Red House Garden

It's been a busy couple of months here at the Red House Garden, trying to get plants and seedlings in the ground between heat waves.  Between making a new veggie garden, building pathways, building up beds, and deciding I wanted to move half of the plants I already have, I am almost glad for this current heat wave - it gives me an excuse to sit indoors and rest!

One project involved redoing the shade garden.  I've previously posted about the progression of my shade garden.  Last year I had a lot of annual impatiens in it, along with hostas, ferns, bleeding hearts, foxglove, and, of course, my little moss garden.

Last year's shade garden

This year I was eager to see how the garden would look when everything came back up, bare of the colorful annuals.

This year's shade garden

It's so great to see perennials filling in, and I was thrilled that one of my foxgloves overwintered and is now happily blooming again.  I am also excited to see several foxglove seedlings which will hopefully live to give me blooms next year - happy success for a garden that sits on pure, thick red clay.

Foxgloves blooming a second year

What was that you said?  This post is supposed to be about a seat for a shade garden?  Well then, on to rambling about that for awhile..

We've been on a mission for several months to find a proper seat for the shade garden, which would enable us to actually be able to sit out in the garden during the hot summer!  It was Mr. Red House who found it when we were out at the Stone Center over in Durham.

Bench made out of Tennessee sandstone

Their stonemason makes gorgeous benches of out of random 'scrap' stone.  Mr. Red House loved it, and since I've put the kibosh on some of his other garden requests (a Weeping Willow tree and a giant Redwood tree, neither of which we have suitable room for!), I let him have it.  
(Okay, I do have to admit I loved the bench too..)

The painful part - digging up all the plants

storing all the plants on a tarp

Add bench and stepping stone, then add back in all the plants

hostas, bleeding hearts, and moss

new little moss garden

For the New Year we were up in the Northeast, visiting relatives of Mr. Red House.  My mother-in-law is a gardener and has a beautiful collection of houseplants.  I love seeing them, especially since I don't currently have any houseplants, mainly due to a cat who can't resist munching on anything even remotely green.  (You should see the begging that goes on in my house whenever I eat a salad.)


I love my mother-in-law's exquisite collection of containers.  She keeps an extensive container garden outside during the summer months, but then brings many of them in for the winter.  Looking a little closer, the plants are made even more beautiful by her overwintering habit of covering the soil with soft pieces of woodland moss.

Cup o' Moss

Backstory:
On the way to NJ last week, Mr. Red House was patted down by the TSA.  Then he was led away to another room for another pat down by the supervisor, as something on the glove that he was first patted down with set off alarms.  The TSA were very nice about it (and kudos to our two little kids plaintively crying, "Daddy!  Daddy!" throughout most of it), and revealed that this was due to nitrates found on the glove as well as on the bottom of Mr. Red House's bag.

Nitrates.  As from fertilizers.  As from plants that I am constantly filling the car with during my plant shopping sprees.

So Mr. Red House blames me for the whole TSA debacle, and I must say, I can't really blame him.


Fast Forward:
After finding out how much I love moss, Radhika, whose house we stayed at, generously and rather gleefully took to her moss with an ice scraper and gave me some.  (I can't grow moss; she, apparently, can't get rid of it.)  I carefully packed the moss in damp paper towels and plastic bags and packed it in my suitcase for the trip home.

After the whole nitrate incident, I was rather worried that my suitcase would send off some sort of TSA alarm.  Images of TSA employees rifling through my delicate sheets of moss with puzzled looks on their faces kept popping into my head, compelling me to write notes for my moss, "FRAGILE: PLANTS!", for anyone who looked into my suitcase of contraband.

Thankfully my suitcase must have not triggered any alarms, as I don't think anyone even opened it.  My untroubled, valuable moss is now in its new home.