Kecemani¹ ąkakši² ąwahkiluwį³

"We said we were going to Gethsemane today," the Old Man told me at the breakfast table. Did we? I don't recall that, but twist my arm. All I really had planned for today was some laundry anyway. (Well, that and playing with my dictionary some more, of course.) And I was more than happy to steer us to Turkish Bakery for lunch when it turned out our first choice, Antica Pizzeria, was closed until 5 p.m. I didn't realise it had been that long, but I'm sure if I'd seen karışık pide on the menu before, I would've ordered it. monshu made a delightful new discovery, too, in the form of hünkâr beğendi (lit. "the sultan liked it", which has got to be a play on imam bayıldı).

Unfortunately, it's still a bit early for planting here in Zone 5, so there still wasn't much range at the garden shop. More herbs, certainly, still nothing in a Mentha citrata. (Since the lime mint is the only variety that did much of anything last year, I don't really see the point of throwing away money on spearmint and peppermint again.) Seeing lemon balm reminded me to pick up a replacement verbena, which we found tucked away in a small frame around the corner.

Then it was on to perennials to try to plug the unsightly gaps in our frontage. Those sad hydrangeas, who struggled against drought all summer long, finally perished somewhere in the depths of a fairly average winter. (Is it petty to point out we had no say at all in picking them up last year? Probably supermarket crap to boot.) So did whatever ugly little bushes spent the winter before tucked away in the basement waiting for the grade to be lowered.

So now we're weighing our options. I've finally given up on the dogwood as being too huge. (Maybe on the verge--or the "parkway", as monshu informs me it's known locally.) Well, that is, unless we were to go with the Cornus pumila the gardener showed us. It's nice enough for what it is, but to a Missourian like me, the only real dogwood is a flowering dogwood (C. florida) and everything else may as well be a viburnum or something.

We looked at viburnums, too, as well as lilacs and forsythias. The GWO suggested the last of these, but I'm concerned about the lack of sun most of the day. He also wanted us to explore the possibility of a nandina, but even those employees who had heard of one assured us they didn't carry them. (As well they wouldn't, since the MoBot website says they're not even reliably winter-hardy in St Louis, so fergit it up here.) Which is how we came to consider the ninebark. I perked up at the fact that it's a native species, and monshu was enchanted by its designer foliage. Something to give serious thought to.

As an added bonus, I had a chance to put names to two ornamentals I've been seeing all over the place laterly. One is Kerria japonica, which I've seen thriving in fairly deep shade down the street, so I'm bookmarking that in my mind. The other I was surprised to find is a prunus species with the run-on name "purple leaf sand cherry" (P. x cistena). A little too cute and clichéd for my taste, really, but an attractive little tree in its way.

Remarks on the title:

1. I tried to come up with a coinage for "gardening centre", but Osage polysemy makes this a challenge. Owe can mean both a garden and its products, edible and otherwise, so owehci translates as "grocery story". After considering paraphrases like owe oožu watǫ́ehci (i.e. "plant put-in store"), I decided to cop out with a transcription of the name.
2. "we both went back there" (In the absence of a plural marker, the 1P prefix ąk- is understood as dual.)
3. "we bought stuff for ourselves" (Joining the subject marker this time are valence-reducer wa- "stuff; things" and reflexive hkik-.)