January Garden

Isn't this cymbidium spectacular? My husband's parents gave it to us from their yard, like our other cymbidiums. I didn't know this one was going to be green with burgundy spotted beards until it opened.

Yesterday before it rained my husband went out and bought a whole tray of starts: poppies, rudbeckia, and some herbs for my new herb garden. What a sweetie. He has been working hard all weekend cleaning up, weeding, trimming. He put in the poppies and I planted the herbs: sweet marjoram, camomile, sorrel. We still have some parsley that reseeded, and some older oregano and thyme. I also planted chervil in the raised bed. Today it has been showering so between showers I went out to check on the starts. They looked refreshed, as if they had just drank up a tall glass of ice water. I guess they did.

We're collecting a family of succulents on the deck. The aeonium are from my mom (the big rosette in the front and the one in the black pot). The spiky one in back, and on the left, are climbing aloes cutting from a vacant house up the hill--they are about to flower. The victoria regina is from my in-laws' compost heap. Maybe this will be the beg, borrow and steal succulent collection. I'm about to go get more cuttings from the vacant house since its fence began to fall down in the storm and I'm afraid someone's going to come and clean up all the wonderful things growing through the fence.
Here is a quote from a lovely book I'm reading, The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects On A Century In the Garden, by Stanley Kunitz.

In the beginning, a garden holds infinite possibilities. What sense of its nature, or its kingdom, is it going to convey? It represents a selection, not only of whatever individual plants we consider to be beautiful, but also a synthesis that creates a new kind of beauty, that of a complex and multiple world. What you plant in your garden reflects your own sensibility, your concept of beauty, your sense of form. Every true garden is an imaginative construct, after all.