today started kind of down - woke up at 7:30 to let the dogs out and promptly fell back asleep until about noon. so i missed going to the home & garden show with a friend :( oh well. I didn’t actually get up at noon either; I sort of dozed until about 1:30 before getting up to meet another friend for lunch - which was enjoyable. Decided after I got home that I really needed to do *something* to not feel like I’d wasted the whole day … so I went out and ‘played in the dirt’ :)

I did manage to get the purple smoke baptisia divided, although I’m not so sure the divisions are going to survive. Now I think I know why they say that baptisias don’t like to be moved - underneath the plant is a near-solid tangled mass of long finger-thick roots. I put one small poorly-rooted chunk directly into the ground by the north parking lot area, and put two other divisions with some roots into big pots with good dirt … if any one of those makes it, it’ll be Kim’s. If not, well, hopefully I didn’t kill the mother plant and I’ll try again later.

I moved that small rosebush (one of the two Dan gave me for Valentine’s Day 2004) out of the way of the mother baptisia plant, and put it into the front iris bed next to the Orangeola Japanese maple tree. Hopefully it will do better there, with more sun and less competition.

I also planted those two potted azaleas - the yellow one is now at the east end of “Dan’s garden” next to the yellow twig dogwood, and the orange one is under the pine tree at the end of the pond dam that’s closest to the house - and a Primrose Lilac and a Moonglow Yellow Lilac, both in the sunnier areas of Dan’s garden. Both lilacs are small and I don’t know if they’ll bloom this year for the memorial service or not.

Searching through the pots for these 4 shrubs revealed 3 double bridal wreath spireas, 2 redtips (photinia), 1 buttonbush, and a Pink Ice Japanese wisteria that seem to have survived; glad I didn’t toss out those pots last summer when they looked like goners! not sure yet where I want to put them, though. I moved the wisteria onto the concrete sidewalk for now, so that its tap root won’t anchor into the ground (like the ones behind the workshop did) before I get it planted in its permanent spot.

So now I have more room in the outdoor pot area to bring stuff out from the greenhouse … will try to do that gradually over the week. Need to double-check the sun/shade and protection needs of the remaining Japanese maples before putting any more into the ground.

The quarter-circle of azaleas and daylilies that Dan had planted to frame in the northeast corner of the front yard is about to burst out into bloom. (A few on the north side of the pond already have.) I went through it quickly and dug up a few tall brown grass clumps that the mowers don’t seem to be getting … it looks much better now.

Just before coming in, I noticed that spring is officially here: we have our first real iris blooms - one of Dan’s favorite two-tone purple irises in the front yard, one yellow (looks like Blue-Eyed Blonde from here) in the north garden. Need to offload my camera card and take some more pictures this week …

Tonight I had dinner with a former ABB colleague and his wife, which was a lot of fun. We made tentative plans for them to come out here in two weeks to see the flowers and help me with the garden fixup work.

On the way home I stopped for groceries, and realized it was my first shopping trip since Dan went into hospice … it was hard to walk around the store, see things I would normally buy for him, and have to stop myself from putting them into my cart. But at least that first-time experience is behind me now.

One of the grief books I’m reading used the term “emotional surgery” to describe the effect and aftereffects of having a loved one die. I like the analogy. People don’t recover from physical surgery quickly or immediately, either … there may be things you can do to accelerate your recovery, but pushing too hard to get back to normal too soon can actually make it take longer.

Still need to work more on the PoV article … maybe tomorrow.