Sounding off...

If I chimed in last time, I might as well sound off this time. After all, it's a new year, and another rollercoaster year of sense-skewed and long-winded blog posts straight from the noodle.

I couldn't be more excited about 2009, though. I'm going to be all over the map in the next 12 months doing what I love best: looking for plants, looking at plants, writing about plants, talking about plants, and planting a few things of my own in my garden here at Rainbow Farm. I'll share as much of it as I can muster with you. After all, keeping a blog is dreadfully hard work.

I realize of course that it's only January 9, and here in Iowa we've safely got another two months before hope dawns on any horizon. Yet I still ambled about the garden today, pretending to make the rounds as if it were June, inspecting and looking over my greenly subjects. Dwarf conifers are about the only greenly things left though, and even a few of them are showing signs of burning in the wake of bitterly cold temperatures (and more to come). The Chamaecyparis selections that I coddled through the summer thanklessly wither amongst the stones of my rock garden. The hellebores I've collected look pan-fried too.

But a few salient emblems of 2008 hang on, reminders of the bounty, joy, and all the seed I didn't but should've collected. Stiff legumes of Thermopsis montana, the mountain goldenbanner, jut out from behind a snow-smashed clump of bearded irises. The wispy, vase-like seed heads of Solidago drummondii hang over a stone outcropping in the rock garden, probably shedding their hairy cypselas amongst achilleas and centaureas; a confab of Asteraceae indeed. Another aster family perennial around the corner and to the east, the Maximilian sunflower with seven foot tall flower stalks, consumes its garden habitat and sprawls into the lawn, hydrant, and any unassuming passerby. Hollyhock stalks litter the backyard like limbs after a hurricane. 2009 will find the relocation of the hollyhock breeding to a field location, relieving the backyard of the Malvaceous menagerie.

Enjoyably the weather was suitable for my midwinter escapade. Temperatures in the low 50s quickly gave way though to the 20s by night fall. The cycle continues...

Upcoming engagements:
January 20: Lecture at the Iowa Turfgrass Conference on native plants
February 9: Lecture to the Muscatine Garden Club promoting The Iowa Gardener's Travel Guide