After a rough start to the year the garden is about where it’s usually at. I’m glad for that since in June it looked like a year of brown lawn and wilted flowers was ahead, but now things are mostly ok. I’d say totally ok, but when things dry out so much it takes a couple days straight of rain to really get into the soil, and in spite of frequent storms there are plenty of sloped and harder-soiled areas where things are back to wilting. Regardless, things look good enough and I’m happy with that.
The front border along the street is reveling in a full-summer show of perovskia and coneflowers, but sunflowers haven’t seeded in like they normally do. I blame the dry spring.
I’m also happy I put off planting annuals this spring. First of all there’s barely any room in the front border where I normally plant them, and second of all even with the rain here and there I’d still be watering them. One less job fits into my schedule perfectly!
I do like a woolly thistle (Cirsium eriophorum) here and there in the garden. Most visitors would accuse me of letting a weed grow, but I’m sure they’d understand when told it was planted here on purpose.
Maybe someone at some point said a dry summer would be the perfect time to ‘thin the flock’, create some space for mulch, spread some iris around, create a generally less cluttered and wild planting… but I think you know where that idea has landed.
Klasea bulgarica suffering along in a less-fertile and less-watered spot in the border than it would like, but it’s still a cool thing, even at five feet rather than seven.
It would be fun to complain endlessly about jobs not done and tasked shelved for the future, but let me first share a somewhat finished photo of the former construction road alongside the house. Something did get done this summer, and even with its lack of mulch (still hoping to get to that this fall), the emerging grass makes for a more inviting path than an uneven landscape of dumped concrete and roadside weeds.
I’m not sure anymore what the arc of stones was supposed to convey but it’s done and will likely stay this way for years, but at least the new grass makes sense, and will lead visitors up past the new daylily border, and allow them to oooh and ahhhh on their way to the daylily farm fields.
Since I think I heard someone ask why I wasn’t posting enough daylily photos, here are a few still in bloom this weekend. Late bloomers and rebloomers is how it is since the bulk of them wrapped up the show a week or two ago.
One of the nicest ones is this gift from my friend Paula. In theory I should divide it for the farm, but ‘Websters Pink Wonder’ might be something I need to hold on to for “evaluation” until I have a huge, huge, huge clump of it!
Also a gift, from another friend, is ‘Apricot Peace’. As other parts of the garden look a little worn out from the summer, this flower is as refreshing and delicious as any sun-riped summer fruit.
Since daylilies aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, here’s a break to look at the tropical garden. This end of the yard suffered through a lot of neglect as the gardener raced past this construction-ravaged part of the estate to go stick his head in the sand elsewhere, but after some time, rain, and lots of weeding, trimming, and rock-picking it’s at least less than a complete disaster. Actually it was Verbena bonariensis which saved the day. Its pollinator-filled haze of lavender-purple flowers covers up many of the sins of this season even if it does obscure the daylily flowers more than I’d like.
The tropical border. You may notice that the huge mound of yellow pokeweed (Phytolacca americana ‘Sunny Side Up’) is way to big for its space and way too much yellow, but I just don’t have the heart to trim it. You may also notice a lack of tropicals…
If I had to summarize for a sure-fire way of saving the late summer (full sun)garden, I’d say Verbena bonariensis, Hydrangea paniculata, and cannas. The three of them just ask for a little water and maybe some fertilizer, and BAM you’re a gardening rock star. Sadly I didn’t take a photo of the hydrangea this week, but how about this color from the cannas?
‘Cannanova Rose’, one of the newer seed strains of cannas, is disease free and flowers all summer and into fall if you just keep snapping off the seed pods. A plus for growing it in the North is the lack of canna roller caterpillars destroying the foliage, since they (and the cannas as well) can’t handle our winter cold.
What? More daylilies? You’ve got it.
‘Chama’ is a later daylily with a long season and big flowers. I’d say seek it out but with all the hundreds of other yellows out there I’m sure you could find something similar which is just as nice.
This Brookside Beauty seedling is not quite as average as a yellow. I picked it up this summer at my new favorite local daylily farm, Garrett Hill Daylilies, and maybe it’s too much of a lot of things but I’m quite happy with it.
It’s not all rippled edges and intense color. Here’s the more simple flower of a species daylily, Hemerocallis altissima (probably). Fragrant, tall, elegant, opens in the evening and then closes for the heat of the day, this daylily has a lot to offer as well.
Ok, let’s keep moving. The potager is beans, tomatoes and… daylilies now… I was fairly good for three years with my vegetables only policy (plus a few tulips), but that ship has left the pier. The beds are now filling with things like witch hazels and marigolds, cannas and phlox, and quite a few daylilies as well. It was a valiant fight but vegetables really are a lot of work, and the farm stand does it much, much better, so…. maybe we don’t need to grow our own cucumbers just in case we feel like eating a cucumber or twenty.
One of the few sunflowers to seed out this year… and a little short and small… but I’ll take it, as will the goldfinches I’m sure.
Right over the boxwood hedge of the potager is the stone wall which I went on and on about last year. It’s still there and it’s still the summer home for a few succulents, except for as hard as I tried there seem to be even more this summer. Someone will point out that I bought a few more .99 cent treasures on a summer plant trip, as well as a tiny box of cuttings and living stones last winter, but these aren’t even out there (they’re just too cool to put so far away), and all of these are just repots and divisions and cuttings. Someone needs to stop this ‘let me just take a few cuttings’ thing, just like the rabbits stopped the living stones thing. Had I known that the rabbits would consider the pots of living stones to be tasty little green jellybeans perfect for nibbling, I would have put them somewhere out of reach, but I didn’t and now they’re gone. Hmmmm, come to think of it my last living stone was the victim of a chipmunk attack. I guess they’re tasty little things and I should have known better.
Some of the old standbys which are apparently less tasty than living stones (Lithops).
So I guess I killed off the living stones through my own mistake. Actually the bunnies pulled a “propeller plant” off the wall and destroyed that, as well as a “lobster claw” which was also apparently too tasy to resist, so they’re not as cute and innocent as I like to think. Maybe I’ll just accept that and reconsider my succulent vetting process to include ‘easy to overwinter’, ‘thrives on neglect’, and ‘is not yummy for bunnies’ and move on. Trust me that any roadblock to the succulent collection growing is probably a good thing, especially when fall turns to winter and all those clay pots need lugging in.
Further down the wall. It doesn’t look too bad until you do a pot count, and it’s pretty much every last terracotta pot I own so another roadblock I set up is ‘no more terracotta pots’… unless it’s a really good sale… or they’re free… or it’s a really amazing pot…
Maybe you noticed the tiger lilies back past the succulent wall? They’re the double kind (Lilium lancifolium ‘Flore Pleno”) and I suppose I do like them in spite of their messiness, but what I don’t like is the arrival of those bright red lily beetles which eat more lily foliage than they should and produce entirely disgusting young who hide underneath a slimy, wet, bubble of poop as they also overeat their share of lily foliage. Because of the lily beetles I’m phasing out some of the clumps and trying to figure out which ones I can’t live without, and so far it’s the Asiatics, Martagon, and a few of the Regal lilies… only because they don’t handle late freezes well and have died back two of the last five years.
Lilium lancifolium ‘Flore Pleno’ spreading quite well in spite of the beetles and a good amount of shade.
Speaking of supporting more wildlife than I’d like, our ‘Liberty’ apple tree has set a decent crop of fruit this year and just about everyone seems to want a taste. When people ask questions like what to plant for wildlife I always think of things like apple trees, which seem to be under attack from every insect, disease, bird, mammal… it’s amazing they can survive from one year to the next. I wanted to try one though, and in an effort towards compromise chose a variety which was supposed to give the gardener “Freedom” from endless fussing and spraying. I guess nothing but bad taste will keep the animals away, but I think my photo does a good job at representing the cost of freedom.
Not spraying or putting in much effort at all does not produce the best foliage or fruit on an apple tree. How do they say it? Freedom does not come free? Definitely true in the case of this tree, but I think I’m fine with a handful of wormy apples to cut up and eaten outside versus bushels of fruit to deal with.
With an image of a diseased, nearly leafless apple tree I guess it’s not a stretch to go back behind the potager into the waste area. The grass which was seeded for new paths is coming up but only the weeds in the grass need mowing since for some reason the microgreens of the lawn are just one more thing which the rabbits cannot resist. They mow down the grass and leave the weeds. This isn’t how it was supposed to work but whatever, most of the weeds are Verbena seedlings and recent studies have shown there’s a 99.9% chance the gardener would rather have impassable paths of flowering verbena than neat grass.
Entering the waste space. Yeah that sunflower also came up where the path is supposed to be…
Change in plan is more the rule than the exception here, so besides grass paths turning into verbena fields you may recall there was a $3 box of canary seed thrown around back here in order to start a millet patch. Apparently what looked like millet wasn’t actually all millet and when some cabbagey stuff started growing I did some investigating and found out canola is also a seed birds will eat… and if anyone actually read the label they’d see canola right there after millet. So now there’s a millet and cannola patch in the waste space. Two fun facts I discovered about canola when I did my after-the-fact investigating were that 1. ‘Canola’ is short for ‘Canada oil, low acid’, a relatively recent Canadian plant creation of low acid rapeseed which became suitable for edible oil uses rather than industrial, and 2. Canola greens are much sought after by deer… which does not help at all as far as making my yard less-deer friendly.
The waste space has filled in quite quickly with weeds, canola, and millet, plus a bunch of barrow fulls of yard waste which were easier to dump here than on the compost pile. I guess it’s all about bringing life to the sterile fill, and sometimes life is messy.
So here I am talking about growing weeds intentionally again when I really should focus on my garden-rebuilding. Someday I’ll get it. Maybe. At least the waste area takes care of itself, which allows me to return to stone moving and construction repairs. Finally the pond area has been cleaned out, the path behind it returned to passable, and all those stones picked out of the earth-moving process are being put to use… for better or worse…
Shoddily stacked garbage stones line the arc of the curve which will take a grass path around the side of the new addition. I think it looks good enough and hopefully the freeze and thaws of winter don’t rip it apart before it has a chance to settle. More larger stones would have made it more weather-stable I think but you get what you get.
My fingertips are aching from all the stone grabbing and wedging and twisting and I’m glad to say the wall is as done as it’s going to get and only about ten stones remained as extras. These walls soak up a lot of rock so hopefully I have enough left for a few more questionably interesting constructions around the yard 😉
The back deck refuge from it all. I try to give the pots a little liquid feed once a week (and I never manage to keep to that schedule) but other than feeding, the drip lines and a timer take care of all the watering and leave me with nothing more to do than a little puttering when everything else seems like so much work.
I feel like I should be further along with everything but now that we’re into August I’m declaring a pause on projects and a rescheduling of fun. A few gardens have been visited, children have enjoyed day-trips, some lazy pool days are scheduled, and tomorrow myself and my plant squad (or more officially the Plant Posse… a possibly eye-rolling name given by a member’s daughter) are off for a day at Longwood. Severe weather alerts blanket our travel zone for the day but thoughts and prayers will guide us, and hopefully between the four of us the more reasonable will herd us out of the way of tornados, find shelter from strong winds, and a safe spot against hail, lightning , and thunder! Any day with the Posse is usually an adventure 😉
Hope you have a great week with an aggressive scheduling of fun!
sorta like suburbia 
Generally, your conditions mirror ours with a very dry June which threatened many plants in the garden, followed by a very wet July so that the garden revived very well. That canna is just fabulous. I’ve never seen such a good colour – and a seed variety! Is seed available online? Re the daylilies: we have had gall mite over the last few years which has been a real nuisance. Enjoy the gardening!
Good question regarding canna seed online. I found a few wholesale spots but very few retail, and all seemed somewhat home-grown so I wonder if they’re authentic and reliable sources. I’ve had excellent results with collected seed of Mango and Rose, but wonder if the other fancier forms would remain as consistent. I’m tempted to wander a few poorly maintained public plantings and collect seed this fall in order to conduct some research! Thank goodness I don’t think gall mites are here yet but I’m sure they will eventually find their way, just like all the other pestilence. Perhaps that’s a reminder not to go overboard…
It is always a delight to be romping through your garden. I sort of giggled at the tropical garden. It doesn’t looks so tropical anymore. That Canna with the rose color is sure a beauty.
Of course I love every stone in your garden. Your usage of them is admirable. All of those clay pots look adorable sitting upon the wall even if the rabbits and deer think it is a buffet table. I never could keep those lithops growing, I couldn’t even blame the rabbits.
Brookside Beauty would almost make me start looking for a sunny space to plant one. It looks so enticing with those yellow ruffley edges.
The “Road Path” does look inviting. I am sure you will make sense out of the arc of stones area before it is all settled.
I also noticed a couple of big stones up by the house awaiting conveyance to their resting place. It will be fun to see what you do with them.
Your stacks of curving stones look might nice. I am sure the green path will accentuate those stacks, or will it be the other way around?? We will see, I hope.
Have fun with the Garden Posse. I will look forward to hearing your thoughts about Longwood.
May August be gentle in your garden. August has been brutal in past years here so I don’t quite trust it.
We had a storm front work through and it’s downright cold now! Plus our August forecast shows a bunch of cloudy days, which figures since I’ve just declared “fun” to be the scheduling goal of this month so that does not mix well with pool days and beach trips. Oh well, at least it’s not January… especially not last January which wasn’t even cold enough to put snow on the slopes 🙂
One is never happy with the weather. Too much of anything can get annoying.
I’m hoping to use the bigger rocks as rock garden pieces along the house. It’s unlikely that I can grow fancy “real” rock garden plants, but a few smaller perennials might make out ok in that kind of a setting, and the rocks in themselves are very cool and imposing. I want it to look like they’re pieces of bedrock sticking out so hopefully my landscaping skills are up to the challenge!
I did the math and checked the calendar and I’m not at all happy with the lack of days before school starts up again. We will see if any of these plans turn out!
A gentle August to you as well!
Webster’s Pink Wonder has been on my want list for a long time, so after you have “a huge, huge, huge clump” of it, I’d like a fan to start my own clump. I wasn’t able to pull Sunny Side Up through the winter here, so congratulations on your “huge mound of yellow.” Regular pokeweed does just fine here, of course. On the whole, I’d say progress has been made, and only the gardener knows how much more progress was supposed to have been made.
I better move ‘Webster’s Pink Wonder’ to a better spot so she grows a little faster!
-and there are always more yellow pokeweeds to be found around here. They really do need to seed out on their own to be really happy, I don’t think any that I ever planted has lived longer than a year.
Good luck with the cabinets this week!
I do enjoy your posts Frank, and this one was full of lovely stuff. 😃 The wall looks like it has been there forever, and the pots make it such a great feature. In fact, all the stonework is impressive!
That Canna is gorgeous – I have never bothered growing them as I have only ever seen red ones before. And the day lilies are beauties, and I particularly like the simple yellow one. Hope the trip is loads of fun, despite weather warnings!
We survived the trip! The weather was excellent while we were at the gardens, but on the trip we had to pull over into a wide open parking lot because I was sure there was a tornado in the area! Branches were flying through the air and coming down in front of the car so better to wait a little before proceeding… but then things turned out fine. Only a few large puddles 🙂
Hopefully I can keep up with blogging for a few weeks at least, these long ‘catch-up’ posts seem like actual work and I still miss half the things I wanted to say!
Enjoyed your update, Frank. You have had a busy, productive summer in the garden, I see. I like the wild look of the front border, I let my plants jostle for sunlight, too. My theory is it means less room for weeds. 😉
The back area around the new foundation is coming along well… you don’t wear gloves dealing with those rocks? I can’t do anything these days without gloves it seems.
Those rascally rodents and deer, don’t get me started. But I have discovered Repels-All this year and I am sold on it. Works like a dream. Another pest of much annoyance, the lily beetle made me give up all but my patch of tiger lilies. Since they overwinter in soil to emerge in spring, if I check and pull them off and check for missed eggs and larva DAILY in early spring, I have managed to have fairly presentable lilies. Discipline isn’t my strong point. 😉 Same with taking a jar of soapy water around in the evening to snag Japanese beetles, along with morning rounds of checking under boards for slugs. Man, it never stops does it?
I used to have a large veg. garden when the kids were little, then the farms made it too easy to let that go. This year, I’ve gone back to onions, beans, kale, cabbage and carrots– though not wildly successful, they are providing some addition to meals.
Enjoy what is left to your summer!
The garden has been suspiciously deer-free for the last week, so I’ll take the rabbit attacks as a cost of doing business here and count my blessings. I will keep Repels-All in mind though, I don’t think I’ve heard many enthusiastic reviews of the deer and bunny sprays so it’s good to hear of at least one which could work!
I do wear gloves… pretty much for everything, but the stone work was so tip-stubbing and fingertip pinching that even with the gloves on, my delicate digits took a beating 😉 Actually I wear gloves for everything and probably go through a dozen pairs each year. I’ve even taken to wearing earplugs and safety glasses, I guess I don’t trust myself as much as I used to or maybe I’m finally developing some common sense!
Yeah, the lily beetles… They’re so disgusting to squish but what else is there? I tried picking, but they had already made a mess of a few plants. I think I have too many lilies tucked away in secluded spots, so I need to get rid of them for the sake of control. I did spray my ‘Conca d’Or’, I couldn’t take seeing those gross lumps of poop shredding its majestic foliage.
I have beans to pick tomorrow. It’s the only thing which has done well in the potager, and I made sure to plant plenty, just in case. Now I have too many so there will be some blanching and freezing going on tomorrow morning 🙂
It is always encouraging to see how much you are getting done, regardless of how much is left to do. Gardeners garden; whether that’s planting or hard work building walls. And that is hard, heavy work. I tried picking up some stones unearthed by the road crew here and was reminded yet again of how much even the smallest stone weighs. That pink daylily is a both a lovely color mix and an excellent shape. A great find. I used to have ‘Tetrina’s Daughter’ which was a yellow, late afternoon bloomer so I am happy to see there are more of that type out there for me to buy. And you should not have posted those photos of the pots on your stone wall. I have a stone wall and now realize I need a lot more pots. That is just one great raised garden!
Haha, I was trying to justify all the clay pots to my mother this afternoon, and saying it wasn’t a big deal and they weren’t much trouble to drag into the garage sounded like such a hollow excuse, even to me! I might have to experiment with storing a few of them bareroot over the winter. It would be nice If I could rip a bunch up, pop them in a tray, and just bring that in… except that I would still have to protect the clay pots somehow. Oh well, I still have a few months!
I’ll have to post a photo of the daylily ‘September Sol’ when it flowers. A friend gave me a start this spring and I wasn’t too impressed having yet another yellow, but seeing the stalks beginning to sprout now, after so many others are already finished, is a very hopeful way to roll into late summer. It’s suppsoed to be tall and fragrant as well, I can’t wait!
So much to admire in your post! I love your Webster’s Pink Wonder daylily. What a beaut! Keep me in mind if you are parceling pieces out someday. Perovskia doesn’t do well for me here, between the cold and the damp, but yours looks fabulous. I used to have a majestic clump of it when we lived in PA. I love all your rock work, that lovely back deck and your cannas. The canna I got from you in last year’s ACNARGS member sale is doing great, but I don’t have room to add more. I heard too many complaints last winter about the space this one took up in the basement.
This year my August garden is looking better and worse than usual. That is, the red berm is amazing, with Crocosmia Lucifer, red daylilies (‘Night Embers’ and ‘Pardon Me’) and Rhus ‘Tiger Eyes’ all at their best. Most years Tiger Eyes limps along; this year it is bushy and blooming profusely. Hibiscus ‘Fire Ball’ won’t bloom for weeks yet, but it’s also a monster this year. On the other hand, the plants that appreciate a little heat and dryness aren’t doing well. We’ve been having a lot of raincoat and jacket weather the past several weeks. The echinaceas are blooming but not like they usually do; the rudbeckia is shorter than usual and flopping, etc. The garden is never perfect.
Oh I know how those overwintering plant complaints go!! But the funny thing is someone went to a friend’s house last month and said how nice it was with plants all over, and I smiled but had to remind her that they still require you having a pot of dirt for them to grow out of. Hmmm, but to be honest there were never any real complaints when I had a few pots around the dining room, so maybe the houseplant ban is really only in MY head!
I need to see that red berm someday, but I think the spring showing of primula is still number one on the list. This summer’s wet has saved my cardinal flowers from being a complete failure, they’re filling the shady end of the back yard with red here as well. Weird that this is the year Tiger Eyes is doing well. It’s doing nicely here as well, and the drought followed by monsoons and low light level, cloudy days, wouldn’t be my first choice for giving it a good year. I’ll take it though! I love that plant 🙂
You certainly don’t shy away from a task, project after project you conquer. Excited to see how well your garden looks. Darn rabbits and deer!
Frank, I cannot believe I’m saying this, but I’m envious of your rocks, hahaha!
And the damn bunnies ate your lithops? How rude!
What kind of a gardening failure am I that I cannot seem to grow Verbena B?
Also, I had forgotten that it was Lora who first casually referred to us as the Plant Posse! I’ll have to give that girl an extra piece of coffee cake!