May 2012 Blooms

It rained on Bloom Day (two days ago).  It rained the day and night before that, too.  But everything's green now!

For this Bloom Day post, I'll focus on the side garden.  It has a lot going on right now.

At the driveway entrance to the garden, the geraniums are blooming.  Lambs ear provides a nice contrast.

A week or two ago, this garden was full of various irises, mostly along the house side of the path.  Most are finished, but there are a few that are later than the others.

Yellow bearded irises with white rose campion

purple bearded irises with rose campion

 Think I have a lot of rose campion? I sure do. Its shocking-pink blooms are about all you can see at the front end of the garden.

a sea of rose campion

Taking a closer look, it is hiding one of the first daylilies of the year.

Also along the house side, I have a few patches of mazus reptans.  It has been blooming for about two months, though it is finishing up now and the blooms are more sparse.  I bought two little pots of this groundcover last year, to see if it would spread well enough that I can redo the path with it between stepping stones.  I planted them along the edge of the existing path, and it has spread very nicely.  It should be easy to divide so I can put some along the whole path.  I love it when a plan comes together!

Mazus reptans

At the front end of this side of the garden (ok, actually in the front yard, but humor me...) is my rather prolifically flowering white rose.  I have no idea what it is, but the one-inch flowers are covering the shrub right now.

Along the fence-side of the garden, Centaurea have been blooming their funky flowers for a while.

Centaurea with lamb's ear

 The heuchera I planted for foliage accents actually have nice pink flower sprays.

Heuchera flowers

 The doublefile viburnum I planted last fall (to replace a nandina) is still very small, but growing and flowering happily.

Viburnum

 And at the front end of this side of the garden, peonies and salvia.  Why does it always happen that as soon as the peonies bloom, we get a big rainstorm?  I think I could predict rain better than a meteorologist, just by looking at the peony blooms. As a result, they don't last very long.

And that's the tour of the side garden.  Here's what it looks like from the front:

 Thanks to May Dreams Gardens for hosting another Bloom Day!

De-Neglecting (Bloom Day, part two)

 I've been working to un-neglect the Neglected Bed, which so far has meant pulling out the ivy that has been smothering it.

 

 (Sorry, no picture of ivy running rampant.  I bet you can imagine it, though.)

 I actually started the de-ivying about two years ago, with a plan to replace the rotting timbers forming the terraces.  But the ivy was all intermingled with the timbers, and it was actually the ivy, not the rotten wood, holding everything in place.  I got discouraged, and abandoned the project.  I stopped caring for this bed at all, the ivy grew over everything, and I named it the Neglected Bed.

Ivy growing through the timbers

At the end of March, taking a break from whatever other yard chore I was doing at the time, I started pulling out some ivy.  And more and more, until the surface of the bed was free from ivy.  I still don't have a plan of attack for the timbers, but I'll get there.

A pile of ivy

 

Look - there were plants under the ivy!

I took the following photos on Bloom Day, then decided to save them for their own post:

It seems I missed a few pieces of ivy here among the euphorbia.  This is the only time of year I like this euphorbia, with its version of "flowers" (later on, it gets sprawly and leggy).  But this makes up for it enough to keep, at least for now.

 

 My only non-purple phlox, banished to the neglected bed, is an attention-grabbing pink.

  

I used to have a blue and white columbine here, with giant flowers.  Its offspring has reverted to blue-purple, as columbine tend to do, but has maintained the huge petals.

  

Can I call this Gaillardia blooming?  Probably not. (A week later, it is in full bloom!)

And last Wednesday, my Sunsprite Rose had its first bloom of the year.

 

With all this going on (and more to come), I'll try not to neglect this part of the yard this year.

December 2011 Blooms

  A warm December means I have more blooms than usual.

In the upper garden, some black-eyed Susans have persisted all fall and into winter

My Sunsprite rose seems to have survived its very late (like last week) transplanting.

 

 The strawberries don't seem to know they can't possibly make fruit in December.

Around front, the white rose is blooming, too.

Not everything is out of cycle.  The berries are right on time!  Holly:

And my one remaining Nandina.

Interlude

I still haven't put up my Bloom Day pictures! What am I waiting for? I have no idea, but this post isn't it. This week I was in Monterey, California, and it was a good time to stop and smell the roses at my hotel:

Almost Summer

I picked a mess of peas today:

It is so hot, the vines are nearly done. My experimental row of direct-sown seeds isn't going to amount to much, I'm afraid.

I brought the peas to a picnic this afternoon. They didn't last long.

Garlic scapes are ready now, too:

I'd wanted to bring garlic scape pesto to the picnic, but the day got away from me. On the agenda for tomorrow.

The girls and I had a nice picnic in the sculpture garden, though it was very crowded for the first jazz night of the season. A thunderstorm eventually chased us away, but I got home to find total dryness. Boo!

As I took a late-evening walk around the yard, some of the plants seemed to be glowing. The neon-yellow of the Oenothera missouriensis is much more palatable post-dusk:

Nearby, the kousa dogwood lights up the back corner of the house:

And in the front, the shrub rose does the same for the other corner:

I see the daffodil foliage is finally succumbing to the heat.

It's about time: I have things I need to plant there.

In the side garden ,the first daylily opened today:

I also saw my first fireflies (they're not very photogenic). Summer's here!

Roses, part two

Here's another reason I don't feel the need to grow roses. When I want to see roses, all I have to do is look over the fence to my neighbor's yard:

When I first moved in, my neighbor introduced herself, saying, "My name is easy to remember. Just look at my yard." That's right, Rosie!

Sunsprite

I don't grow roses.

But three roses came with the house.

This free-flowering beast with cute little white roses adorns the front bed. Not really the best place fore something that grows wildly out of control, but it was there. I don't have any better plan for the space, yet, so it stays.

Smack in the middle of the side yard (looking very out-of-place, until you realize it is where there used to be a fence dividing front from back), there once was a rose. I don't know what it was - the rose died before I moved here, leaving only the rootstock.

I haven't bothered to dig it up, so I have some ratty-looking red roses over there.

In the terrace garden was this:

A Floribunda rose called 'Sunsprite'. Now, yellow roses are my absolute favorite. I don't wear yellow (don't have the complexion for it). I don't decorate my house with yellow. But I do love yellow in the garden (daffodils, anyone?). It is just so cheery.

Sunsprite is not just a yellow rose, it is a yellow rose with the sweetest scent. In flower, I can smell it all over the garden. So many roses have had the smell bred right out of them, but this one is perfect. Not that any rose is perfect here in humid Virginia. Black spot is a real problem, as are Japanese beetles. But when this one is happy (in my yard that is rarely), it is perfection.

My yellow rose was very old. 'Sunsprite' was introduced in 1977, but I'm pretty sure mine wasn't that old. My terraces were installed about the early-mid 80s. It is possible this rose dates to that time. It was a tree rose, and the stem was thick and gnarled.

In 2007 I was away for about a year. There was also quite a drought that summer, and much of my yard suffered, including this rose. It survived, barely, and limped along for another year. A hard winter ended its suffering. Like the rose in the middle of the yard, I haven't dug out the rootstock. This one is especially happy growing and flowering, so much so I even showed it off in my Bloom Day post.

(note the old rose trunk on the left)

But I miss 'Sunsprite'. Last year I looked for a replacement (even though I don't do roses), but couldn't find one locally or even reasonably-priced mail-order. I did come across one when I was in Wisconsin last year, but it was too big to take on the plane. I started looking for substitutions. I was leaning toward a 'Julia Child', which is very pretty, even though I knew the scent wouldn't be the same. But I didn't get around to buying one.

Then on Sunday I just happened to walk by a parking-lot plant sale. I smelled it before I saw it, and knew it had to be mine. So much for my plant-buying ban. Welcome home, 'Sunsprite'!

(oh, how I wish this were a scratch-and-sniff blog!)

May 2011 Blooms

I think May is my most crowded bloom day post. While the garden is calming down a little bit (new things to see every day rather than every hour!), there's still plenty to show off. I'll try to limit my photos today to three sections of the yard.

The Garage Garden (aka the herb garden, though it is less and less so as time passes) is no longer the Purple Garden.

There's still lots of purple in the form of columbine, but the front section is now yellow with potted iris and rue. The clematis add a vibrant red-violet. And toward the back, some new flowers this year.

I started a bunch of seeds last year, then did a plunk-and-run into a bare-ish spot of the garage garden. This year they are crowding each other out. The tall plants above are not what I thought they would be.

I think they are valerian. I don't like them, so out they will come. Making more room for:

Pink penstemon. This one got really crowded between the valerian and all the columbine. I've removed some of the offending columbine already.

Over to the terraces, the Neglected Bed (formal name: Right Lower Terrace) has all sorts of color going on:

some Iberis (candytuft) hanging on in front. Then, the rather vigorous rootstock from the Dead Rose is all abloom:

Further along, some iris I dug from my cousin's yard several years ago. They bloomed for the first time last year.

And just in case there wasn't enough color already, the Gaillardia have joined the party:

(I consider these a Summer flower - what are they doing up so early?)

Back across the yard, the driveway bed (now blackberry bed) is blue. But I'm not sad about it.

The grape-scented iris seem to be more blue than purple this year. They match the flax (Linum perrene ssp. lewisii) down the row a bit. Beyond the flax, not visible from the previous photo, is mom's geranium:

I wonder how much of this will last once those blackberries (also flowering now) take over?

Two more photos to show off today. First, the peonies are blooming!

Peonies always seem to pick the day before a rainstorm to open. Hard rains last night, a storm today, and more to come over the next few days mean I probably won't get to enjoy them much.

Finally, my favorite flower of May, for the promise it brings:

Peas are coming!

To see what's blooming in other gardens, visit Carol over at May Dreams Gardens.

also blooming today:
front - virginia sweetspire, pansy, coreopsis
side - bearded irises, Dicentra spectabilis, Dicentra spectabilis 'alba', Dicentra eximia, rose campion, heuchera
patio - virginia sweetspire
upper garden - Baptisia australis, Tradescantia, Sedum ternatum
shade garden - Chrysogonum virginianum, hellebores