Fireworks in the Garden

Do you have big plans for the Fourth of July?  There are many activities planned in our area to celebrate the holiday, including the annual fireworks show in C-U, which is always outstanding.  But my husband doesn't like crowded celebrations and the traffic afterwards, so sometimes I go to the show with one of my children and grandkids.  Other times, we'll simply sit on the lawn after dusk and watch the displays in surrounding towns from a distance.   I'm not sure what we'll do this year, but we could just stay at home this year and enjoy the garden--in the past week, my garden has exploded into a riotous display of color that's almost as good as fireworks.

Like pink?  There is plenty of it in my garden right now.  The Asiatic lily 'Brindisi' is nearly at the end of its bloom cycle, but what a show she has put on!

She's the biggest and most prolific Asiatic I have, putting out too many blooms to count.

As she is fading away, the pink of the purple coneflowers is taking over.  I have a sea of coneflowers this year, and I'm not exaggerating--more on this in a later post.

Prefer a hotter shade of pink?  These phlox always defy my photographic skills, but they are a dazzling shade of hot pink/fuschia.  And to think I almost pulled them their second year, because I didn't remember planting them!

More hot pink from the Monarda in the butterfly garden, which is a jungle once again this year.  By the way, please ignore the many weeds you may see in the photos.  The abundant rain we have had this year has certainly been good for the garden, but it's also been a boon to the weeds.  I'm fighting a daily battle against them, and I think I'm losing.

Now this is my shade of pink!

We can go darker still with the Drumstick Allium.

Or how about a bright red?  I wish I had taken this photo a few days before, when more of the poppies were blooming. . . and wish I had pulled that buttonweed behind them before snapping this photo:)  I scatter poppy seed in late winter over the snow and never know how many or where they might germinate; needless to say, this was a good year for them.

Going darker still, 'Little Grapette' is the first of several darker daylilies to bloom.

Personally, I like a combo of light and dark as in this early daylily 'Moonlight Masquerade.'

If you prefer the purity of white, there's plenty of that too--'Beckie' daisies are just starting to bloom.

And so are the 'Knee High Sonata' cosmos.

In fact, there will be quite a bit of white in the coming weeks as the 'David' phlox join the parade of blooms.

We can also add some purple to the dazzling mix of colors with some larkspur.

And almost blue--Balloonflowers.  I actually had to pull out some volunteer Amsonia, which were hiding this plant.

There is plenty of yellow in the garden, too, with all of the 'Stella d'Oro' daylilies in bloom, as well as other yellow blossoms, such as this 'Moonbeam' Coreopsis.  In fact, about the only color that is noticeably absent in my garden right now is orange, but that will soon change as more of the daylilies begin to bloom.  Tarzan obliged me by adding a little orange today:)  I think he has the best idea of how to celebrate the weekend.

No Fourth of July would be complete without displaying the red, white, and blue.  Maybe the phlox are a little more pinkish and purple, but it's close.

A little closer to the patriotic color scheme--an "accidental" combination of red, white, and blue.

Wishing you all a happy and safe Fourth of July!

Lessons Learned In the Garden: Spring 2013

With age comes wisdom, or so they say.  Having recently celebrated another birthday, I can safely say I am wiser than I was thirty or forty years ago.  But I am far from a sage yet, and I still have so much more to learn.  That is certainly true when it comes to gardening. Once again I have found out how much I still don't know about gardening and am joining in with Beth at Plant Postings for "Lessons Learned" this spring.

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever," wrote the poet John Keats.  However, gardeners know that is not necessarily so.  While trees may last many lifetimes, the blooms of trees and other plants are usually fleeting.  Nowhere was this more evident to me this spring than in my Baptisia.  My lone Baptisia is in the roadside garden, and one day while working there, I noticed the first blooms on it and couldn't wait to see it covered in purple.  A week went by before I thought of it again and realized I wanted to get a good photo of it this spring.  But when I went down the lane with my camera, there were no blooms to be found!

These were the only Baptisia blooms I saw this year.

 Now you have to understand that this small flowerbed is at the end of our lane which is about 1/8 mile long, so I don't make a point of walking down to check things out every day.  However, I do pass it every time I drive somewhere, so what happened?  Was I just not paying attention as I left on errands, or did it even bloom fully?   Sadly, I'll never know.  But I have learned my lesson--even if you don't have time to work in it, pay attention to your garden every day, or you may miss something beautiful.

I almost pulled out this "weed"--which turned out to be a Rudbeckia!

Recently fellow blogger Carol posted on Facebook that she was offering a course in weed identification: the workshop would be held in her garden, participants were to bring their own hoes, and the class would last until all the weeds were gone.   Carol's post may have been tongue-in-cheek, but I really could use a course in weed i.d.--except, let's hold it in my garden, please!  I can recognize dandelions, of course, along with bindweed, henbit, purslane, and the weedy grasses that are the bane of my garden, not to mention countless others whose names I don't know but whose appearance immediately tells me they must be banished at once.  But there are so many plants I don't recognize as seedlings. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has nurtured a plant only to discover weeks later that it's a weed, or pulled a weed-lookalike, remembering later that I'm missing a new plant...unmarked, of course.

Actually, besides a course in weed identification, a good book on weeds would be an invaluable resource.  One with clear color photos of mature weeds as well as the seedlings, with an easy-to-use cross reference of  leaf size and shape.  If such a book already exists, please tell me--I'll order it immediately!

On a positive note, I have finally learned the secret to growing annual poppies and larkspur.  After several years with no success in growing poppies, I followed the advice of another blogger (sorry, I've forgotten who it was!) who recommended sowing poppy seed in late winter by sprinkling it over the melting snow in the garden. As the snow melts, the seeds sink down into the soil and germinate when they're ready.  I've done this for several years now and have done the same with larkspur the past two years. Voila!  Success!  Next winter I'm going to get out my seed packets earlier and try the same technique with other annuals that require some cold stratification.  Casting seeds out on the snow is certainly easier than filling my fridge with seed trays of 'Rocky Mountain Penstemon' and babying them for a few weeks as I did this spring, only to have nothing germinate.

The first of many poppies to come!

The only problem with this method of sowing seeds is that you never know exactly where the plants might come up or how many will germinate.  I don't just have poppies this year, I have a plethora of poppies.  I also have a plethora of volunteers. Remember the nicotania that re-seeded itself all over my arbor bed last year?  At the time I attributed it to the mild winter we had in 2011-2012.  But apparently, nicotania just likes it here.  Once again, I have seedlings all over the arbor bed. 'Victoria Blue' salvia also re-seeded itself, which I didn't discover until after I had bought a flat of it, naturally:)

This Nicotania escaped being pulled.  A pretty white flower, but a few are enough!

Last year I dug up and transplanted many of the 'Victoria' volunteers elsewhere, and I dug up dozens of Nicotania volunteers to give away.  Not this year, which brings me to another important lesson I've learned this spring: sometimes you have to be ruthless in thinning out plants.  I'm a saver by nature, and it's hard for me to throw perfectly good plants onto the compost pile, but really, sometimes you really can have too much of a good thing.  I've pulled or hoed out most of the nicotania, leaving a few in an empty spot (and will probably be pulling more seedlings out as they pop up all summer!); I've hoed out the excess 'Victorias' that have strayed into the wrong territory; and, I've thinned out some of the poppies for now, and will be pulling most of them after they've bloomed, rather than leaving the seedheads.  It's been a hard lesson to learn, but I know I will be so glad I did this as the garden fills in this summer.

Best friend Beckie, aka my "plant enabler," talked me into buying this basket, so of course I had to go shopping again to find some double impatiens to fill it!

Finally, I have vowed this spring to cut down on the number of annuals I buy in the future, or at the very least be more organized when I go plant shopping.  Every year there are certain old standbys I always buy, but while I'm out shopping for the best buys on those, I always find something new to entice me.  Once I arrive home, I find I need another coleus to finish this container or something trailing for that one...and off I go, shopping again.  I spent much of the end of May and the beginning of June planting everything; meanwhile, the weeds have grown by leaps and bounds, and I haven't even begun to mulch.  Planting is my favorite part of gardening, but when it starts to become a chore, it's time to re-think and prioritize how I really want to spend my time.

The largest of the Asiatic lilies, 'Brindisi' signals the beginning of summer and lily time!

There will be more lessons learned in the garden through the rest of the year, more than enough to post some this fall, I'm sure.  And that's a good thing--all this new knowledge helps to keep the old brain cells from atrophying.  Besides, if I knew everything there was to know about gardening, it probably wouldn't be as much fun anymore!

Thanks to Beth for hosting this topic every season; you may learn something new yourself if you visit Plant Postings' wrap-up of lessons learned by other bloggers.

GBBD: Early Summer Blooms

My, but the summer days are flying by . . . well, technically, it is still spring until June 21, but last week's heat wave certainly makes it feel like summer.  At any rate, here it is the middle of June already, which means it's time for another Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day hosted by our fairy godmother Carol of May Dreams Gardens.

As I said on my last post, bloom times seem to be out of sync this year. 

The daylilies 'Stella d'Oro' are finally in full bloom.

Another latecomer, though, is the star of the garden right now. I had hoped my lone Asiatic lily 'Brindisi'
would bloom last week so that my daughter could see it, but it waited until this week to open up.

Look at all those buds!  I have been so smitten in recent years with daylilies that I have passed by the Asiatics.  I must find a place for more of these next year.  That's Hemerocallis 'Moonlight Masquerade' in the right background; a close-up of it is featured on my last post.

Nearby is another prize--my first red poppy.  I've never had much luck with poppies before, but this year I scattered some seed in late February over the melting snow, and they apparently liked that cold start.  I still had some seeds leftover from Spring Fling of '09 when Cindy generously shared her bounty with us, and I also had seeds from Tatyana, whose red poppies I so admired last summer.  Both packs were spread with abandon in late winter, so the lineage of each plant is unknown.

In the butterfly garden, chaos reigns as usual.  Bachelor's buttons have reseeded again,

and yarrow invades any empty space.

Penstemon from  friend Beckie--'Husker's Red,' I think--is nearly swallowed up by taller plants, either asters or goldenrod.  Not knowing what they are until they bloom means I am surprised every fall:)  The asters/goldenrod were cut back after this photo was taken.

Another re-seeder, Nigella, bloomed before I had time to take a photo, though a few florets remain.

Butterfly weed, however, is just beginning to bloom. 

I'm hoping the Monarchs can find it in the midst of this jungle.

The first hollyhocks have opened up.  There will be fewer than usual of these old friends this year, I'm afraid--in the feverish trimming that went on here a few weeks ago many of these fell victim to the weedeater.  But I know they will be back again next year.

The new Itea 'Henry's Garnet' was chosen for its fall color, but the little white brush-like blooms are a welcome sight this spring.

And for something different, you can't get much funkier than the vertical blooms of the Lamb's Ears.

There are other blooms, too, as the garden begins its summer session, most notably the first of the coneflowers as well as 'May Night' salvia and the geranium 'Roxanne,' but it is pouring down rain at the moment with thunder booming overhead, so those flowers will have to wait for another day.  There are many annuals, too, that will have to wait for their own spotlight, but I will leave you today with one of the most eye-catching at the moment, the yellow Hibiscus.

To see what else is blooming across the country and across the world, be sure to check out the list of participants at Carol's. 

And my best bloom of all?--My garden buddy who turns eight today. 

 Happy Birthday, Granddaughter!

Pretty in Pink

My favorite color is sky blue . . . just in case you were wondering.  Gardeners know, though, that finding plants with a true blue flower is extremely difficult.  One of my first ventures into gardening several years ago was to create a small shade garden at our previous home.  'Endless Summer' hydrangeas were relatively new on the market at that time, and when I saw them in a magazine, I knew they were just what I wanted.  I was going to have flowers of blue amidst the green hostas and ferns!

There's just one problem with this picture--other than the season I first purchased them, my 'Endless Summers' have been . . . pink!  I was amused when I read Racquel's post about her hydrangeas and how happy she was to finally have a pink one.  Obviously, I have the opposite problem.  Our area has very neutral soil, which is good for growing most things, but hydrangeas like acid soil.  My half-hearted efforts this spring to amend the soil to a more acidic ph weren't enough to produce the blue blooms I wanted.  But that's okay, because my favorite color in the garden is actually pink.

I've become a little more daring in recent years, adding some yellows, reds, and (gasp!) even a few oranges to various parts of the garden, but pink is still the predominant color you'll find here.  On the numerous shopping excursions I make each spring, you'll usually find me with a cart full of many pink annuals.  The old standby geraniums--okay, pelargoniums; old habits die hard--are still favorites of mine for several containers.  This 'Americana Light Pink Splash' is my very favorite.

Pink isn't a one-trick pony, either, with various hues available from this delicate pale pink of some double impatiens . . .

. . . to the hot pink shades of these variegated double impatiens.

Hot pink single impatiens paired with a pinkish (or is it red??) caladium.

'Royal Magenta' Supertunias are really more hot pink/fuschia than magenta.

Pink geraniums again paired with hot pink verbena.

There is the dusty pink of a rather tattered-looking Gerbera daisy . . .

. . . or the pale pink almost obscured by the red veins of this caladium.

But even if I didn't buy so many annuals, there would still be pink in my garden.  'Appleblossom' yarrow keeps spreading and spreading each year.

Salvia 'Eveline' is a pretty alternative to the usual purple perennial salvias, even though its blooms don't last as long as its purple cousins.  Too bad . . . I could see myself creating a miniature Prairie Lurie with more of these plants (copyright credits to Frances, the proprietor of Faire Lurie).

 The original flowers here at the Prairie, the hollyhocks, are not doing so well this year for some reason.  Only one--pink, of course!--is blooming so far. Perhaps some overzealous weeding or the attempts to eradicate encroaching poison ivy have done in some of these heirloom plants.

The Butterfly Garden, on the other hand is thriving . . . and looking quite chaotic, to be truthful.  Volunteers have re-seeded themselves all over this newest garden, including this bee balm from Beckie.  She told me it was a red cultivar . . . hmmm, this looks hot pink to me.

And, of course, I couldn't have a post about pink flowers without including the famous Practically Perfect Plox Pilosa, better known throughout Blogland as Gail's PPPP.

Or the almost as famous pink Penstemon X.  Both it and the PPPP are doing well in the Butterfly Garden despite having to duke it out with nigella, cosmos, and other volunteers.

But the piece d' resistance right now, the pinnacle of pink perfection, is this new Asiatic lily.  The old memory cells just aren't what they used to be (just ask Tena), and I could have sworn I purchased a yellow or orange lily last fall.  But I'm so glad I didn't!   You'll be seeing more of this example of pink pulchritude in a later post when the rest of the lilies are in bloom. 

And once it's fully in bloom, this new hot pink salvia 'Wendy's Wish' will also get more exposure. Reminiscent in form to the popular 'Black and Blue' salvia, this new cultivar somersaulted into my cart the moment I spotted it on my last plant shopping trip.

There are other pink blooms in my garden that for one reason or another didn't make it into this post, and of course, there will be later pink blooms, most notably the purple coneflowers, which naturally are not purple at all but rather pink.  But I think you get the idea . . . So, what color predominates in your garden?

Gee, I don't know about you, but all this pink is suddenly making me feel all "girlie" . . . I think I'll go curl my hair and put on some lipstick before I head out into the garden.