Senior Moments

As you know, Betsy and I have many flowers in our yard — daffodils, tulips, iris, roses, lilies and daylilies.  But we also have some plants that don’t flower very much (no, I am not talking about the weeds in our flower beds!).

I grew up on a small farm in northern Indiana.  The topsoil was rich and about 18 inches (or more) deep.  Dad used to say that when we planted seed we had to jump back to keep from being knocked over the growing plant.

That certainly is not the situation here in Tennessee.  Don’t get me wrong — I like the mountains and our home.  But in some places there is solid rock about an inch below the surface.  We’ve worked around that by building some raised flower beds, but there are places in the yard where we have rock right under the surface and there’s not much we can do about it.

Except plant sempervivum (hen and chicks).  Sempervivum seem to thrive in the most impossible soil conditions, and they look good all year around.  We have several different varieties and various places around the yard.  Some are bicolor, like the picture above.  Others are a solid color.  The most common are green, but we also have several maroon or deep purple plants, as you can see in the picture below.

I’ve mentioned a couple of times that our house is on the side of a hill with a lot of trees around.  And although there are lots of advantages to such a location there are also some disadvantages.  Two of the disadvantages are erosion and places where grass won’t grow.  In our case the two places often coincide, especially in the back and on the uphill side of the yard.

But three or four years ago we hit upon a solution to some of our problems.  The lot below ours is vacant and we noticed a lot of periwinkle growing in it.  So we transplanted some into one  of our problem areas.

It’s been slow, but the picture above shows how things looked earlier this week.  The periwinkle has spread to cover the area where the grass wouldn’t grow and to at least cover an area of erosion.

The pretty blue flowers of the periwinkle are a sign that spring has arrived.  And since it’s spreading I have a little less lawn to mow.  And believe me, at my age every little bit of hillside yard that doesn’t need to be mowed is an advantage!

We have several small areas of periwinkle that we are encouraging to spread.  In the meantime we enjoy the beauty they provide.

The picture at the right is a close up of the flowers of our periwinkle.