The Happy Cottage

Small Garden Journal

This blog began in Jan. 2017 on a cold bright winter day in our 1945 cottage home in Durham, NC. Photos of the Spring 2016 garden inspired me. Winter is after all, the perfect time for gardeners to daydream of Spring. Monthly posts highlight what's happening in our Zone 7 Piedmont garden which includes small wildlife and occasional updates of what's happening inside the cottage. In 2015 we renovated the house next door and are enjoying starting garden beds there as well.

Visit the Butterfly Compendium to see a catalog of pollinators in the garden and host plant information. View this and other favorites in the Featured Posts section of the blog (to the right of the most recent post).

Gardening/lifestyle ethos at The Happy Cottage: support Mother Earth and yourself by being as natural as possible. Avoid the use of synthetic chemicals and weed instead of spray. Include host and nectar plants for pollinators. Favorite garden medium: organic mushroom compost. It's the soil that mushrooms were grown in. Full disclosure: We do use biological mosquito dunks.

My gardening style has evolved over twenty years to include scent, food for pollinators, butterflies, birds and shelter for small creatures. A multi-dimensional garden will bring you years of enjoyment!

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Summer Garden Idyll

We have broken the drought and heat wave today. Spring showers are happening! I've been playing around with more Microsoft created videos. I've decided they are much more user friendly than Wix created videos. This one is from photos of summers past. The daylilies will start our summer show here in a few days.

May Heat Wave

We are experiencing brutal heat and dryness in the last week of May. Many sun loving plants are tolerating the heat with occasional watering. The dry shade bed is a very different story. The plants are practically flat in these extreme conditions this early in the season. The wild mock orange in the shade bed will not be blooming this year since it is in survival mode. This Sunday, May 30th, we are predicted to get some relief with much cooler temperatures (the 70s instead o

Magical Mid-May

Last night we saw the veiled crescent moon appear in the west as she set. I hope this signals the start of a little more warmth for Spring. We set yet another weather record this week with a low of 46 degrees in mid-May. The plants don't seem to have suffered, but the season seems delayed by a couple of weeks here. We also hit an "abnormally dry" period. The disappearing act Beautiful and bright a few minutes later The pinks and purples of salvia, pink primrose and lychni

Mothers, Flowers and Seedlings

We celebrated my Mother this year on the patio with a small family gathering and Maddie Rose (the pup). My sister, Annette is a big Maddie fan. This is her photo. The geranium is for Mama. She loves bold flower colors. The weather was perfect. We set up a shade tent with bunting and fabric drapes over the patio table. It worked so well that Ian and I will explore having a retractable awning installed. A family of blue birds visited the feeder on Mother's Day. It's looks l

May Day 2021

I think that Pan is a pretty good representative for ancient celebrations. It's been a cool bright day in Durham. Highs were only in the 70s. We are still experiencing unsettled weather. It was in the high 80s a couple of days this week. I learned that we had the sixth driest April on record this year. That could explain the delay for some of our iris blooms. Normally, our Beverly Sills irises would bloom in mid-April. They just started in the past week. I've let Micro