Keep it Classy

Aug24

You may think that a couple raised beds and an obsession for snowdrops would practically guarantee refined taste and a Martha Stewart garden visit, but as of this evening both have yet to happen. Sometimes I think neither will happen and then I start wondering if maybe it’s just a problem with the gardener, and his complete lack of class and good taste. So be it. I like orange, I like cannas and dahlias, I like marigolds, and above all I love too much when a little less would have been much more respectable.

French marigolds reseeded from last year. I hear they’re less ‘out’ than they used to be but ‘classy’? Maybe not yet.

I don’t have the patience or writing skills to really go into why one flower is classy while another is crass, but over the years I’ve picked up on the judgements of my betters and at this highpoint of summer realize that my garden definitely veers towards the trailer park style rather than waterfront estate.

Chrysanthemums can be fancy I suppose, just look at the formal displays in the far East style, but as flowers go I think of them as a modern carnation, the flower bouquet you buy when roses and lilies are too expensive. btw I hate this color, but a friend loves it, so I trust her taste and keep it!

I suppose if you decorate your estate with gobs of full flower chrysanthemums in themed color displays they’re fancy, or if you stick with the truly perennial types which put out sprays of color in late fall you’re good, but my chrysanthemums are mostly the feral offspring of whomever managed to survive the winter. To me they’re an interesting bunch though, even if the colors aren’t anything extraordinary. The earliest ones are starting to bloom now, which is far too early and reeks of autumn, but I hope they’re just enthusiastic and can keep this going at least through September.

A larger flowered chrysanthemum which showed up under a rosebush one summer. I’m looking forward to seeing what its seedlings look like in bloom in another two or three weeks.

Evening primrose (Oenothera biennis) is a weed of waste places and abandoned gardens. Obviously it does well here and obviously it’s not high class, so I always leave a few to grow and flower. Birds are supposed to like the seeds (although I’ve never seen a bird on it) and I like the way the flowers pop open each day, so this native biennial is ok in my book. Now if only I could motivate myself to seed out the fancier versions I found last winter. Oenothera versicolor ‘Sunset Boulevard’ offers dark stems with tangerine flowers overlaid in rose, while the large yellow blooms of Oenothera glazioviana pop open in under a minute as the sun goes down… it’s worth a party, or so I’ve been told.

Oenothera biennis, the common primrose, with a few other classy weeds such as Persicaria orientalis and the golden, too-loud, Rudbeckia fulgens.

Phlox come with an excellent pedigree and are grown in some of the best gardens. And then they get here. A few years back I decided to treat my self to a few selections from the ‘Sweet Summer’ series, and a few years forward they’re all dead except for two. Actually make that one. ‘Sweet Summer Festival’ would never fully open her blooms and was yanked a few weeks ago and sent to the compost pile. She came with excellent references, and I thought she would grow out of it but maybe it was some weird tissue culture issue… or she just hated it here and couldn’t be bothered with hiding her disgust.

Phlox ‘Sweet Summer Fantasy’ looking slightly less fabulous than the pictures had lead me to believe. “Large flowers, strong upright habit with clean foliage and good branching”…

I was looking at the trash I call a phlox bed today and really gave some consideration to offering up my garden as an extreme test location for new phlox varieties. I think a new plant would really have to jump through some hoops to do well here, and if anyone out there wants to send me a bunch of free plants for evaluation I’m completely on board… and just to throw it out there even if the plant doesn’t do completely well it doesn’t mean I can’t write a glowing review… I mean integrity is kind of a vague concept these days, and free plants really do hold a lot of sway in this garden.

Aristolochia fimbriata (the white veined Dutchman’s pipe) is actually a very classy little treasure, and look at the little pipe it’s putting out! downside though, perhaps I should have looked at its mature height and spread before planting it at the base of a six foot trellis.

I always thought of Rose of Sharon (Hibiscus syriacus) as a trashy plant. We had it round the garden growing up and my mother would always complain over its leafless stems in May when everything else had already sprung to life, and then I would always complain about the carpet of seedlings which would fill the weed bucket under every bush. Should I even mention the slimy faded flowers which would litter the ground for two months in late summer? They were always guaranteed to squish up between your toes, and even better if a slug had come out to take a bite before your foot landed on it all.

‘White Chiffon’ rose of sharon hasn’t reseeded too badly, and when all else fails white flowers always add distinction.

I have to say I like the new rose of sharons. ‘White Chiffon’ is a smaller version of ‘Diana’ with a little extra fluff in the center of each flower (I still prefer the single ‘Diana’), and if for once I can refrain from accidentally cutting down the bush during spring cleanup I think she’ll be an excellent addition to the garden… unlike the amazingly colored but prolifically seeding ‘Bluebird’ who was shovel pruned.

Rose of sharon ‘Ruffled Satin’. I have not seen a single seedling under this one, and to my eye you might even get away with saying this plant looks refined?

I guess the mallow family is often pointed at for weediness and gaudiness, and I’m not sure where the latest court ruling stands at for classiness, but if you move away from shrubby hibiscus to the perennial version it’s really got to be a gray area. Some of the newest forms are just amazing, but they have all the oversized flowers and inappropriately bright colors of something less refined. I would grow all of them, but just can’t deal with the ravages of the hibiscus sawfly which eat their foliage to shreds each summer so there’s only one left, and some years he does ok, and other years I just turn away.

An ok year for hibiscus ‘Turn of the Century’. I love it, but it’s a far cry from the five foot shrub covered with blooms which this plant is capable of.

Ok, enough with all this concern over tackiness. If you look at the last hibiscus photo you might notice a classier plant in the backgound, the chartreuse leaved, 2020 Perennial Plant Association’s plant of the year, Aralia cordata ‘Sun King’. This cool thing doesn’t seem to mind a crushing late freeze, mid summer drought, and rooty shade, and although its two foot height in my garden does not compare well to the 4-6 feet it is typically quoted as, it’s still a wonderful presence. The plant is a great introduction by plantsman/hunter/explorer Barry Yinger who spotted it atop a Japanese department store in the garden center. So much easier than bushwacking up a Chinese river valley and climbing cliffsides looking for new plants, but I’m sure that was on the list as well.

Of course when I saw the name I knew I had to try the seeds for Hosta yingerii, and here they are several years later.

Plant nuts will remember Barry Yinger’s Asiatica Nursery which was an outlet for introducing hundreds of exotic and obscure plants into the American horticultural world, and even if you don’t know it, your garden is probably richer for it. Even my little plot has a few (hopefully) hardy camellias which are just a few degrees of separation from Mr Yinger collecting seeds under armed escort within sight of the North Korean mainland. A cool connection me thinks.

Not to swing this around and make it all about me, but I did meet Barry Yinger once. Not to brag but it was at one of the first Galanthus Galas, and he was off in a side room breaking for lunch when I decided to take my chance. “Is this where the restrooms are?” was my icebreaker, “No, they’re the next doorway” was his response, and I was on my way. I don’t think he remembers.

Obviously my classiness is only eclipsed by my social skills, so let me abruptly end this post and wish you all a great week!

Around and About

Aug16

August always goes too fast and this exceptional year is no exception. I blame the puppy. Hours are spent entertaining and attending to little Biscuit’s whims, and even though I’m sure everyone in the household can hear his 4:30am whimpering, it is only the gardener who fumbles for his glasses and stumbles to the door to let him out. We enjoy the sunrise together but the conversation is entirely one sided and repetitive. “Go potty, go potty…. go potty”. Eventually the gardener gives up and heads inside for his coffee, and it’s usually then that the message clicks, and the paper towels and wet vac come out.

Stubborn little Biscuit the Yorkie

Hydrangeas are much more reliable. Even in a sleep-starved state the gardener recognizes how foolproof Hydrangea paniculata ‘Limelight’ is, and as long as it gets some water, a springtime trim, and full sun, the show is always on for August.

Limelight hydrangea along the street. The rain from hurricane Isaias has everything looking much fresher.

Weeds are a problem when the mulch is thin but you never know what else will pop up on the bare earth. I have no idea what a hydrangea seed looks like, but apparently they happen, and if you ignore weeding long enough they can grow up and turn into something nice. They’re entirely in the wrong spot which is not as nice, but I’m sure the gardener will be right on that and have it moved within the next decade or two.

With so much green this seedling has to be a child of Limelight. Three years is all it took, and trust me, even with the neat mulch and greening crabgrass this part of the border is not typically well cared for and these still succeeded!

Hydrangea paniculata and Hydrangea arborescens bloom every year here on the new wood which grows each summer. The colors are limited to whites and pinks but considering it’s been so long since I’ve seen a flower on the big mophead hydrangeas (H. macrophylla) I don’t even remember blues and purples and miss them about as much as I miss unicorns and rational government. Maybe reliable and the tried and true are boring, but there’s only so long you can listen to how great blue hydrangeas are before you realize it’s all just hot air.

I planted ‘Annabelle’ next door and love it all summer, even now in its all-green phase. My MIL prefers the mophead hydrangeas so that’s what is growing to the right. She claims its flowers are blue although I’ve never seen the proof.

Speaking of next door, for some reason the redone potager construction has gained me the kind of street credit which the rest of the garden never did. Out of nowhere there have been landscaping questions and design ideas for next door, all of which will hopefully include pulling out one of the green mounds of hydrangea and not that much extra work for me…. hahahahahaha, that was fun to write but I know it won’t be the case. The conversations also include filling in the pool and “putting one in your own yard because it’s just too much upkeep for me”. We will see.

The potager is still relatively restrained for August. Vegetables are still visible and a few unwatered pots of succulents hopefully class it up a little… even if all I did was take two pots off the deck and drop them right into the blue planters.

I hope it’s understood that a pool will never go where the potager beds stand. The vegetables and flowers may not be as refreshing as the deep end of a pool but they’re still inspiring in other ways and probably less work. If we actually ate more vegetables that would probably help, but even if all the tomatoes become pizza and all the zucchini gets deep fried that’s a start I guess.

So far so good for the sand paths. I probably rake them more than I need to, and I’m sure next year they’ll make awesome seed beds for weeds, but today they look great, and I’ll just take today.

Since the potager is under decent control I figured it was still hot enough to clear up the mess I refer to as the compost pile. Moving mulch in the heat is fun, but moving compost adds all kinds of spiders, worms, and centipedes into the mix so in some ways it’s even better. My new policy on all things gardening is to do less, so for the compost pile this means putting less on via hiding pulled weeds and trimmings under plants, throwing anything you can onto the lawn and (eventually) mowing it up, and also using one of the raised beds in the potager as a dump for all the local trimmings and waste. Eventually the plan for the raised bed is to coat the debris with some soil from another bed and just plant on top of that. If you want to be fancy I think it’s called sheet composting or hugelkultur, but I’ll just call it a saved trip from across the yard and to the official compost.

A much tidier compost area. I won’t dare show the before photo but just consider that I found a bench, several pots, and a few sections of fence under the mess so it was definitely past time for a cleanup.

I don’t know if you noticed, but outside the compost area is a new planting of nekkid ladies, aka surprise lilies, aka Lycoris squamigeria. They were previously in the potager and after 10 years I would guess I’ve seen all of three flowers come up, so I think they like the new spot. All this in spite of the March transplanting after their foliage had already started to come up. Usually they hate transplanting and out of principle don’t even come up the next year, but six stalks in the one group and two more in another and I’m thrilled. I think they also like the deeper soil and summer shade here as well.

Lycoris squamigera looking perfectly fresh in the middle of August.

I’m hoping the other Lycoris I planted last year do nearly as good as these. They were from an excellent source, perfectly packed, and looked freshly dug but still wouldn’t humor me with a single bloom last summer. At least they sprouted this spring to prove they’re not dead, but I wouldn’t mind a few flowers on top of that… especially since other gardeners are already showing off their plantings in full amazing bloom.

The orange surprise lily, Lycoris sanginea.

So besides finding surprise lilies in the compost area I also found some surprise pots, all nicely filled with potting soil and ready to be planted. The next step was obvious… well maybe not so obvious. In spite of the magic going on I’d had enough of the bugs and heat and humidity, so it was into the relatively cooler winter garden and its dozens of neglected cyclamen and snowdrop pots. I repotted.

The cyclamen have multiplied and are ready for fall while a few cuttings were stuck into a few pots. Look closely and you’ll see my dead New Zealand sedge. Honestly I still can’t be sure if it’s dead or not so I’m not sure how that qualifies as ornamental… but you know…

Adding pots to a garden which already has plenty of pots sounds a lot like just adding work, but it’s really not. In a bit of foresight two years ago I bought enough fittings for a second drip irrigation setup. Last year I found an irrigation timer on clearance. Last week I put it all together and opened up the whole side of the house for shade containers. Hmmmmmm 🙂

The dripline came just in time for Brugmansia ‘Miner’s Claim’. The dead stick from last year has finally put on enough growth to need regular watering in order to continue looking uber awesome. I don’t even care if I ever see another lame pink flower on this thing… although I won’t complain.

Shade containers will be a new thing and I’m sure I’ll be complaining about them by the fall. I’m going to start nosing around for free brugmansia cuttings immediately either by gift or stealth, so let this be your fair warning when I invite myself over for a garden tour. Under the cover of social distancing I’ll try to behave myself but I make no guarantees, only after the fact confessions.

Oh look. There’s already a potted camellia ‘Ashton’s Supreme’ ready to move into the new container garden. I think these are flower buds forming for the autumn so of course I’m super excited it’s forming flowers under my care rather than dying.

Besides being a poor garden guest I’m also starting to go on too long so let me wrap things up. Elephant ear from edge of Florida parking lot. A weed down there but here it barely survives each winter, even when I try to pamper the tiniest bits of life indoors under lights. Sometimes I’ve resorted to dumping out the remains and hoping the water and heat of summer bring some life back to the tiniest bit of living root, and so far it’s worked, but I dread the winter when I finally lose this treasure.

Someone is loving the heat and a steady IV drip of miracle grow and water this summer. I just potted up another offset for the new shade garden.

This potted elephant ear (I’m not sure of the exact species so lmk if you have an idea) looks deceptively tame in the photo, so let me assure you it’s pretty big.

I love the wrinkles and swirls of green in each leaf. At four feet long I still expect them to get a little bigger still before frost.

Oddly enough I didn’t even plant the tubers of the regular elephant ears because… well because I’m fickle. These are bigger and less floppy, so I guess that’s the reason.

The sun containers. Watered via timer every 12 hours and all I have to do is sit with a coffee in the morning, and an adult bev in the evening. I hate watering so this is the only thing which keeps them going.

Don’t let an empty compost bin and a few repotted plants give you the impression I’m just a flurry of activity and hard labor. I’m not. It’s been two weeks since my last post and there’s only so long you can cruise on the high of a mulch job completed, so this is probably the least I could do. Oh, I also mowed the lawn. Go me. At least there’s been no pressure to do nonsense like painting or new closet shelves. The dog has been a handy distraction for things like that since I wouldn’t want to wake the little beast with hammering and stuff.

Hope you have a great week.

Imma Savage

Aug4

The weather is hot, the weather (was) dry and the gardener spent a three day weekend spreading mulch. He was not lazy. He showed no mercy. Sentiment was shed like a stream of sweat as plants were moved, underperformers were whacked, and all the mistakes and shortcomings of 2020 were buried under a fresh brown frosting of shredded bark mulch.

Edged and mulched, the front yard looks very... neat. — Edged and mulched, the front yard looks very… neat. Not bad considering the lawn has only been cut once in five weeks.

There was actually more involved than just three days of hard labor. The weekend before I had the gardener start ripping out and chopping down anything which didn’t please me, stunted things, dried up things, things which were just too crowded and taking up too much space. A few runs were made for free township compost, and the most promising plantings got some pre-game mulch to hold the moisture and give a good shot of nutrients going prior to the big event.

Along the street there’s no towering wall of sunflowers this year. Even the purple coneflowers were stunted and about half were pulled due to the lack of rain. Thinning, some compost and watering, and then a coat of bark mulch really made a difference.

Transplanting annuals in 90+ (33C) heat should be frowned upon, but since the gardener was not smiling anyway it seemed appropriate. The zinnias and verbena survived.

About two wheelbarrows full of fennel left the front border, plus a bunch of other dried stalks from June. Now I can almost see the stunted cannas and butterfly bushes.

I have to admit I’ve been watering the zinnias and a few other things for the last few weeks. It’s been worth it, and since I’ve been informed on exactly how much the water bill has gone up, I can tell you exactly how much it’s been worth. No doubt it will be worth even more next month when an even higher water bill surprises the mailbox.

Agapanthus ‘Blue Yonder’ has earned its regular watering. Perfect foliage and at least three weeks of this strong blue color is quite awesome, and I hope no one is tiring of seeing this same plant every year.

When I went to order the mulch, my mulch guy said “that’s a lot of mulch”. He was right of course and the price was not so I cut back to the smaller truck and still had plenty. Several areas remain which could have used a coating, but as I filled the last load into the wheelbarrow I was thanking my mulch guy again and again for saving me from myself.

Around the side of the house and into the backyard. Moisture from the neighbor seeps down through the tropical garden and from a distance it looks almost lush 🙂

Mulching in August is probably a stupid move, but I wouldn’t expect anything less from my gardener. It takes forever for him to work mulch in between plants, and of course things need clearing out, pruning, and edging and all that adds to the work involved. On the plus side, there’s less mulch needed since a full flowerbed usually doesn’t need mulch extending any more than a foot or so in from from the edge. Less mulch means less money and I think you know where I stand on that.

Most of the best gardens boast classic topiary in one form or another. Obviously we would expect no less here in almost suburbia.

The potager did not need mulch, but that of course did not spare the vegetables from my savagery. Potatoes were dug, onions harvested, and another few tons of zucchini were brought into the house for processing and gifting. A woodchuck was trapped. The trap was brought over to the car for a trip elsewhere. The woodchuck escaped… fortunately just before the trap was placed in the car…

Cabbage transplants are in although this family rarely eats cabbage. Perhaps the woodchuck will return and take care of that, just like he took care of the broccoli (leafless stalks, lower left corner) and parsley (leafless stalks alongside orange marigolds).

I took my woodchuck frustrations out on the boxwood. Even in my most savage moments there’s a calm satisfaction in seeing an unruly hedge go from wooly to neat, and although the zen of trimming with expensive hand shears is extremely overrated, I did survive.

The potager is too neat. Trimmed hedges are nice, but I think it needs more jungle so perhaps this week’s rain will do the trick.

As the gardener continued to mulch past the potager he could feel his will to live slowly begin to fade. Fortunately the pile of mulch remaining in the driveway was also fading, and with just a few more edges to do that works out just fine. More mulch might have tempted me to just bury the entire shade garden and put it out of its misery since the weak little rain showers which almost kept the lawn green never penetrate the red maple canopy which shades this area.

Everything looks wilted and sad, but for the most part nothing ever dies. Of course it never really looks good either, but…

Dry beds and dry mulch did have the advantage of being easy to clear, and easy to shovel and spread, but the dust was terrible. Normally I’d just put on one of my dust masks, but since the mulch was in the front yard I didn’t want the neighbors seeing and thinking I don’t support our leader, so I suffered my way through and tried to cough it all up later.

So the job is now done. We are expecting around two inches of rain today as the remnants of Isaias pass through and the view will likely change, but at least the mulch should look even nicer as plants (hopefully) burst back into life. The gardener will need a few days to rest up and rehydrate as well, so that works out… although there are still bags and bags of daffodils to go through and cyclamen need repotting.

Fortunately it never ends. Have a great week!

A Lot of Work

Jul26

There’s little question as to how I feel about hard work, and this is always the time of year when I start to wonder if it will ever end. Between the pests and pestilence that try to take over every time your back is turned, to the weeds that spring with almost an unholy vigor out of any unmonitored patch of soil, to the searing heat that jacks up the water bill, I just don’t understand those people who smile wistfully and claim to just “love gardening”. They’re probably the same people who put on a sunhat and white shorts, grab a pair of teal garden gloves and a cute little English trowel, and then head out to the parterre to plant a tray of nemesia while birds are singing and a fountain sprays in the background.

The no-work mullein out front has topped 9 feet and greets each morning with a fresh show of buttery yellow flowers. I love it, the bees love it, and sadly the mullein moths love it as well, and have darkened and nibbled a few of the stalks.

Here it’s a different story. Covered in bits of green weed wacking debris, with dirt up my arms and half blind from the sweat that kept running into my eyes, I was wondering if the sore muscles and frequent blood donations were worth it. Someone came by and said “you’re filthy don’t even think of going into the house like that, I just cleaned the floor”, so there I sat dripping even more sweat -since it’s also a billion degrees out- trying to make a little sense of it.

Smarter people just sit on the porch and enjoy the morning light. The porch is easy, plants get dragged out from the winter garden in the spring, and just need a little watering every now and then.

I have nothing against sunhats and teal garden gloves, it’s clearly jealousy, but I can’t help wondering why I keep doing this to myself year in and year out.

July is wrapping up so it’s probably time to finally plant the last of the (even more) perennial seedlings which seemed necessary in February.

…and then it’s a beautiful morning and the light is perfect and the house is quiet and I love it all… well almost all, the front border along the street is too dry and I’m kind of giving up on that, but all that other bother of lugging plants in and out, and dividing and moving and planting, and digging and hauling and weeding and mulching and watering… well you get the picture, I guess it’s worth it.

Things lugged out onto the deck are hitting their summer stride. As usual it’s a bit of a mess, but I love filling the whole place with way too much.

The deck is a safe zone although you wouldn’t think it. I can go out there and just take it all in since the bulk of the work is done in May and June and then it’s smooth sailing until October. Drip irrigation and time release fertilizer make my coffee in the morning and a drink at night much more pleasing than dragging a hose around and feeling guilty about letting them dry out once again.

I DID NOT like ‘Canary Wings’ the first time I saw it, but this spring two of these relatively new begonias jumped onto my cart. Studies show I’m a sucker for anything with yellow leaves.

The biggest success this year has been ‘Alice DuPont’, a mandevilla vine which has survived two winters with me so far and has finally found a place where she can show off her amazingness in a way that does credit. She’s come a long way from the pot of brown sticks which exited the garage in May.

The far corner of the deck. Hopefully the rickety trellis of old miscanthus stalks can carry Alice through the summer.

I’ve added a few new things this year but nothing too exciting. The fruity colors of the lantana and purple angelonia are perfect, but as usual I fell for petunias and calibrachoa again, and after a strong start to the summer they’re already looking a little tired.

Jewels of Opar (Talinum paniculatum) came up in the soil of a gifted plant, and yay for surprises! It’s like a pink baby’s breath, and although it doesn’t wow like Alice it’s good to also have plenty of flowers which don’t yell nonstop.

Something else will take over for the petunias. Nothing in this garden is ever one and done, and it’s the changes throughout the season which keep me interested. Maybe by September even Alice will bore me!

Just kidding Alice, you’ll never bore me.

When things come together you really forget all the grumbling about digging and storing cannas and replanting tropicals each year. While the heat is sucking the life out of the perennials of June, the southerners and tropicals are stepping up. #summerstrong!

Cannas by the street were supposed to be complemented by an airy froth of purple verbena… but then a clowncar of marigolds pulled up and unloaded all the orange. But I really can’t complain about volunteers, so of course they stayed.

Even the tropical garden is back on the love-it list. A lack of rain is stunting a few things, but you’d never know it, and even the sunflowers are welcomed back… although I did pull dozens in May…

The tropical bed looks less tropical and more just bright annuals this year. Still nice to look at as you walk next door for a dip in the pool.

Admittedly I’ve allowed a few more perennials into the tropical garden this year. That’s one less thing to worry about and I’m sure I’ll find something else to overdo elsewhere in the garden. Right now as potatoes and onions come out of the potager I’m fighting the urge to fill the beds with a succession crop of flowers, or use the space for excess perennial seedlings. One year, that’s the goal I have for keeping the new beds in vegetable production rather than turning them over to flowers again, and we will see 🙂

Sunflowers on a Sunday morning. It may be hot and dry, but it takes a lot before sunflowers complain.

Hope you’re enjoying the fruits of your labor, and even if the weeds are starting to win there’s always plenty of good out there.

Have a great week!

Keep Those Projects Rollin

Aug19

It sounded like a plan, kick all that midsummer apathy to the curb and really focus on getting some of those garden-changing projects done… but then I realized life is short and vacations are more memorable than a new bog garden, so vacation it was 🙂

One of Maine’s most photographed lighthouses, Portland Head Light. After WWII, my uncle was stationed at neighboring Fort Williams so we’ve been visiting this site for a good 40 years now. It’s always picture-perfect.

We did a pitstop in lower Maine and then headed to the Canadian border and Campobello Island. Five days of being outside, wearing sweatshirts, cooking on a campstove, and enjoying the scenery. The kids and I enjoyed it… the wife again chose to stay home, close to electricity, wifi and central air 🙂

Looking across the channel to Lubec, Maine.

These trips of course pass too quickly, so now it’s back to contemplating the maturing season and the back to school fliers. I dislike both so lets instead look at how the latest projects have progressed. You could probably guess that no one picked up a shovel to finish things off while I was gone.

The new hellebore garden. Mid August is not a good time to transplant hellebores, I believe after blooming is recommended, but after years of saying they needed to be moved if the mood strikes better to act on it.

The new shade garden is already filled with hellebores. I nearly died of heat stroke and probably lost about three pounds of water weight digging them out of the full sun spot in the potager and moving them, but the plants seem just fine in spite of the heat. I wish I could say the same for the shovel I used to dig them. Hellebore roots are strong, and apparently that strength is more than what was left in the shovel’s handle, so a new one was the first post-vacation gardening purchase. Fortunately the bog garden construction required no tool-sacrifices.

Ok so the new bog garden is far, far, less impressive than a handful of transplanted hellebores, but I’m quite pleased with it. Of course the most interesting pitcher plant is already half dead but the rest look promising and I’d still like to find some moss to add. The pitcher plants were left potted so they’d be above the highest water level, but there’s absolutely no reason for the log. I just thought it was a nice thing to add.

So maybe the projects aren’t rolling along as much as the calendar says they should. Maybe it will happen this week… although the weather says otherwise… or maybe not. You can’t follow a relaxing vacation filled with cool, foggy ocean breezes with a jump right back into the hot dog days of August. You have to ease your way back, and for me I was happy enough to get the lawn mowed again and edged, especially since to do so involved first replacing the lawnmower blade due to a violent run-in with a hidden rock.

Looking past the tropical garden into the backyard. The green of the lawn is misleading considering nearly all of it is weeds and annual crabgrass.

Of course I took all these pictures prior to any work being done. Even a single day away from the garden needs to be followed up with a thorough garden tour 🙂

It’s only been a week but with plenty of rain and some serious heat things have grown quite a bit. To my surprise no one has questioned the milkweed sprouts growing in the lawn or the gourds creeping in from the sides. Even when I mowed, I mowed around them. I like lawn, but a few interesting weeds are always an improvement!

All over things are exploding with color. Again the sunflowers have taken over, and again I love it. I’m always surprised by how well they elbow their way in, even with all the bird snacking and weed smothering mulch. I tried ripping a bunch from the tropical border and the potager but as you can see I’m about as good at that as I am at finishing projects 😉

The front border at its peak. Even after skimping on this spring’s annual plantings it’s still managed to come together.

I’m thinking about ordering topsoil and more mulch in order to finish the bed expansion which happened when the bog was planted. It just makes sense to shovel and move tons of stuff when the humidity shoots up to one billion percent and the forecast calls for a nice little spell of heat. If worse comes to worse I’ll just let it block the garage for a few weeks until the guilt overcomes me, and if I’m really lucky the sweaty mess of it all will make me almost relieved to see summer winding down. Maybe. I doubt it though.

Have a great week!

Rollin, Rollin

Aug5

So now it’s August. August fourth to be exact, and I’m not sure how we started into the month already when I only just realized July was ending, but here we are. Weeding continues and with the front yard relatively under control it’s time to give the back some attention. The potager is always ground zero for mayhem.

The view from the potager up to the house.

From the right angle and with some nice morning light the potager looks like a flowery wonderland, but an actual visit would show plenty of weeds and needs. Staking, deadheading, dividing… they’re all on the list somewhere, but weeding is all I really manage to get to. In my new lower-the-maintenance kick I’m trying to think of better edging and maybe some raised beds and trellises but that’s a whole ‘nother lever and I don’t know if I can pull it off without someone else noticing that the closets still need new shelves and back in June in a moment of clarity that was chosen as the real summer project.

Full disclosure. The back garden really isn’t as flower-filled as you may think, and the berm is just too steep and too boring to mow… just so I can have more to mow. So it sits covered in weeds (actually struggling and dried out smartweed for those who need to know) until I commit to planting something better there.

I was kind of inspired by how well the phlox were flowering and didn’t really mind all the hard labor out back. There are a few seedlings which are nicely fragrant which I always appreciate, and in general quite a few have decided to flower instead of die, and for me and my phlox that’s a big step.

Phlox paniculata with some hydrangea ‘Limelight’ in the back. The hydrangea have grown faster than I thought they would, and this bed might need some rethinking.

I don’t grow the phlox well. There’s always something they don’t like and I would guess that in any given year for the half that do well there’s another good half that look downright miserable. I think they’d like a looser, more fertile soil with even moisture levels but that’s just not going to happen and they’ll just have to deal.

This pink seedling is my favorite this year. It’s a pretty average color but up close I love the streaking… which of course doesn’t show too well in this photo.

I made it all the way to the ‘forgotten’ beds in the far back, which are less flower beds than they are just planted areas which I don’t mow. The double tiger lily (Lilium lancifolium ‘Flore Pleno’) is back there and has finally opened up its congested and twisted blooms. I never know for sure if I really like it or if it’s just too interesting to not grow, but I’m beginning to think I actually like it 😉

The double tiger lily has been around since 1870 so of course I’ll need to keep it around.

I was about to tackle one of the worst of the ‘forgotten’ beds when I noticed someone else had moved in before me. I treasure yellow garden spiders (Agriope aurantia) so when I saw this darling sitting in her web I decided enough was enough with the weeding and frost can level these things just as well as I can.

Yellow garden spider down in the weeds. I can’t leave this darling exposed and homeless, so for the rest of the season this bed is officially a spider refuge.

I’ll regret letting this messy plot go to seed but in the long run I always opt for interesting over pretty so each afternoon I check out how well she’s respun her nest and weather she’s looking a little thin. Every now and then a Japanese beetle gets flicked into her trap just to make sure she’s plenty plump by autumn.

A few of my weeds turned into cardinal flowers (Lobelia cardinalis). They kind of make up for all the endless rain which gave them the soggy ground they enjoy.

Opting out of any more weeding really gave me a new lease on gardening. Weeding the whole garden only to start weeding again is about as rewarding as mowing the lawn every time the lawn needs mowing, and it makes me feel like a dog chasing its tail except I’m not that into tails. These never ending tasks just wear me down. So the lawn is getting tall and the less noxious weeds are enjoying summer and I’m moving on to projects. I finally decided to address the pile of flat rocks I had collected last fall and had been mowing around ever since.

I don’t know how I moved that big rock back in the day, but last week with a lot of sweat and levering I finally moved it out from behind the grass. Then I bulked up the stepping stone walk and settled on a spot for the bog garden.

For me projects make you feel like you’re actually making headway. I want my garden to grow from year to year as well as season to season so changes always make me feel like that’s the case. The reality is that the photos sometimes say it looked better in the before state, but where’s the fun in that? Also I bought four new pitcher plants for like $15 on clearance so obviously I needed to invest hours of time and at least twice that much money in peat and sand just so they had a comfortable place to live.

Leftover stones and a neighbor’s discarded bench were all the excuse needed to make a second new bed while the first new bed was happening. Why not?

Someone might notice that adding beds to a garden that may already be too much might possibly be a move in the wrong direction but of course I don’t care. Hobbies should be fun and you’d be amazed at how quickly a weed whacker and a pile of mulch can tame just about any mess.

The rewards of messiness. Devils trumpet seeded out in a cloud of volunteer fennel. Not bad for a weedy snowdrop bed.

The bog is settling in and the bench now overlooks a patch of hellebores which have finally been moved out of the vegetable garden. I would have taken and posted a photo but was so sweaty and disgusting the mosquitos even avoided me. So much for the fun part of the hobby 😉

Rollin with Summer

Jul31

August approaches, and with it come some of the best outdoor moments of the year. I love how the garden comes together now, and how everything is just full of humming and buzzing and color. It’s a treat each day, and my only complaint is how fast the days fly by.

The front border on the last days of July. Less annual color this year but still a few interesting things to check out each day.

We were away last week on vacation and missed some of the hottest days of the year, but that’s fine with me since it was plenty hot on the island we visited. The heat here in Pennsylvania was tempered by a few downpours though, and even after a week of neglect the garden still looked fine.

I’m starting to wonder if I should try and tame the inner reaches of the front border. This time of year it starts to look a little messy with self-sown rudbeckia, sunflowers, and phlox.

The fact that the garden carried on fine without me is a little insulting but when it’s messy to begin with I suppose a little more messy doesn’t show. I’ll take that as one of the perks of having a far from perfect garden, but I did devote a Friday evening to mowing, and a Saturday morning to deadheading and weeding the front borders and I think it did make a difference.

Neatness would be much improved if I would only stand up to the interesting little things that show up on their own, but I can’t, and although good design never called for a squash patch on the front lawn, it looks like that’s what we’re going to have.

Everything out front is about the same as it always is but I did notice one change. There seem to be fewer wasps and bees this year, and more flies. That of course could change in a week, but as I was staking the steely blue eryngium I didn’t have that usual fear-of-sting like I normally do, and I was surprised.

Hydrangea ‘Limelight’ with rudbeckia triloba, eryngium planum, and a few branches of willow ‘Golden Sunshine’. Yes. It’s messy here as well.

Hopefully the missing bees and wasps are just an annual blip in bug populations, but I halfway think it’s got something to do with all the bulldozing and construction that went on behind our house. When they finished off the industrial park, a big chunk of rocky, scrubby, weedy, woodsy habitat was leveled off, and is now either mulched or turf and not at all interesting to anything other than woodchucks.

Sedum ‘Bon Bon’ is looking exceptionally nice between the blues and the yellows of the front foundation plantings. Yes it’s messy here as well and I really need to edge and divide the blue fescue, but that’s not something I’m willing to give up pool time for.

Not to look forward to messiness, but I did go back there this weekend with a sprayer of roundup and an eye for anything particularly invasive. The weeds and brush will return on their own, but I just want to make sure things like Japanese knotweed, crownvetch, bindweed, and poison ivy don’t gain the upper hand. I guess you could say I’m a weed connoisseur.

But don’t let all this talk of weeds become too distracting. I gave the front yard a once over and then did the backyard on Sunday. Neither looks too bad now and I’ll post more photos shortly, but in the meantime I’m particularly happy with the hardy agapanthus ‘Blue Yonder’ which is slowly clumping up for me at the far end of the front border. I think this is year three for it, and each spring when it comes back I’m always excited to see a few more shoots, and each summer when it blooms I’m wowed by the saturated color.

Agapanthus ‘Blue Yonder’ handled -5F last winter without a problem or any kind of protection.

So that’s it for now. The heat of summer has things slowing down a bit, and as long as I don’t slow down as well there might be a chance of catching up on projects. We’ll see. There are two more trips planned and that’s always a lot more fun 🙂

Back to Work

Aug1

The rain last week did wonders for the garden and it’s become as lush as last year. Lush is sometimes code for overgrown, so I spent some productive time trimming and weeding this weekend and I’m happy to say it appears to have paid off. With pictures taken at precisely the right moment, from just the right angle, within hours after the lawn was mowed and edged, the yard finally looks nice. I guess it’s about time considering we’re about four months into the growing season.

The lawn cut and edged. It looks almost parklike, just ignore the yellow spots… the kids were playing with a metal detector and searching for treasure in the turf…

I’ll try not to dwell on all the flaws I see. The front border has much less color from annuals this year because of beetle attacks and a dry spell, but there’s enough which has come along regardless. From the street side it’s really filled in, the usual perennials and random sunflower make a nice barrier between us and the road.

The border does its own thing along the street with just an occasional whacking back when things get out of hand.

From the lawn side there’s also a good amount of perennial color, but not as much as I’d like. I do prefer my plantings on the brighter side 🙂

This picture is 100% showing off the lawn. It’s a rare day when a well watered, green, freshly cut, neatly edged, lawn shows up on this blog.

Speaking of too much color, it’s not an official policy but in general I don’t have many daylilies in the garden. I don’t like the way the leaves on so many of them look all beat up by the end of the year and for that reason got rid of most of them. That may be a-changin’ though. I spotted this one next door and there’s a good chance I may rationalize an emergency dividing, so I can sneak a few pieces over onto my side of the property line.

Orange and pink. This might be just what my border needs… or it might be one more piece of evidence in the case against any good taste in my garden.

I’ll have to be sure I don’t give in to the temptation of bringing a few bright daylilies into the tropical border. It’s supposed to be all big leaves and bright colors thanks to explosive, non-hardy southern plants, not steady reliable things like daylilies.

A late start means the dahlias are only just now starting to flower, plus an unusually lazy May meant three or four were all that ever got planted. Maybe less will be more this year…

The top part of the tropical border is again nearly overwhelmed by 8 foot tall sunflowers among other things. This year I thought for sure I’d have the upper hand after pulling nearly all of them up but of course with more space the remaining plants grew even bigger. I guess I could have worse problems.

At least the elephant ears look tropical.

The lawn isn’t the only thing enjoying some maintenance love. I pulled out the hedge clippers and started doing a little trimming and was able to re-meatball all the lumps of yew along the house. I don’t completely mind trimming hedges, but rounding off the same yews every year just to have the same yews rounded off every year seems incredibly pointless, so by the time I got to the big one at the end I was more than a little bored. We’ll have to see where this ends up.

Maybe I can call my yew balls ‘topiary’ now. Of course I have yet to clean up the trimmings or get a ladder to reach the top…

Out back the potager is particularly lush. I’ve been relentlessly pulling sunflower, verbena, persicaria, and amaranth seedlings but plenty remain. Through July I still pretend to be the one in charge, but by August I lose the urge. From here on things will be getting messier and messier, with all kinds of halfway attractive flowers sprouting up and taking over as the phlox fade or the vegetables are picked.

It’s phlox season, and each day far too much time is spent checking them out.

I do like my phlox, but experience has shown they don’t like me. The list of named varieties which have perished in this garden is pretty embarrassing, so of course we won’t talk much about that, and hopefully more observant readers won’t notice that I again spent a decent amount of money on new ones earlier this spring. They’re not dead yet which is a good sign I think.

A mix of seedling and named varieties of tall garden phlox (Phlox paniculata). To my eye gold and pink do not mix well… in fact I hate the mix… but I need marigolds and I need phlox, so there you go.

From further away the phlox look colorful at least. Close up the foliage looks abused and there are plenty of other issues, but the flowers keep coming, and it makes me wonder if they think this is their last hurrah before they kick the bucket. I hope not, but I’m not going to fool myself into thinking they like it here.

I feel like it’s a requirement to grow marigolds in your vegetable garden, even if it’s so fancy that you call it a potager. Sorry about the white buckets littering the view, but this photo is to prove that there really are vegetables in here.

One last phlox photo. I wonder if they’d like me more if I dug up a whole new bed and devoted it to even more phlox and more new phlox? A few more reds would be nice and how much room do a few tomatoes need anyway?

I definitely need more phlox, and I also won’t rule out bigger clumps of the good ones like this white seedling. They’re native plants by the way, so maybe this is helping make America great again.

I’m sure by September I’ll be wishing for fewer phlox and more colchicums. Maybe. Hopefully it’s not chrysanthemums though since I’m this close to yanking most of them out in spite of the fact I needed bunches of them just a few years ago. I hope not everyone is as fickle as I am.

Happy August and have a great week!

Are you ready Noah?

Jul25

Since Sunday we’ve been stuck in tropical weather pattern that’s been sending shower after shower of rain our way and the inches keep adding up. I would guess we’re probably around four inches officially but it sure feels like a lot more, and although the sun has been in and out I can’t remember any dry stretches that have lasted longer than two or three hours over the last four days. Right now the forecast says two more days and perhaps as many inches and to be honest I don’t mind it yet.

Sunday morning before the rain hit I ran out and finally picked a few gooseberries. The daughter and I spent the first rainy afternoon cooking up a gooseberry tart, and I have to say it was delicious!

Noah never really mentions much about heat and humidity, but we sure have the humidity part. I guess endless rain will do that, and until the molds and rots kick in most of the plants are taking it in stride. The caladiums in particular seem very happy. Two months ago while looking at their tiny, shriveled tubers I was sure my overwintering had done them in, but to my surprise they’ve risen from the dead and are actually growing well. *accounting note. I couldn’t resist buying two more at $3 a piece… I have a weak spot for clearance sales, even though I don’t need any more*

Lovely caladiums potted up in some very unattractive nursery pots. This year I’ll focus on taking better care of them… even in September… Next year I’ll think about improving the pot situation.

The worst thing we have to deal with is floppiness. That’s not a bad tradeoff considering those closer to the river will be looking at flooding as all this water works its way to the sea. Lets hope we can dodge that bullet and it’s less than expected.

Gray plants and lots of rain don’t usually go well together. It looks nice enough anyway, but all I can see is how well the thistly sea holly is doing, and how unsuccessful I was at removing all of it last summer. Apparently even the smallest bit of root will resprout…

In the meantime the garden appreciates too much water much more than too much drought. It makes for squishy and sloppy garden tours but the plants just keep getting lusher and lusher.

The orienpet lily ‘Caravan’ is around six feet tall this year, but still risks being overtaken by the weedy little sunflowers which are being much more aggressive than I thought they’d be.

The orienpet lilies don’t seem to mind the weather. Most of these oriental-trumpet hybrids are sturdy crosses that grow like weeds and don’t need staking. They’re the ones often marketed by shady retailers as ‘tree lilies’ and some of the taller ones can easily push eight feet.

Lily ‘Leslie Woodriff’ doing well in the mess which lines the street. I had trouble planting her since the soil is so thin in this spot (about five or six inches), but she doesn’t seem to mind at all.

I’m looking forward to see how the late summer garden develops with all this rain. The cannas are kicking in, the annuals are bulking up, and even the vegetable garden looks promising. Of course none of this matters more than my newest favorite plant, a candlestick bush seedling (Senna…or Cassia alata) which I started last winter. I love its leaves 🙂

Senna alata aka Cassia alata, the candlestick bush. It’s not hardy, gets too big, and can be invasive in the tropicals. It probably won’t even flower before the frosts hit but I don’t care. It’s a favorite anyway.

I don’t think a photo of the whole plant really shows off how big and cool the leaves are.

Here’s my hand for reference. I couldn’t quite manage getting a foot in there, but this leaf is probably about two of them long.

Let me end by apologizing to those who are spending this summer suffering through heat and drought. If I could send some of this rain your way I would, but of course it never works out that way and I hope your turn comes soon. All the best.

$6 for two irresistibly priced clearance caladiums

$744 total so far for the 2018 gardening year.

During and After

Jul21

Summer vacations and gardens gone wild are two things that seem to come up regularly each year, and I’ve noticed many of the better bloggers will do posts on preparing your garden for a longer absence. Here’s my two cents. Do everything you know you should have done already but have been putting off, and then go enjoy yourself.

Florida in July is not enjoyment. The kids seem to like it but my only moment of ‘not bad’ was seeing the new Pandora section of Disney’s Animal Kingdom. Cycads, fantail palms, tree ferns, massive rock outcroppings on what used to be flat sand…

It was as hot up in Pennsylvania as it was in sweltering Orlando but fortunately a well timed rainstorm kept everything relatively happy. My plants are used to hit and miss attention so one more week wasn’t all that big a deal.

The deck containers would have fried without watering, but an automatic drip system makes them almost carefree, even with a full sun baking each afternoon.

I guess I can just pick up where I left off.

These are my new phlox. Only the most adept word-find champion would be able to find any phlox in this mess, but trust me I managed to dig them out yesterday afternoon 🙂

For some reason this year seems like so much more work than any other. I suspect it’s the result of my cheap nature and the way it’s keeping me from buying a nice, luxuriantly rich, delivery of shredded bark mulch (and its lovely weed smothering qualities), but it could be anything. My deepest fear is that I may in fact be getting old, and I may in fact have a more ‘intense’ garden than I should. My daughter informed me last week that all I do is look at plants or go on the computer and look at plants and maybe she’s not all that far off. I kind of pointed out that I also brought her to her friend’s, picked up her brother from somewhere else, went to the store, met mom for lunch, picked her back up, went for ice cream with her….

The potager in need of a grooming and a hedge trim. Growing vegetables might be the most time consuming component of the garden… even if you’ve only got my word to go on when it comes to there being any actual vegetables in there.

So now I’m working through the garden one more time to get it presentable. Throwing lawn clippings down as a mulch is helping, here and there the weeds might be slowing down, and overall the flowers are trying to make a go at it. At least the bugs (both good and bad and indifferent) don’t seem to mind a little ‘woolliness’.

I’d like to think this beautiful yellow swallowtail is the child of one that was hanging around the garden a few weeks ago. I like that there is so much life sharing my garden.

Some of the woolliness comes from my weakness for self-seeders. With phlox season ramping up there’s the excitement of new seedlings which snuck in while I wasn’t looking, and the surprises that come with new faces.

It takes plenty of diligence (maybe more than I have) to keep your phlox colors pure. This may look like the same clump but it’s actually ‘Cabot Pink’ in the back right half and a stray seedling to the front left. Slightly different petals and a tiny bit shorter, but the real giveaway comes on cool mornings when the seedling takes on a blue tint.

The phlox might look nice but they’ve been giving me trouble this year, even with decent rains and halfway decent care. Spider mites are swarming and the usual sprays of water and fertilizing haven’t done the trick. For as much as I like tall garden phlox, they really only tolerate me. Maybe someday I’ll make them happy.

My failed poppy patch. You may be able to spot a few purple blooms in there but for the most part it’s weeds which seemed to have sprung up overnight. Hopefully I can get at this today before the rain hits.

Relatively speaking the front border is doing much better than the back. It’s not nearly as colorful as last year, but it’s far less work than the potager, and only needs a strong beating back every now and then to keep looking decent. Last year I expanded it out as much as two or three feet and worried about what to do with the space. This year the perennials have rolled in and I barely have a few spots for annuals. Hmmmm. Ten minutes after saying I want less work I’m considering ripping out perennials to make more room for annuals.

I feel like the border is dull this year. The coleus I usually count on for foliage color have been brutalized by beetles and other less interesting things are trying to take over their space.

Don’t worry. This should be the last post where I whine about how much work gardening is, and go on way too long with the woe is me theme. It’s really not that bad and since I took these pictures I’m nearly all the way around the yard with the straightening up. Plus there’s plenty of stuff to admire while I’m trudging on 🙂

‘Silk Road’ might be my favorite lily. It fills this whole end of the border with fragrance, doesn’t need staking, and gets better each year even in a terrible spot. My dream for the future is that it becomes a clump of several bulbs and adds another two or three feet in height!

Enjoy your weekend, the weather here has been excellent for time in the garden and in spite of my daughter’s harsh assessment I’m still planning to do a lot out there today.

sorta like suburbia

more than you ever wanted to know about my garden

Category Archives: summer