Garden: The Front Garden Slides Towards Fall

Just a quick post to share a couple of photos I took today.  The garden looks to have begun its slow (maybe not so slow...I don't know?) slide towards fall.  Drought stress and uneven watering may have hastened this progression.  I see room for improvement in my watering technologies, that's for sure.  But, then again, maybe I can just heap the lion's share of the "blame" on the change of seasons. It is, after all, nearly October already.

"Reverse View" taken from my neighbor's property, perpendicular to our front walk.  This would be opposite to the view you'd see if you approached our front door on the path. I've got my game-day flag out--go Seahawks!

The Cimicifuga seems to have faded/suffered sun scald practically overnight.  Did I let it dry out or is it just that time of year?  Its rich aubergine tones have been replaced by ochres and russets.  One of my favorite combinations in this part of the garden is the Cimicifuga with the spikes of Digitalis parviflora "Hot Chocolate".  It pleases me in Spring when the plants are fresh but also now, in shades of brown.  This year, in fact, having given voice to this sentiment on multiple occasions, I decided to to double-up on a feature I like and filled a gap in the garden with another Cimicifuga and more Digitalis seedlings.  So (yea!)  you will now be treated to even more pictures of my favorite plant combo!

Close-up of the corner grouping.

The Sedum "Autumn Joy" is coming into full bloom, much to the delight of honey bees.  There are 8-9 plants in this swath and I've been toying with the  idea of replacing a few of them with a duskier Sedum variety.  This year I planted a couple of Penstemon "Dark Towers" to fill holes and to weave dark foliage throughout the border.  I like the contribution their dark seed heads make to this scene (below). 

A different view of the corner.

So that's the state of the front garden.  Soon (next time, maybe) I'll have some pictures of the back yard.

Happy early fall!

Garden: GBBD--September 2014

I'm late with this post, so I stole out for a few minutes to try and capture some blooms in the late afternoon sunlight.  

The "Autumn Joy" sedums are absolutely seething with bees.  I cut them back in early June, so they are just coming into bloom now.  One of the things I like best about this sedum is the range of soft colors mingling across the umbels.  Mine are mostly soft green, now, with light pinks and deeper rose hues advancing daily.

I enjoy the blooms on this Ammi visnaga "Green Mist"--they draw up into little balls as they age as do those of Daucus carota which are also called Queen Anne's Lace. Last year I was disappointed to find out that the blooms of Ammi majus "Graceland" don't do this.

Chasmanthium latifolium "Northern Sea Oats" is coming into its prime.  

In addition to these blooms, I have blooms on:  Rosa mutabilis, Lobelia siphilitica, Eutrochium dubium "Phantom" (also cut back hard in early June), Japanese anemone "Whirlwind", hardy geranium "Jolly Bee", Weigela "Sonic Bloom (TM) Pearl", Honeysuckle "Sweet Tea", Gaura, Alyssum, hardy fuchsias, Cyclamen hederifolium, and some re-bloom on Campanula poscharskyana "Blue Waterfall" and Alchemilla mollis.  

I'm still waiting for bloom on my newly planted Aster lateriflorus "Prince" and newly planted Ageratina altissima "Chocolate".  

Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day is a monthly link party hosted by Carol at May Dreams Gardens.  Take a moment to head on over there to see what is blooming in others' gardens around the world.

Garden: A Difficult Area

There's a difficult area in my garden that rarely features in photos.  It's a strip of land on the north side of my driveway that measures about 7 feet wide by a 25 feet long.  It slopes pretty dramatically in two directions, both down to the street and down onto my driveway.  And the soil is awful--clay over hardpan.  It's really difficult to know how much water this area receives.  On one hand, it usually seems dry which is consistent with shallow soil.  On the other hand, there's a lot of groundwater making its way down the slope and I have a feeling that this water (which derives both from rainfall and from springs in the area) percolates down to the hardpan and then sheets across it.  So, shallow-rooted plants might experience summer-dry conditions while deeper rooted plants might (for better or worse) find their roots dipping into flowing groundwater year-round.  All this is just a guess, though.  To know what is really happening I think I'd have to dig down to the hardpan layer many times during the growing season just to look at and to feel the soil for moisture.  I've had good intentions, but I've not done this. Yet.

When we purchased the house, the slope was covered with ancient junipers.  A sea of woody and overgrown juniper is not my favorite look.  It was so uninspiring, in fact, that I don't have a single picture of this area as it was when we moved in. No one needs help visualizing a hillside covered with juniper, right?  If you do, here's a photo of the hillside behind our house:

Our back yard, 2007

After clearing out the juniper and amending the soil generously, I planted a mixture of grasses (Calamagrostis x acutiflora "Karl Foerster" and Nassella tenuissima), bearded iris, and a couple of small vine maples (Acer circinatum).  The planting scheme was consistent with what I was trying to achieve at the time, which was distinct clumps and drifts of unfussy, prairie-style plants.  I also wanted the plantings to evoke a dry environment.  It looked like this:

North side of the driveway--May, 2010

How sad and empty that newly planted area looks!  I tried to wait patiently for it to grow up and fill in.  In April, 2013, it still looked like this:

Driveway Bed, April, 2013

The Iris were a highlight and yielded many nice photo opportunities (when I cropped out all the more unfortunate parts of the scene.)

Iris in Driveway Bed, 2013

The "Karl Foerster" feather reed grasses grew substantially and the Nassella filled in a little bit, but the poor vine maple was not making any headway at all.  Since the area was first planted, I'd added a few new plants including Rubus pentalobus and several varieties of dwarf shasta daisies.  But the area remained an eyesore.  It was not as full and lush as I wanted it to be and and did not coordinate well with the gardens on the other side of the property.  So, late last year I tore it all apart and remixed it.  I replaced the unhappy vine maple with a cut leaf sumac--I know that they live in areas with shallow soil, so I hoped that it would have the opportunity to make the best use of the shallow soil in this area AND be able to choose whether or not to send its roots down to the groundwater that I think flows just on top of the hardpan.  I moved all the plants around to try and achieve a more "meadowy" look.  Finally, in an effort to integrate the appearance of the two sides of the garden, I've added some additional plants:  Gaura, a couple of calico asters (Aster laterifolius "Prince"), hardy geranium (Geranium macrorrhizum "Ingwersen's Variety"), and a Japanese anemone.  So now it looks like this:

Driveway Bed, late-August, 2014.  

New additions -- calico aster and Gaura

Cut leaf sumac among grasses--"Karl Foerster" behind and Nassella in the foreground.

And that is how it looks today.  I'll give it another year to see if it will grow together and achieve the look that I have in my mind's eye.  I'll commit fully to the Nassella as a matrix plant and buy a couple more to fill the existing gaps.  And I'll do my absolute best with care and pruning of the Nassella--always a challenge.  If next spring/summer rolls around and I'm still singing this same song...well, I guess another garden remodel will be in my future.

Garden: Why no Photos?

I haven't been taking a lot of garden photos this year.  On one hand, I think I'm bored by the look of the garden and the photographic opportunities that it presents.  Last year, I probably photographed the same darn Pennisetum bloom and Sedum "Autumn Joy" bloom cluster about a thousand times.  No joke--the EXACT same Pennisetum bloom.  Because it was the most photogenic.  I kept waiting for someone to ask if there were any other plants in the garden besides the token Pennisetum and the Sedum--maybe just ONE Pennisetum bloom that I taped to a skewer and posed attractively in various positions around the garden.  No, I swear I did NOT do that!

This is The One.  Do you remember him?  I do.

And I know you've all seen the Digitalis parviflora in front of the Cimicifuga--apparently, I like to photograph that view as well.  

Cimicifuga and Digitalis this year...

...and last year...

But it's not simply that I am not sharing redundant photos--I'm not taking many photos at all.  

I'm a bit disappointed with the appearance of the garden because, in a fit of (and I've written of this before) "remodeling zeal", I tore out a big chunk from the middle of the garden and then a smaller chunk out of the left-hand side.  I know that the changes will be good for the overall garden design, but I wish I'd let myself have one year--ONE single year--of finished-and-grown-to-the-best-of-my-ability garden without chopping great swathes through the middle of it.  So.  It's a little bit disappointing to look at the garden in person (what with the gappy middle and side) and I find I'm not so thrilled about sharing pictures of it, either.

But, here are a couple of photos of things that look interesting, to me, right now.

Ammi and Allium.

Overall, this bit of planting isn't super successful.  The Ammi (Ammi visnaga "Green Mist")  proved to be too tall and leggy for this spot.  Normally, I think you wouldn't see its blooms in combination with the Allium "Summer Beauty".  However, this is the shortest of several Ammi plants and it seems to have been beaten down by the weather.  At the moment, I think the plants make a pretty pairing.  They are growing up through and adjacent to Sedum "Autumn Joy" and Amsonia "Blue Ice".  The Allium is a new addition to the garden this year and the "Green Mist" replaces the Ammi majus "Graceland" that I grew last year.  I prefer the greenish blooms and the ferny foliage of the "Green Mist" but "Graceland" was shorter and had smaller bloom clusters and, therefore, was probably more in scale with the rest of my garden.  Or maybe "Graceland" was just stunted by transplanting and inadequate care.  That is totally possible.  Maybe I'll plant "Graceland" again next year and it will tower, 5 feet high, at least, over all its neighbors.  That's gardening, right?

Here's another scrap of a view.  I thickened-up the end of the bed that's near the street by adding Phygelius and Rumex sanguineus.  There's an Allium "Summer Beauty" photobombing this picture, too.  Out of frame to the right are grasses (Hakonechloa and Chasmanthium latifolium) and Hydrangea "Bombshell".  I'd meant to plant Phygelius "Moonraker" which has pale yellow flowers--this plant, purchased in bud, seems to have been mislabeled.  I'm not sure what to expect from this variety, but I hope it grows as large as does "Moonraker" and proves to be as hardy.  I'm OK with the creamy, white blooms--they tie in nicely with the adjacent Hydrangea.  I think this combination will mature well together.

I'm not happy with any of the wider views of the garden, but here, for the purpose of benchmarking, are a couple of shots.  This is the "reverse view". It's about the only angle I can use which does not have a big, gappy, hole right in the middle of the planting.  Look!  There's the Cimicifuga and Digitalis again!  And the too-tall, leggy Ammi!  The overall look of the border would probably be improved if I went out and gave that Ammi the yank...right now...and trimmed off the spent lily stalk.  OK--I edited the lily stalk but left the Ammi, for now.

Here's the front view (below).  I tried to crop out the gap in the middle--it's there where the small Pennisetum "Hameln" and the small Penstemon "Dark Towers" are planted.  I like the dark seed heads contributed by the Penstemon.  When these plants bulk up, I hope they will fill the gap completely. 

So that's the state of things.  I did some editing during early summer/late spring that has kind of wrecked the look of the garden this year.  And I'm not enjoying looking at it OR photographing it.  But, there's still a lot of bloom and color coming in the next couple of months when the sedums, the grasses, and the Joe Pye begin to do their thing.  And there's always next year, right?  Will I remember not to wreck my summer garden with June-ish remodeling?

Garden: I Didn't Know What I Didn't know...

I've been doing a lot of good reading lately.  Currently, I'm working on Essay on Gardening by Henk Gerritsen and I'm really enjoying it.  Gerritsen, (1948-2008), was a planstman, garden designer, artist, and writer living and working in the Netherlands.  He is well known for his personal garden, Priona, which he developed with his partner Anton Schlepers.  The story of the development of this garden provides a framework for Gerritsen's musings on plants which comprise Essay on Gardening.  Gerritsen's plant knowledge and level of scholarship is deep--you'll need to keep Google handy to look up plant references--but his writing style is conversational and often amusing and the book is an easy read.  

Photo from Amazon

Gerritsen's horticultural focus was on close observation of plants in their native habitats and recreation of similar plant communities within the garden.  While he rued the loss of native habitats both in the Netherlands and abroad, he was not a "natives-only" type of guy--he felt that plants sourced from around the world simply contributed to a bigger palette of plants from which to choose the most suitable for any given habitat. Priona demonstrates the kind of garden Gerritsen favored--one in which self-sustaining communities of plants coexist and thrive in a natural way with little human intervention and without the use of fertilizers or pesticides.  

I'm a big believer of "right plant, right place" and I think that the plants in my garden should look as if they inhabit a similar environment--no mixing bananas and cannas and cactus and roses and whatnot--so Gerritsen's words found a receptive audience.   Before long (in fact, before I even finished reading Essay on Gardening) I was researching the native habitats of many of the plants in my garden.  Two plants specifically, Sedum telephium "Autumn Joy" and Pennisetum alopecuroides "Hameln", were left over from a previous iteration of the garden.  I became familiar with these plants through their frequent use in "xeric" gardens, hell strips, and commercial plantings all around the city.  Because of this, and because of plant tag wisdom such as "drought tolerant, requiring only minimal water once established, plant in full sun and dry, well-drained soil" I'd chosen both plants as part of a previous, dry-looking garden design.  I thought that they evoked "dry" but knew that they would survive our winter-wet climate.  Now that my garden features predominantly plants from moister environs, I'd begun to feel that these two plants no longer fit the scheme.  But where do these plants come from, originally?  I'd no idea.

Sedum "Autumn Joy"--picture taken about this time last year.

Imagine my surprise to learn that, according to Plants for a Future (pfaf), the Sedum is said to be native to stream sides, hedges, and the shady sides of damp woods. Perfect!  And "Hameln", according to Missouri Botanic Garden, enjoys moist to wet soil and can commonly be found along streams and around pond edges.   Doubly perfect!  No wonder both of these plants are  thriving in sun/part sun with average to moist soil.  So...I got lucky with these two plant choices and have plants that are better-suited to my growing conditions than I'd imagined.  

Reading Essay on Gardening has given me a lot to think about.  For one thing, I realized how limited my gardening knowledge is--and how hard it is to acquire good quality information.  Based on my own observations and on plant tag wisdom, I'd thought that both the Sedum and the Pennisetum were "xeric" type plants suitable for (or even favoring) arid conditions.  Diligent searching on the web turned up some new information but also many sources sharing the same (somewhat inaccurate) plant-tag facts.  I soon found myself wishing that there were a comprehensive data resource containing information such as who collected the plant and brought it to cultivation?  When?  In what geographic region and specific habitat was it found?  What is the plant's current range? The limited and often inaccurate information that is shared and shared again among growers and wholesalers is not adequate.

Of course, as soon as I finished writing this piece, I read a blog entry by Joseph Tychonievich of Greensparrow Gardens about Encyclopedia of Life.  He writes that it is his new favorite web site.  I hustled on over there to do a little research and, you know, I think it may be MY favorite new website as well.  Much of the plant information I sought so fruitlessly is readily available on this site.  I welcome this new gardening reference to my small arsenal of gardening resources.