss that! Previously to that, I'd been summoned a few times here in Laurens County but never had to actually serve; neither has Pieter.
Monday it turned out that I was on, together with 11 others and 1 alternate. Very lengthy procedure and kind of hard to sit through without any window; neither in our juror room, nor the court room. But today we got to the deliberation of this criminal case and I performed as foreperson. We came to a unanimous decision for the verdict of the person being tried; being guilty on one of two counts. Glad it is over with!
Knowing the language is one thing but it is very hard to listen to all evidence, witnesses, audio and video in a language other than your mother tongue. Especially on subjects that are not your daily routine. But I did it and gained some experience for maybe future jury duty.

The pay for such Jury Duty is by law US $ 25.00 per day; that's IT.