Happy daylilies

Nearly everything green in this photo is a weed of some kind. Last year I pulled all the weeds around the daylilies, thinking that I would be rewarded with a blizzard of bloom like this one. Instead, the daylily leaves all flopped over and died. Bloom time came and went, and the whole area was covered with what looked like moldy hay. I was sure these guys were goners, but look at them now! God, if I ever figure out how this garden thing works, I'll be so gratified.

I should mention that everything in the photo is also inherited: it was here when we moved in. Someone, or several someones, worked very hard on this property to have the gardens they dreamed of. And then they moved away. I'm trying to be very careful not to destroy their hard work while I put my stamp -- so far barely visible -- on this garden.

That said, I ruthlessly destroyed the charming cottage garden round the kitchen door, because it was all pink, a color I dislike, and I wanted a kitchen garden. Herbs, dammit! Something practical, not that dimity Thomas Kincaide nonsense. Interestingly (and maybe not surprisingly) the plants in the charming cottage garden were mostly invasive and indestructible; 3 years later I'm still digging up violets and columbines, though I think I've finally defeated the mallows. Do not mourn the cottage garden; I transplanted everything and its several components are now thriving elsewhere. The hostas are posted along the shady back of the house (to be joined one of these years, whenever I can find time to go dig some up, by ferns), though I unfortunately transplanted one of the gorgeous blue ones too close to the grey water outlet, and it's dying from thermal pollution. Or maybe it's the fact that it's also in the inevitable path of the garden cart and keeps getting crushed.

But this climate creates, for 3 months, the sort of jungle environment that so horrified certain 20th-century novelists and filmmakers. Vile fecundity; creeping, writhing, loathsome bounty ("It's the enormity of perfected and overwhelming murder. ... We have to humble ourselves in the face of all this overwhelming misery, fornication ..."). The summer is so short that everything has to burgeon rapidly, swell and reproduce and spit its progeny before frost, which on this hillside is not reliably over yet and can recommence in August. So that hosta, being motivated, has a prayer if I can get to it, dig it up, and move it soon.