cimorene: cartoony drawing of a woman's head in profile giving dubious side-eye (this place isn't punk rock)
Cimorene ([personal profile] cimorene) wrote2019-04-09 01:37 pm

flowers for spring + scarecrow creation and maintenance issues

It's been snowing all day and all last night after raining and sleeting yesterday! I don't expect this will be the last snow of the year, given that was after Easter for the past two years (as I'm fond of complaining.

(I'd say spring flowers are one of the few things I miss about Alabama. My parents' hundred-year oak tree, now dearly departed in the mile-wide tornado a few years ago, was surrounded with hydrangea and azalea bushes big enough for me to nearly get lost in when I was about 10-12 and there was a bed of snapdragons and a bed of mixed irises and tigerlilies, plus big daffodils mixed into several of the edging beds and even a few volunteer patches of them out in the yard for a while that my dad would mow around.

(Daffodils are kind of a traditional Easter flower here in the warmest SW corner of Finland - the archipelago -, but it's too cold for them to actually bloom before Easter unless they're grown indoors in pots, which kind of gives the lie to the whole 'symbol of the awakening spring around us' idea, if you're using artificially grown ones because there in fact is no spring awake around you yet except crocuses and brave grass stems. Also the ones for Easter are very tiny, which makes an even more comically bitter contrast to the size and lushness of daffodil blooms that I associate with the season from Alabama.

(I don't prefer floral landscapes or gardens to green ones, but when it comes to flowers, I strongly prefer big tropical flowers to others. This is an unfortunate preference to have in Finland.)

Speaking of gardens, MIL wants to construct scarecrows this summer. I've never been a party to this before, but doesn't making scarecrows' clothes out of actual fabric then result in that fabric mildewing from the rain? If the scarecrow is in your cornfield, fine, you probably don't see it that often. But if we're talking a little kitchen garden and it's much closer to home, it seems to me that it would be more logical to create the appearance of humanity with weather-safe materials of some kind. MIL and Wax both seemed to find this question bizarre and suggested you could undress the scarecrows for the rain and dress them again later? But that seems like an awful lot of trouble to be always remembering, doesn't it, particularly if it's going to rain frequently? Does anybody have scarecrow wisdom to share, or am I going to have to research this and probably end up on a deep dive into whatever corner of the internet contains fanatical scarecrow-making fandom?
viggorlijah: Klee (Default)

[personal profile] viggorlijah 2019-04-09 01:33 pm (UTC)(link)
I thought the whole thing with scarecrows was that they ended up dressed in rags by harvest time? The clothes got more and more raggedy and the birds pecked away bits for their nests and every now and then it was re-dressed for Halloween.
icarus: Snape by mysterious artist (Default)

[personal profile] icarus 2019-04-09 02:55 pm (UTC)(link)
Colorado also got late snow ... but I guess this is normal for Finland? (You're in Finland?)
icarus: Snape by mysterious artist (Default)

[personal profile] icarus 2019-04-09 09:03 pm (UTC)(link)
My friends have scattered across the globe. Just ran into another online who's in China.

Here are some of the daffodils I used to drool over in the old Brecks catalog we'd get every spring. They're coming up here in Maryland now.

Edited (somehow my image tag isn't working...? ) 2019-04-09 21:06 (UTC)
icarus: Snape by mysterious artist (Default)

[personal profile] icarus 2019-04-09 03:41 pm (UTC)(link)
"Just dress and undress scarecrow" sounds like one of those things you tell someone knowing full well it'll never happen.