New York Summer: Tilia on Bergen

The sun sets here, too

Solstice

Below, a lily on the terrace, looking a little supercilious. It's going to be pretty.

Pretty is underrated, you know. That was a whole tangent of a conversation this morning on site, between an architect, her two clients and me, about whether to have flowers or not. The architect was leaning against pretty. Also against anything variegated. Hm - Gerard Manley Hopkins*. The quiet wife whose house it is, wanted lots of flowering plants, I knew. The husband was wanting roses but also wanted to appear cool. We reached a happy medium. It's going to be a nice garden, just round the corner from me, on Baltic. On either side of the property, their neighbours are growing string beans, garlic chives, and have cherries heavy with fruit.

While we are getting on, or not getting on, with our varied lives - happy, sad, doomed, promising, exciting, drab, stressed, inspiring, regretted, habitual, the fig is growing.

* Pied Beauty - Gerard Manley Hopkins

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

New York Summer: daylilies on Amity Street

You know, you can even eat the spent blooms. The Chinese do. This courtesy of Stalking the Wild Asparagus.

Watermelon and feta salad

For a summer evening: and this should not wait around. Though the juice that accumulates is pretty delicious...

Equal parts, chunks of: watermelon, cucumber, feta

Optional: red onion, sliced thinly, radish, basil

A light dressing of red wine vinegar, into which a dash of salt and sugar are dissolved, black pepper, the teeniest slosh of EV olive oil, thoughI prefer none, in this case.

Soapbox: a lot depends on the feta. I went through every feta I could find in South Africa, becoming more rancourous with each rejected bite. They were chalky, dry, blegh. I want feta to be firm, but creamy; crumbly, but creamy; salty, but creamy...Sahadi's French feta has spoiled me for life.

Summer still life

Tribeca garden

This was Monday. Three men, Kevin, Nick and Joe, heaved and sweated and pulled and shoved and sawed and pulled and pulled. The blues played loudly over the terrace's speakers...They were removing three large fir trees (to be replaced by crabapples) from their planters and the roots did not want to leave their Tribeca pad. I was sympathetic. It was day one of a major garden makeover, before we went shopping yesterday. It's not glamorous, it's not fun; it is very hard work. But it is quite rewarding at the end of the day, when everything is clean again and a semi-blank canvas starts to present itself. Makeovers are always harder than starting fresh, because existing elements of the garden must be incorporated without looking odd, and someone else's "vision" needs to be ERASED, I mean transformed, as subtly as possible.


Below, this is Nick, today, representing some new gardening blood recently hired, sawing at the very potbound roots of a Japanese maple. One of the challenges of container gardening, with container-grown plants. He said rather carefully, This is more brutal than the type of gardening I was taught.

I know, son, I said, welcome to New York! And blessed him for being taught at all. It is a pleasure to work with people who love plants, and he does. He speaks fluent Spanish and Portuguese and Paulo, our resident Brazilian, beamed all day in response.

Fast forward: the Swiss chard perking up in the kitchen garden after a thorough soaking. The new boxwood hedge in the background immediately changed the space and made it more intimate.

The two espaliered Mackintoshes were retied to their cross-pieces and upright supports with velcro ties: easily removed and super-strong. It gave me a new appreciation for this art of tree-training - I stood up there for about two hours taking off the old plastic ties and making sure the trees would remain supported in wind. It is a sweet thing to be balancing on a high floor, looking down at the traffic patterns below, the thunderclouds above, the silver Chrysler Building gleaming in the distance in a shaft of sunlight, and then to refocus on the apple branch 8 inches from your face...it is one of the best ways of belonging to the city.

Sir Fred's custom-made planters looking lovely.

Below, gardener Linda planting the perennials beside the area where the dining table will be. The irises drooped initially but again, a nice drink perked them up.

Roses, gaura, hardy geranium, Japanese iris, nicotiana, common sage and good old lavender.