This is the extent of my gardening on board (well, almost)! Rosemary, thyme and a bright red geranium! I have no idea how my gardens at home are faring in the 90+ degree heat of the past few weeks, but this little pot makes me quite happy!
A visit to the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in Boothbay with a good friend was a perfect summer day. These gardens sit on 128 acres that border the shoreline of Back River. The idea for the gardens started in 1991, and the land was purchased in 1996, with some of the founding directors using their personal homes as collateral for the land purchase. The grand opening occurred in 2007! There is a wealth of inspiration here, and most plants are clearly identified. There are tranquil spaces, such as the Meditation Garden and the Waterfall garden along with several quiet woodland paths. And then there are spaces that are strikingly beautiful such as the Children’s Garden and many perennial borders.
One of several mazes in the gardensBirdhouse at edge of Cleaver Event Lawn and Garden
Really large bonsai planter
So many daisies!
Path through the Vayo Meditation GardenPond in the Children's Garden
And here is the winning idea I took from my tour: a wall of plants! It is made by filling wire baskets with soil, then stacking them and framing them into an attractive wall. This wall of plants not only saves space, but also makes a good screen to block unsightly views! I want it!
Herb wall
This example of a planted wall is filled with herbs. You can see one of the wire boxes in the lower left on the ground next to the wall. They had walls planted with annual flowers and one shade wall planted with ferns.
Today the wind is howling so we will sit on our mooring in Boothbay Harbor. I am going to work on my Nantucket purse and remember my wonderful day in the gardens!
In this cove the shallows are full of the shells of sea life eaten by the various birds fishing these waters. We found a huge scallop shell, several large quohog shells and a razor clam shell, and endless mussel shells. Mussel shells are so beautiful with their range of iridescent blues and purples! Looking through the water at the shells made me think this would be a wonderful tapestry, having some of the shells in sharp focus as seen through clear water, and others obscured by light reflected on water. Now, how to actually depict that! I took several photos with a polaroid filter, but they all came out perfectly clear, as if there were no water at all!….
Then I happened to read Kathy Spoering’s post about taking the time to osbserve the natural world, to really look….through an artist’s eyes. I definitely need more looking…
I spent most of yesterday watching the bird life around Snow Island. There are several ospreys in the area, more than I’ve seen in one place before, and they all seem intent on ridding themselves of the eagles in the area. The ospreys worked together to dive bomb the eagles, and I’m not sure if they were just claiming their hunting territory of if the eagles pose some additional threat. I know some birds steal the nests of others. Clearly, for reasons I may not fully understand, the ospreys do not wish to cohabitate with eagles!
eagle at Snow Island
This eagle sat calmly in the tree while a group of ospreys hurled themselves and dived down on her/him! Right nearby was the eagle’s nest complete with adolescent eaglet.
Eaglet on the nest
Well, I know this eaglet is hard to see even if you ‘bigify’ the photo…nest is near the center of the image. I marveled at the parent eagle bringing food to this baby whose sharp beak and claws surely must make parenting difficult!
Yesterday was one of those Maine days that is so clear everything appears super-focused. I took photos of water and sky, and I hope someday they will be useful to developing a cartoon for a tapestry.
And I finished one of my summer books….
Summer reading:
This is a fascinating history of New York before the English, when it was the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. The author gives vivid images of life in this colony through the written records and correspondence of that period and shows that the Dutch culture has lived on to the present time in current New York culture. His premise is that New York is still more Dutch than English, and that the Dutch culture of the 17th century is the core of American culture. He does a great job!
Amazing book!…too moving to describe. I highly recommend it! I bought it for reading on board, but I finished it the day I took sneak peak at home….
I just finished this yesterday, while watching the bird life here. A wonderful story written from the point of view of three different women during the year before American involvement in WWII, during the blitzkrieg of London and the rounding of up Jews throughout Europe. I put this near the top of very few books that I will always treasure!
Just started this yesterday, and I’m hooked. I don’t normally stumble on so many good books all at once! I feel incredibly lucky….
And I’m looking forward to Water for Elephants that is on my phone. I can’t see the movie until I read (or listen to!) the book!
The day will end with a dinner of fresh local veggies and local cheese from the this quaint farm stand in Five Islands Habor….oh, and a bouquet of dark red dahlias, feverfew, and love in a mist!
Typically Maine, the weather changed every couple of hours yesterday, and the sights made me think about trying to capture the essence of a place in imagery…..which made me think of Joan Baxter’s tapestries. She has mastered conveying a sense of place for Scotland, with tapestries that are full of mists and myth and mystery. After 15 summers in Maine maybe I am getting a sense of this place….also a place of mists as well as brilliant sun and sharply focused views.
As we sailed out of the Basin and Cundy’s Harbor yesterday, the sky behind us grew very dark, and shortly into our trip we were overtaken by a squall. Twenty minutes later the shoreline and islands glowed in the fresh new light and sparkled from the rain. We were headed to Snow Island, and just as we approached we saw an eagle soaring overhead! He (she?) landed on a rock right nearby to dry his wings.
Eagle on Snow Island
In the trees just to the left in this photo was another eagle! We could not get the two birds together in one photo!
After anchoring another quadrant of the sky darkened, and another squall passed through. The quality of light is decidedly Maine to me, and something I’d like to capture in a future tapestry.
Approaching Squall
Can you see the eagle in the lone tree just right of center in the photograph? All in all, we saw three eagles at Snow Island.
Before heading to Snow Island I spent a good part of the day working on another sweater…. Deborah Newton’s “Greenhouse Tank” which is in the current issue of Interweave Knits.
Deborah Newton's Greenhouse tank
Deborah Newton is one of my favorite knitting designers. Her designs are lovely and fit beautifully! I am really hoping this will be more flattering than my Plymouth “Kudo” sweater!
I am working this sweater in raw silk from Tess Designer Yarns in a colorway called Bahama Bay.
Deborah Newton’s “Greenhouse Tank” knitted in Tess Designer Yarns “Bahama Bay” raw silk
I’ve been living on the water for one week now. The weather has been beautiful, the coastline of Maine stunning! On the trip up Bob saw a whale and a big basking shark. Together we’ve seen seals, and lots of shore birds: egrets, herons, ospreys, storm petrels. Yesterday I saw eider ducks for the first time!
During the first few days on board I finished this sweater which is a monstrous failure!
Plymouth yarn "Kudo" knitted into Plymouth's pattern 1977
So, what went wrong? Well, maybe the yarn is just too bright for horizontal stripes? …especially in larger sizes! Although it was a very quick project to knit, no knitting project goes quickly enough not to feel a sharp pang of anxiety when it proves to be a failure!
Also, here is the photo on the pattern:
Plymouth Yarns #1977 for Kudo yarn
My biggest gripe is the look of the sleeves in the cover photo. They are clearly 3/4 sleeves. The pattern knits up as short sleeves. The pattern does say that if you want shorter or longer sleeves you must adjust your stitch number to achieve this. The pattern says that the stitches called for in the instructions will result in elbow length sleeves, but it does not say whether that includes the seed stitch border. To me the sleeves in the cover are elbow length before the seed stitch border was added, so I presumed that the pattern photo showed the sweater knitted to the specifications in the basic pattern. Wrong. The finsihed sweater looks decidedly dumpy with the short sleeves. I tried the seed stitch border and didn’t like it. So I ripped it out and tried a crocheted scallop, also dumpy, as the photo shows! I cannot just do the sleeves over, making them longer, since the entire sweater is knit in one piece, from the bottom of the front all the way to the bottom of the back, increasing for the sleeves and working the neck as you go. This would basically mean knitting the sweater again from almost the beginning. A little note in the instructions saying that the sleeves in the photo had been lengthened would have helped immensely! But still, I don’t know if I could carry off those bright horizontal stripes, so I’m not too enthusiastic about doing this sweater again anyway!
Paul's awesom mud oven in the shape of fish!
On a more positive note…. we went to a party on Bailey’s Island, as guests of guests. Our host Paul built a mud oven shaped like a fish with its mouth wide open to accept his culinary creations. He made 32 pizzas that day! Delightful combinations like pear and gorgonzola, eggplant and green salsa….even a couple of dessert pizzas with chocolate chunks, marmallows and strawberries! I think there will be a mud oven in our future at home!
Bailey's Island granite cribstone bridge
This bridge is built Lincoln Log style out of granite pieces that are resting on each other, no pins or cement of any kind. Amazing! It was originally in 1927-28 and a recent rebuild was just finished this year. According to local knowledge, there was only one other bridge like it in existence in the 20th century, and that was in Scotland. That bridge was dismantled during WWII so currently the only cribstone bridge is this one on Bailey’s Island. We were anchored right on the East side of it!
“Pandora” from our host’s gardens on Bailey’s Island
Lunch is ready!
As I write this we are leaving Cundy’s Harbor where we visited good friends with a lovely house and garden right on the harbor. Their neighbor, a seasoned lobsterman, motored over to us in his boat Life After... while we were headed to the well known “Basin,” and he passed us four lobsters in a bucket! We will feast tonight!
