Ideas come fast and furious to me. You'd think that after all these years I'd learn to filter them better. Alas, I have not. This blog is an example of, yet again, not thinking things through. But here's the basic idea:
Sometimes people ask me questions about where I live. It's surprising how little I actually know. This blog is a place to tell stories about the place.A friend noticed in the peak of the eve were letters cut out spelling "Thistlemoor." I do know how that got there.
The house is a wood frame farmhouse built around 1900. Sometime in the past, probably in the 1950s a product called Insulbrick siding was nailed to the siding. Insulbrick has a tough outside like roofing material that on sheets of pulp fiber. The outside is fairly durable, but the pulp exposed to water swells. So overtime Insulbrick can get pretty ragged. That was how it was in the front of the house, which faces West and into the weather. So I removed it back to the clapboards. Under the eves surely there must have been a decorative layer of wooden shingles originally. Anyhow when I took off the Insulbrick nothing was there except the wood sheathing. I put nailed plywood to the sheathing and that looked pretty plain. So I added some figures cut from plywood with a jig saw. There's a figure of a little old man with a dogie and a little old woman with a kitty at her heals. My mother also suggested we put a name on the place and the name she came up with was Thistlemoor.
Oh, but the blog title is Barbara's Buttons. That's the name of the lavender-colored flowers in the picture, one of the sorts of flowers that grows here. The scientific name of the flower is Marshallia grandiflora. It's a native wildflower, although I purchased a single little seedling from Wayside Gardens years ago. I like this plant very much. I'm very fond of lavender flowers. But I also call myself the Incompetent Gardener because I manage to kill so many plants. Marshalia grandiflora still lives in the garden at Thistlemoor and I love the tough plants that grow.
I was surprised to discover from the Wikipedia article that Marshalia grandiflora, Monongahela Barbara's Buttons, is a species of concern. It has been extirpated from many parts of its former range. I've never seen it in the wild. But because it is a plant of concern that seems a good reason why people should tend it in their gardens.
