Yesterday, I left town to visit Birmingham and make some stops along the way. I got some plants at Petals from the Past, and then stopped nearby at my great grandmother's homeplace, Granny's House. The site hasn't been lived in for nearly two decades. My distant cousins live on adjacent properties and look after it for my grandmother. It seems they had been hunting there.
This place, though it now looks so poor, was the place of so many of my great childhood memories. It's hard to believe that most of the people who once called this place home are now gone from this world. Only my grandmother is left.
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| The house. My great grandfather assembled it from an older house in the 1930s and added rooms. |
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| The well house. This is where Granny kept most of her potted plants. There's an old well beneath the table. I remember it mostly because my Aunt Dot broke her leg when the swing broke and fell on it. |
I walked back in the woods to the far edge of the property, where my grandmother says an aunt and uncle of hers used to live. I love this area because there's a huge swath of daffodils. Sadly, they no longer bloom, but there are thousands of them. I think they're the heirloom variety 'Twin Sisters', based on memories of blooms I saw when I was younger.
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| Daffodil foliage and Uncle Charlie's old deer blind |
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| More daffodil foliage |
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| I have no idea if they planted these many daffodils or if they spread like this. |
Are they beyond blooming completely, or if moved would they bloom again? We have an old garden now taken over by the woods that have something similar to this.
ReplyDeleteFor daffodils, I recently got a historic daffodil handbook. It said if you find daffodils like these, fertilize them in the fall with 5-10-10 fertilizer (or soil test) and make sure they have water regularly from when leaves first emerge until they turn yellow, and they may bloom the following season. Or, if they're in a place where they don't get enough sunlight and/or are mowed over, move them. It said the best way to move them is to dig up entire clumps and keep as much soil and roots as possible.
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