I am a big, big believer in gardening on the cheap, which means I divide any perennials that will tolerate it. Which is most of them. But sometimes…well, it doesn’t work out exactly as planned. See evidence at left. Can you find the hostas?

Last summer, this was a bed of badly crowded daylilies, and not even particularly pretty ones, just your garden-variety (sorry) orange ditch lilies. But whatever. They weren’t blooming here, just taking up space, and I had some bare spots here and there, so I spent backbreaking hours digging, dividing, replanting. When I was finished, this little spot had just a handful of daylilies left next to the fence, leaving lots of lovely bare ground in which to plant the hostas I bought (and divided) at the end of the season.

I could see the hostas were in trouble by the end of May. Here’s a more recent shot, taken just a few days ago:

Granted, this is from a different angle, but trust me: The hostas aren’t any more visible when you’re looking at this bed straight-on. Which leads me to wonder: WTF? And the daylilies still didn’t bloom.

So now what? There’s no way I’m wading in and digging the rest of these suckers out; the ones I transplanted didn’t do that well, either, so the hell with that. My inclination is to just yank out the foliage, maybe on a really wet day when some of the roots will come up with the leaves, and at least give the hostas some space to breathe. As for the daylilies I planted in other parts of the yard, they have one more season to redeem themselves. So much for daylilies thriving anywhere.

Oh, and I’d just like to say: The mosquitoes this year? Brutal. I braved the raspberry patch for 10 minutes last night—I cannot let them go to waste!—and ended up with so many bites I looked like a damn leper. I took a quick shower, but the itching was so unbearable I needed a Benadryl to calm it enough for me to sleep. Worst of all, I had a bite under one eye. Nothing you can do about that.

Tonight, during a lull between tornado warnings and flood watches, I took advantage of the slightly cooler temps to weed the front garden bed, which is in a less-verdant part of the yard and has fewer places for skeeters to hide. Stupid, stupid, stupid. And now I have a mosquito bite on my eyelid. Anybody know of a mosquito repellent that will keep these things away from my face? At this point, I’m desperate enough to try just about anything. A necklace of garlic cloves? Mustard plaster? I’m all ears.

If I had the stomach for it, I would keep track of the time I spend every year trimming back this tree and seven others like it. Four are parked rightupnextto the house; the others are in front of a fence. It’s pretty obvious that the previous owner—let’s call her Betty—wanted vertical elements in these spots. Along the house, they make a certain amount of sense, because they break up an otherwise extremely dull expanse of siding. But couldn’t she have picked something that would’ve been vertical and a little less labor-intensive?

Our first summer here, I puzzled over these things for a long time, trying to figure out how to prune them. There is no central trunk; rather, there are dozens of stems, most of them dead, around which Betty apparently painstakingly threaded and twined the shoots of new growth. The trunks—for want of a better term—are tangled and interwoven in a way that is utterly confounding. And since most of the wood in the middle is dead, the new shoots tend to flop over, making a godawful mess that is absolute hell to cut back. I never know where to start. And it’s such a big job (the by-the-house trees were already above the soffits in mid-May) that I can never manage to cut all the trees in a single day, which means they never match. Something’s always too short, too sparse, or too overgrown.

This year I decided on draconian measures and just cut the hell out of them, lopping all of them from 10-12 feet down to about 6. I finished the last one, shown above, this afternoon. Yes, it looks sparse. But so did its brothers around the corner when I hacked them back less than a month ago. And just look at ’em now:

They already need trimming again. Feh!

To add insult to injury, when I came inside to recuperate, I felt a bug crawling on my neck. I brushed it away, and it fell right into my cleavage—never a good thing. I fished it out and it fell into our plush new carpet, where it burrowed like a mother. I finally extracted it, with some difficulty…and it was a Japanese beetle. I’d noticed holes in the tree’s leaves when I was trimming but didn’t think much about it, because frankly I just don’t care. Stupid high-maintenance tree.

So now I have a dilemma: Try to get rid of the beetles, or just let nature take its course? I know, I know: Japanese beetles + landscape plants = bad. But I’m telling you, it’s extremely tempting to just stand back and let the dominant species win.

We have delightful developments to report on the birdwatching front: birds and more birds in my backyard.

I’m testing a solar-powered birdbath fountain for work, and was near the end of my rope with it until I realized my existing birdbath was too shallow. (The old one is a terra cotta plant dish with a lovely mosaic pattern and perched on top of a pot—sort of like this birdbath, except my pot base isn’t nearly as pretty.)

The fountain worked when I tested it in a big soup kettle, bubbling like crazy—so it was off to Wild Birds Unlimited to find a properly deep birdbath. It’s now set up at the edge of the patio, the fountain is burbling soothingly, and I’m just waiting for the birds to find it. Wish I had a picture for you, but when I picked my camera up, it was strangely light. My kids had once again pilfered the batteries—which I just recharged two days ago, on my own charger; hmpf! They think juice for their Wii controllers is more important than providing photos for my blog. They are wrong.

I’m convinced the birds know there’s some new toy out there for them, because the birdsong level got louder and considerably more excited as soon as the fountain kicked in. The racket out there is ridiculous. And I just refilled the feeder in the adjacent lilac, so we should have bathers any time now. (And if you’re wondering whether birdbaths attract mosquitoes, they don’t if the water’s moving. There are products you can buy—like Mosquito Dunks —to keep skeeters from breeding in birdbaths, ponds and other water features, but I won’t be needing those. Heh.)

While I was admiring the fountain, I noticed activity in a birdhouse in the same lilac. I put it up last spring and the birds studiously ignored it. But it’s pretty—ceramic, cobalt blue, with nice curvy lines—and I enjoy just looking at it, whether the birds use it or not, so I left it in the same spot. Now a bird couple—jenny wrens, I think—are building a nest there. One brings impossibly long twigs to the opening and jams them in while the other hovers and chirps encouragingly. (Or bossily, if you’re the glass-half-empty misogynistic type.) Some of the twigs were at least a foot long, and most of those ended up on the ground, but you’ve gotta give the bird points for effort. It looked like a tightrope walker maneuvering a balancing pole.

All of the above adds up to sweet solace on a day when I also discovered the deer finally did find and ingest my single red rose. (A clean cut on the stem, and not a rose petal in sight.) Ah, well. One nice thing about having a big yard with lots of attendant wildlife: For every minor disappointment, there’s a new marvel to take its place.

It blooms! Wonder of wonders. Now if I can just get this sucker to climb and keep blooming. But even if this is the only rose I see all summer, I’ll be happy. It stood up to yet another torrential thunderstorm last night—the kind that leaves you quaking in bed at 4 a.m., counting the seconds between the flash that lights up the entire bedroom and the piercing thunderclap that follows. A huge limb came down in the side yard and the two honey locusts dropped smaller branches everywhere, and the normally dry swale separating our backyard from the neighbors’ looked like a swollen creek. But the rose is still there. It’s my little miracle.

Raspberry harvest is picking up, too. I got eight edible berries today and had to toss only two. An 80 percent success rate, compared to yesterday’s discouraging 33 percent. Gotta love those numbers.

Did a little weeding last night before the storms moved in, but didn’t last long. The wild strawberries are back in an area I’d completely cleaned out just a few weeks ago—attention must be paid!—but I could stomach only about 20 minutes before heading back inside. Even the slightest movement stirs up a cloud of mosquitoes and other biting nuisances. Our lawn guys recommended an insecticide application this year to get rid of the anthills in the yard—I’m convinced our entire community is built on one monstrous anthill—and tamp down the mosquito population in all the plants and shrubbery. We’ve never even contemplated such a move before; we tend to be anti-chemical, and in previous summers, we’ve just mowed around the anthills and dealt with the skeeters by using a mosquito lantern. But, as we know, this summer is not going to be like the previous ones. It’s us or them.

I do want to give a shout-out to my patio mosquito solution, however. It’s called ThermaCELL (available at your friendly neighborhood Target) and it’s a marvel—a small lantern powered by a butane cartridge. The wick inside is lit with the push of a button, and the heat rises to the top, where it activates a small blue pad that emits a slow, long-lasting dose of repellent that keeps the skeeters at bay within a 15-square-foot area. There’s no flame, no smell, no batteries or extension cords, nothing scary to slather on your skin, and it works. Smaller hand-held models can be used in the garden…which is probably what I ought to be doing.

Let the record show this is the first raspberry of summer. I hope the photo is sharp enough, because I can’t take another one; the goal was to document the first ripe fruit, and I already ate it. The total take was just a half-dozen or so, but it’s only the beginning. Raspberries in my cereal! Raspberries for breakfast! Raspberry pie! Couldn’t be happier.

To tell the truth, I enjoy the harvest as much as the eating. Picking raspberries is an exercise in patience, not one of my top-tier traits. You can’t pick too fast or you’ll drop the fruit. You can’t tromp into the bed with guns blazing or you’ll trample the canes. You can’t pinch off berries that aren’t really ready to be picked; you’ll either squash them or drop them, or both. It takes forever to get a bowlful, and that’s okay with me. During berry-picking season, the time I spend with the raspberries is probably the sanest part of my day.

It was a little disconcerting to have to throw two of the berries back to the birds because of moldy spots. Very few berries showed mold last year, but we’ve had an unusually wet spring and summer this year. So maybe this crop will need more picking-over than usual. But that’s okay. Any and all extra effort is absolutely worth the reward.

A wise man—our lovely and talented Webmaster—told me when I started this blog venture that nothing kills traffic faster than failing to update regularly. Then your readers assume you’re off doing something else. Well, I was.

Since my last post, we’ve been dealing with lots of things that have nothing to do with gardening. A serious health scare for my sister (she’s fine now, but it was terrifying for a while), a trip out of town to see her, a car purchase, startling developments at work, and a couple of pesky household problems involving trees and water damage to the master bedroom. I’ve been a wee bit, how you say, distracted.

But we’re back now, and I hereby resolve to do better by all six of my readers. If there are six of you left.

Today’s garden photo: Further evidence that this growing season will defy all attempts at prognostication. I planted a climbing rose a couple of years ago and stuck a bit of old storm-door trim behind it in hopes it would climb through it. Climb it has, but the plant has never bloomed.

Imagine my surprise when I spotted this bud a few days ago. The deer have helped themselves to every rose I’ve planted (the others are all dead; thank you, Bambi!), so I didn’t have much hope for this one, either. But the three spireas around it are growing like weeds this year, so they may be making it a little more difficult for the deer to wade in and chomp. The spireas will need to be cut back eventually; I know precious little about roses, but they’re supposed to have good air circulation, and the spireas are definitely crowding this plant. But that will have to wait. The spireas are blooming madly themselves, and since the planets have aligned, inexplicably, to produce this single rosebud, I’m not mucking with the works until it flowers and fades.

I’m feeling rather pleased with myself today. Got the last of the yews trimmed—no small task, as they’re in front of the house and wind around the side, and they’re also in front of the garage and wind around that. Enlisted the 16-year-old to help; it’s about time someone besides me can handle this chore. I also tackled a monster bed of unidentified shrubbery shielding the windows of the Elvis Room (more on that in a minute). All this, plus cleanup, took several hours. It’s now raining in a near-biblical fashion, and I’m glad it’s all done.

Funny thing about training somebody else to do some of what I do, though: I really don’t want to. It isn’t that I don’t need the help. There’s a chance my part-time job will be full-time by the end of the summer, and I’m agonizing over how to stay on top of all the yard and garden chores without my afternoons free. But I’m loath to give any of it up.

We didn’t have much in the way of gardens when I was a kid, but my grandmothers had the sorts of garden plots you see in magazines, heavy with vegetables for canning and lovely old-fashioned flowers like zinnias and intriguing oddities like gigantic castor bean plants. (Those kept away the moles, or so the old wives’ tale went.) They appreciated the beauty, I’m sure, but they gardened for survival. Both of them started their families during the Depression, and both of them canned the summer’s bounty for as long as their health allowed. If the banks folded again, there’d be no food shortage in their houses.

I can’t grow a vegetable (save lettuce) to save my life in this shady haven, but puttering around with perennials, yanking weeds and trimming trees and shrubs is essential to my mental health. We had a nutty week here—a major health crisis for my sister, and lots of money flowing out for long-planned projects and purchases. The garden was my escape from all that.

I’m just old enough to see retirement on the distant horizon, and maybe that brings an extra sense of urgency to these tasks. Someday I won’t have the stamina to spend four hours of a late-spring day wielding hedge trimmers. My husband is already past that point, but this stuff was never his thing anyway. He appreciates what I do to keep the yard looking presentable, but he doesn’t have the interest (or the knees) to do it himself.

I try not to think about this too much, that someday all this will be only memory. I’m reminded of a Galway Kinnell poem that warns against imaging the end of things and suggests embracing the moment instead. (At least I think that’s the point; feel free to correct me.) It’s a poem about lovers, but it still resonates with me, decades after I first read it:

If one day it happens
you find yourself with someone you love
in a cafe at one end
of the Pont Mirabeau, at the zinc bar
where white wine stands in upward opening glasses,

The still undanced cadence of vanishing.

And lest we end on that heavy note, an explanation about the Elvis Room. When we got married, two friends of mine from Indiana presented us with a gift they insisted we open at the wedding reception. It was a singularly hideous bust of Elvis. They saw it at a gas station in Chicago on their way to the nuptials and, well, they just had to have it. It occupies a place of honor on the mantel above the fireplace in the family room. We are always arguing about what that room should be called (“family room” just never caught on, and it isn’t the basement exactly because the windows look out at ground level, and I refuse to call it—as my husband does—”the ground floor”). So I’ve rechristened it the Elvis Room. We knew Elvis was going into this spot when we moved in and realized there was a remote to put a spotlight on the center of the mantel. Where else should The King be if not in the spotlight?

I’m really enjoying this little corner—or curve—of the patio. When we moved here, the stuff planted in this spot consisted of three or four dying arborvitaes that completely cut off the patio from the backyard. I got it from a privacy standpoint, but these things were no picnic to look at. We had all of them torn out, which left behind a perfectly decent planting bed after we finished cleaning up after the landscapers—the same guys who left all those rocks in the planting bed in the front yard. (Have I mentioned that if you hire people to do this sort of thing, you really need to watch them every minute? Because you do.)

The first year, I tried planting vegetables there. The lettuce did just fine, but the deer ate all my tomatoes. Then I switched to herbs. Those didn’t do all that well last year, so I planned to yank them out and start over. To my surprise, they came back with a vengeance—purple sage, thyme, pineapple mint and more Greek oregano than I could ever possibly use. (I’m already drying a big batch of the latter.) And the white dianthus and purple columbines came back in stunning shape. So, this year’s plan is to let everything be (although those herbs need to be reined in again), and fill in with taller plants to give the bed a little height—yellow, purple and white coneflowers. I’m also expanding the space a bit to make room for some dwarf Galliardias and see how they fare.

I have to say, it’s a much nicer view than it used to be, even if it does mean it’s a clear sightline to our chemical-happy neighbor’s yard.

Speaking of Crappy Neighbor, I’m pretty sure the one vulnerable bed of sweet woodruff is—as Billy Crystal said in Princess Bride—not dead, just mostly dead. I had one of the kids mow some of it down. And I’m kicking myself now for the hours I spent weeding the grass out of there after the spraying incident; I had a feeling I was on a fool’s errand. Ah, well. So it goes. Maybe this will give me a chance to try some new plants back there next year.

Here in Wisconsin, we are big fans of food on a stick. We are a practical and thrifty people, although our cholesterol is probably through the roof.

The State Fair’s food-on-a-stick offerings are truly astounding. Last year, fairgoers had a whopping 32 choices, including the highly controversial newbie, chocolate-covered bacon. I hear the cherry pie and fried PBJ are overrated, but the crab cakes sound tempting.

Anyway, sticks are useful. And in my yard, they’re free. Hence today’s project: using crap that hasn’t yet made its way to the local dump to expand a trellis.

Last summer a yew died right in the middle of a shrub bed in front of the garage, facing the street—an ugly sight we promptly removed. But now, instead of an ugly shrub, we have an ugly hole.

Fortuitously, the previous owners had installed two trellises on the garage wall right behind the hole. They had planted a clematis under one of the trellises, but it insists on wending its way through the yews instead of climbing the trellises—and not blooming, either.

All these happy accidents provided a golden opportunity to finally get something growing on those trellises. I chose a blue morning glory for one side and a white moonflower for the other, so something will be blooming both morning and evening. And to pick up the slack in the middle, I bought a black-eyed Susan vine, something I’ve always wanted to try. That will provide continuous bloom when its neighbor plants are sleeping. But the black-eyed Susan needed something to climb, so I dug through my collection of fallen sticks and wove them through the existing trellises to create one big trellis. A cheap fix, as long as the sticks hold up to the weight.

All the stars seem to be in alignment for this project, though. A beautiful little butterfly flitted into the scene just as I finished it and stepped back to assess the look. I’m taking it as a good omen. I’ll keep you posted.

I don’t know what to make of what’s happening in my yard this year. This has been the nicest spring I can recall in my 25 years in Wisconsin, and as a result, some odd things are happening.

The bleeding hearts bloomed earlier than usual, with only a fraction of the blooms they sported last year. The raspberries are ahead of schedule, too; they’re well on their way to setting fruit. Since I picked last year’s first berry on the Fourth of July, I’m expecting an early harvest. The pitiful little herb garden I started next to the patio looked abysmal last year, so I had every intent of clearing it all out and planting perennials. But the sage, thyme, oregano and pineapple mint confounded me utterly by forming lovely low mounds too pretty to fiddle with. The thyme is blooming, so I guess I should cut that back; I’ve already hacked away at the oregano and bundled up the cuttings to dry. (Oregano lovers, beware; you have to watch this stuff. It’ll spread like a weed if you’re not careful, and the one batch I allowed to survive was crowding the columbines something awful.)

It’ll be fun to watch summer unfold. I’m glad this is the year I decided to start keeping track of things. It may be another quarter-century before we have another spring as splendid as this one.