Green as Color in the Garden

A serene, green corner of the garden.

With all the talk about color palettes and color wheels and coordinating color in the garden, it's easy to forget that green counts as a color, too. Many garden design books talk about green as a 'neutral.'  I think of green in the garden the way I think of my favorite pair of black pants.  It goes with everything.  With the thick backdrop of loblolly  pine trees behind the garden, dark green is the backdrop here to the flowers.  And of course all the flowers have green leaves, except the dead plants but I don't count those.

Yet when you have just green shades in the garden, it can be very soothing.  There's one corner of the flower garden that now rests in shades of greens and grays.  In early spring, the mounds of phlox growing low on the ground are covered with bright pink blossoms, but by June they are resting and refreshing themselves, growing and spreading out. 

The variegated green leaves you see in the right side are from my red twig dogwood.   It does not have flowers, but the leaves offer beautiful color and interest. They are a light green color with plenty of white on them.  The stems and trunk of the red twig dogwood are red - a bright cardinal red. During the winter, when the leaves are gone from the shrub and there's not much to look at in the garden, it really does provide a beautiful contrast, especially in the snow.

Other greens adding interest include the spiky foliage from the day lilies.  Many of the day lilies are starting to bloom, but I have some thick clumps of what is euphemistically called ditch lilies - the orange tiger lilies that grow wild by the roadside of America - and these have dark green, sword-like foliage which is quite attractive.

Another big swatch of green in the garden is the yarrow. Achillea "Fire King" has spread throughout the sunny perennial garden.  Soon, the clusters or florets will begin blooming, adding a sort of red-purple mistlike haze over the great swaths of lace-like green leaves.  Behind them are the Rudbeckia, the Black Eyed Susan, and various daisies.  While the daisies have begun blooming with cheerful yellow flowers, the daisy and Rudbeckia foliage adds more green.

Flower garden, June 2012

The green area offers a peaceful, restful place during the hot summer days. I can look out my office windows at this scene, and although I am looking at it from above and a different perspective than in the photograph, it does offer a serene place for contemplation and retreat when I need a brief respite from work.  

Perennial Combinations: The Sunny Border

  
The pictures today show off the sunny border in the perennial garden I installed in the front lawn. This is a bed that gets full, blazing, hot sun all day long. It's also hard to water, so the plants there have to be tough. 

The border is edged with three colors of Echinacea - purpurea (purple), White Swan (white), and a yellow. I bought a garden collection of seeds from Park Seed in 2008, started them under lights, planted them outside and crossed my fingers.  Today, not only did they thrive, but their offspring are crowded under the shadows of the white snowball Viburnum near the center.

I added three colors of daylilies which you can see peeking from behind the Echinacea.  There's Stella D'Oro, the small, compact daylily with piercing yellow flowers. I added the one most people call the wild type, the orange flowers. And I have one that has no name but produces the most beautiful orange-peach colored flowers. It's sort of the color of the orange and vanilla ice cream mix you can get at the store, if you know what I mean.  Yellow daisies and Gaillardia, started from seeds collected from the sunny driveway perennial garden, finish off the sunny border.

In the center of the bed is my white snowball Viburnum, a red tree peony which is nothing more than a twig right now, and a Festiva Maxima peony and a dwarf pink.  There are also three crepe myrtles, light lavender and red.

Some garden designers suggest planting cool tones in the hot sun, but I love the hot, hot look of bright yellows and oranges with a dash of purple.  Why purple? It's one of my favorite colors. It also came with the seeds....

Happy Hot Friday! Temperatures are expected to reach 100 degrees Fahrenheit here again...yuck.  Very unseasonable.  Here's to watering and mulch!

The Echinacea and Its Offspring

It's about 110 degrees in the shade (literally) today but still I keep finding more Echinacea babies. You'd think that with this intense heat the self-sown seedlings would shrivel up and die, but no - they're going strong.   I'm not sure if it's purple coneflower, yellow or the White Swan.  I found clusters of seedlings under the snowball bush, under the crepe myrtle, and daring the blazing sunlight. They're in a garden bed that gets baking hot sun all day long, no water unless nature provides it, and lousy soil.


Then you have the Echinacea I tenderly nurtured from seeds under the grow lights in the basement. Ten weeks of pampering. Transplanted it in the morning, watered, mulched it, and planted it among the other perennials so it would have some shade. I practically sang this thing a lullaby. And what do I find today? Bare dirt.

Moral of the story: the more I neglect my plants and just follow the leader - the plants - taking my cue from what grows, the better my garden will be!

Perennial Combinations Using Lavender

 never could grow lavender in my garden on Long Island. Being an island (even though it feels like living in an extension of Manhattan - oops, that's an island, too!), the humidity was awful and lavender often died from molds and fungi. Not so in Virginia. I went a bit crazy planting lavender my first spring here. I bought a set of various lavender seeds from Parks, planted them and kept my fingers crossed. Two of three varieties, lavender Munstead and and lavender Hidcote, love it here. They're thriving in all the sunny beds but especially in my rose garden. I have a new Spanish lavender that promises purple-burgundy blooms started from seed and nearly ready to transplant, too.

One of the most unusual lavender perennial combinations I've discovered is this startling lavender and yellow Rudbeckia together. It's not Black Eyed Susan but a yellow Echinacea variety.  There's also Echinacea "White Swan" and "Purpurea" planted in this border.

I mentioned my rose garden, and that's where the lavender really combines well with the scent and colors of the roses. It combines beautifully with my pink "Bonica" roses as you can see here, but it also looks beautiful with the red miniatures roses, too.

I seem to gravitate to pink and lavender combinations - the last perennial combination to share is the lavender on the slope with the lovely Misourri primrose blossoming alongside.


For more photos and ideas for perennial combinations, see my other blog entries -

• Pops of Color
• Perennial Combinations: Salvia

Perennial Combinations: Pops of Color

I've been experimenting with perennial combinations in the flower garden and today, this one struck me as particularly beautiful. The peony is a white "Festiva Maxima" and the dianthus is red. I don't know which one it is because the tag is so sunbleached I can't read the variety anymore. I love how the large white peony blossoms seem to pop against the hit of red, and the silvery green foliage of the dianthus is particularly lovely.  I also stepped back and took a picture of the blue salvia with the white peony, another combination I like.

What's Blooming Today

As temperatures soared unexpectedly into the 90's today (very hot for this time of year), many of my perennials finally burst into bloom. Enjoy this little tour around the garden! I drove into town this morning for the Heart of Virginia Festival but only stopped at the plant sale at the train station. I picked up two tomato plants and two mums and looked for some of my local blog readers who said they would be there, but as luck would have it, they weren't at the plant sale tables. Sorry I missed you!

It's too hot to garden today but you can enjoy a little virtual tour of the flowers....

Happy Weekend!

Ah the Good Old Days Sort Of

After I wrote the last post, I had a sudden, sharp realization of how much people smoked when I was a kid! And I'm not talking just about Miss Nita and Aunt Betty. I'm talking about everywhere. Do you remember family vacations as a kid? We always stayed in a Holiday Inn or a Howard Johnson's motel and the room always smelled funny. It was only years later that I realized it was stale cigarette smoke that gave the rooms that awful smell. My parents had smoked, but my mom gave it up before she got married. My dad smoked a pipe until he broke one of his teeth champing on the pipe stem. He gave it up. I remember how he always kept a toothpick in his mouth, in the exact same spot where he once kept his pipe. Whenever I did the wash I'd find bits of broken toothpicks since he'd leave them in his shirt pockets and forget about them. We were never without the obligatory box of toothpicks in the kitchen for him.

But smoking....we were strictly forbidden to smoke. I have never once smoked a cigarette. Never. Not once!

When I was 16, I took a job working for the Rosenzweig Insurance Agency in Floral Park. It was a wonderful job and a super office. Mr. Rosenzweig did not smoke and people were forbidden to smoke in his inner sanctum. But the rest of the office? It was like a chain-smoking convention. Those were the days when every desk in the office had a little ash tray that came with the pencil holder. Three of the women who sat in the open area where I worked smoked all day. You'd open the door to the office and this blue haze hung over the work area. Later on, when the first smoking laws went into effect, Mr. R asked the girls to smoke only in the break room. It was one small room in the back of the building next to the bathroom. We hung our coats on pegs on the wall above the file cabinets and ate our lunch at a small circular table.

One day I came home from work and my dad grabbed me by the collar and started sniffing, like a dog. "Have you been SMOKING?" he barked at me.

I must have looked amazed rather than guilty for he dropped his grip almost immediately. I said, "No, Dad, I would never touch the stuff."

He continued sniffing. "Why do you stink like cigarettes?'

At that I had to laugh. "We keep our coats in the break room where the women smoke. My coat's been hanging in the smoking room all day!"

Later on, another woman complained, so the girls had to take their cigs back into the alley and smoke outside. But I never forgot how funny it was when I told some young people at work one time about what it was like to work back in the early 1980's. They couldn't get over the fact that people could smoke at their desks!

Perennial or Weed?

"Is this a perennial or a weed?"

Good question. As John and I weeded the butterfly and hummingbird flower garden yesterday, he had to ask me over and over again, "Is this one of the perennials or a weed?"

The truth is, many flowers grown in the perennial garden to nurture butterflies and hummingbirds DO look like weeds...or, grown in other conditions, may be thought of as weeds! These flowers tend to be big, floppy, and bloom for only short bursts.

We bought the Butterfly & Flower Garden Kit from Spring Hill Nursery, and added our own plants - Buddleia, Salvia, Nepeta and Lantana.

The Penstemmon is always what confuses us. Once the big red spikes have gone away, and we're left with the long floppy stems, someone wants to rip it up.

But I do admit, we were fooled by a couple of weeds. It wasn't until later that day when we were weeding around the orchard trees that I realized that something I'd left in the Butterfly Garden was really a weed.

But what is a weed, exactly? Just a plant growing where you don't want it!

Considering that Lowe's was selling Goldenrod this week, I'm inclined to broaden my definition of what belongs in the garden...and what constitutes a weed.

The July Garden

The July flower garden here at Seven Oaks is hot, hot, hot - brimming with eye popping oranges, yellows and golds while temperatures soar. I seem to have planted midsummer blooming perennials that are just saturated with color. It's a total accident. I have about as much garden design instinct as I do the ability to do calculus (that is: zero ability). The weeds are taking over, but I hope to get out in the evenings and make a dent in them later this week.




My favorite flowers blooming now are the Echinacea - coneflower. I bought seeds in 2007, a kit from Park Seeds. I'm always buying kits. I was told that coneflower is difficult to start from seed. Maybe, maybe not. These seem to love it here in the bright full sun garden that gets hot direct sun all day long.

The kit included purple, Echinacea "White Swan" and a golden color. Now they are all blooming...just stunning clusters of them in the little island garden in the middle of the lawn. The birds love them. They land on them as they swoop over the lawn, and I think they are enjoying the seeds too.

Before temperatures soar, enjoy these hot flower colors in the July garden here in southern Virginia!

Journey Into the Garden Through the Camera Lens

Today's update...journey into the garden through my camera lens.

Hollyhocks: took them two years but they were well worth it. Bought from Spring Hill Gardens (visit them using the link in the left side of the blog please).

The flower garden in June. One of my favorite places, and I hope it becomes one of your favorite places, too.






From one direction, the hollyhocks are highlighted by numerous yellow perennials, including varieties of daisies and Stella d'Oro daylilies....

Looking at them from another direction, the hollyhocks stand out against the salvia and nepeta in the butterfly and hummingbird garden behind them. I have white and yellow hollyhocks blooming now. A group I planted from seeds, mystery colors all, are about to bloom.






















Here is one of our daily visitors. At one point today, three hummingbirds took turns on the feeder. They perch on the trellis. Morning glories are slowly making their way up the sides of the trellis, volunteers growing from plants I had there last year.

Flower Gardening Update

I promised that once a month, I'd stand in the same spot (next to the piles of slate destined for the garden paths...trust me, they aren't moving anytime soon) and snap photos of the flower garden. I love flower gardening. I could spend all day out there. The butterflies are out in full force. On Tuesday we counted 20 butterflies alone at the front of the garden. This morning as I snapped these pictures, several hummingbirds swooped by to drink nectar from the feeder hanging on the arched trellis entrance, but I was too slow to capture them.

Here is the garden on May 4, 2009:













And here it is: the flower garden, today, June 4, 2009. This is the hot, sunny, sloping area next to the driveway that the guys building our house thought of as wasted space. They've told us they wondered what we'd do there. Even the UPS delivery man stops to look at the flowers when he drives up. The flowers make me so happy! Annuals, perennials, roses and a ton of weeds, all in happy, messy profusion.














The majority of the plants are from SpringHill Nursery. Remember my story about them? I bought two kits and they had a year guarantee. I called them to ask for a replacement on just six plants that had died. Each kit had at least 30 plants. They didn't just send me new plants - they sent me the WHOLE KIT! TWO KITS! So my flower gardening joy is complete. More plants to play with!

Garden Update

Yesterday was the first break since this unseasonable heat started, so after dinner I raced outside to plant the perennials and annuals we'd bought last week. In went the yarrow, orange-red avens, mystery colored campanula (no label on the variety, just a nice fat healthy plant and the name "Campanula" on the label), and over two dozen bronze-leaf begonias (one of my all time favorites) and white, purple, pink and salmon petunias. Petunias thrive here in Virginia. I think it's all those cool nights and hot days. Last year I had just fountains of petunias all over the garden, and that was from a $1 clearance flat I grabbed at Lowe's. I love that clearance rack. What the clearance rack at Filene's is to a New York City gal, the discount plant rack at Lowe's is to my life as a country gal...

So in went the flowers last night. The butterfly garden got weeded and new plants added. The cocoons on the buddleia still haven't hatched. John speculates that nature won't let them hatch until the buddleia leafs out, so that the babies have enough food.

I've got a new yellow theme going up in the island flower bed in the middle of the lawn, and the poppy - the sole survivor of my first forays into poppy growing - has perked up. One half of the bed contains plants with all sorts of yellow and white colors: Stella d'Oro daylilies, yellow yarrow, yellow echinacea and echinacea White Swan. I've got a big white snowball bush there too and white peonies. I've added white petunias. On the other end of the bed are my pink crepe myrtles, lavender, Echinacea purpurea, and now hot pink petunias. I think it's going to be a love it or hate it with the color.

Wonder of wonders, the echinaceas I grew from seed last year have started budding. I've got White Swan, purpurea, and a yellow variety whose name escapes me now. The yellow echineacea has just started sending up flower buds - I feel like a proud mama at graduation!

The scabiosas are blooming like mad now, and my purple and white iris that smells like a grape soda pop is just about to bloom. The new irises in the back of the garden are also sending up at least one tentative bud. I'll finally get the answer to the question, "Which survived? The blue or pink irises?" since I can't read my own handwriting in my garden journal where I recorded what I planted and where last fall.

Best of all, out of my five peonies I bought from a catalog and planted in the fall of 2007 - four survived, and three of the four have masses of flower buds. Peonies are one of my all time favorite plants. I am stalking my Festiva Maxima now like a crazed fan outside of a starlet's window.

Perennial Kits or Do It Yourself?

So where do you fall - do you go for the prepackaged kits of plants sold in catalogs, or do you buy plants and do your own thing?

I've never gardened much with perennials before moving to Virginia. Frankly we didn't have enough room in my last two gardens. My parents' house in Floral Park, Long Island, had a garden the size of a postage stamp, mostly filled with my dad's chrysanthemums and vegetables. My in-laws garden in Huntington, Long Island, where I lived after I married, had clay soil, dense shade, and lots of lawn. Gee, why wouldn't they dig it up to put in more flower beds? Guess not, huh? I had to make do with what I had. Every bit of sun in that garden bed had a vegetable tucked in.

The only perennials I'd bought before moving to Virginia were 1) daylilies 2) platycodon (Balloon Flower - Komanchi) and 3) heuchera (Coral Bells).

I did work at Martin Viette Nurseries (Andre Viette's father founded it but it is now owned by another family) for three years, so I absorbed plant knowledge by osmosis. But perennials scared me.

When we moved, we had this awful bit of land on the side of the driveway. It sloped away very steeply, and was bare dirt. The dirt was hard packed clay with lots of rocks thanks to the digging that had to be done to create our water well. The slope faced south, with the thick pine woods at its back.

What to do?

Perennials. Lots of them.

That slope needed to be covered. The dirt eroded at a surprisingly fast and scary rate. So we rushed out and bought two perennial sun garden kits from Spring Hill Nurseries. Last March, I laid out the paths and got my long-held wish: a rose garden.

The perennial kits are great. We had good luck with most of them, except the hollyhocks. The hollyhocks either didn't grow or the Japanese beetles ate them faster than they could grow.

But the other plants...well, read on.

The kit contained purple yarrow, purple and blue scabiosa (which always sounds like a Harry Pottery spell to me), orange gaillardia, and white and yellow daisies, along with purple mini hollyhocks and big hollyhocks. We originally bought two kits. I called Spring Hill to ask for replacement hollyhocks, since so many didn't grow. They sent me two more full kits at no charge! So I now have four sets of plants growing on the slope.

Here's what thrived in southern Virginia:

1. Yarrow: I love this plant. It loves my hot, sunny slope. It has spread out in pools of green fronds and it is only its second year. I can't wait to see how it blooms!

2. Gaillardia: Not only did the plants thrive last year, with almost constant hot orange blossoms from June through November, but it reseeded. I saved seeds and have a flat of seedlings waiting to go into another garden. My plants decided to seed themselves and I'm excited to see about a dozen tiny gaillardia springing up among the other perennials. They already have flower buds.

3. Scabiosa: Not everyone's cup of tea, but the butterflies love the tiny pompom flowers. I think this one also reseeded. It loves the garden and seems very hardy.

4. Daisies: I wish I could find the original packing slip so I can stop calling them both daisies, since I know one is probably rudbeckia, and I feel dumb for not using the Latin names. No matter. Thriving, thick clumps of plants already came back, and I'm excited to see seedlings for these guys too. I've also got some plants started from seeds I collected last year.

There you have it - what worked and what didn't. What didn't are hollyhocks. The picture today is the one lone hollyhock that bloomed last year. It's a mini. Everyone asked me if it is a weed and my husband kept asking me if he could dig out the weed, pointing to the poor hollyhock. Sad, sad plant. We'll see what it does this year!

Perennial Combination

Drumroll, please...here is the perennial combination I put into the front of the house, right next to the steps and the porch. My perennial choices are highly dictated by what's available at Lowe's. Yes, I could head over to the fancy greenhouse in town, B & M (which has very nice plants) but my wallet is thin at the moment. So Lowe's it is. I had a gift certificate. The soil was hard, awful clay that had to be broken up with a pick axe. The ground was also compacted from the construction on the house. We broke it up, amended it with compost, then put down landscape fabric. The perennials went in, and we covered the whole thing with pine bark mulch. Sun exposure is mostly south west, with sun reaching the area around noon and direct sun until dark.

• The tall perennials in the back with the purple spikes are "East Friesland Salvia." I love salvia, and it does so well here in Virginia. I have salvia "May Night" in the butterfly garden and it's huge already!

• On either end are two dianthus "Neon Star". I love the spiky blue-gray foliage and the neon dark pink flowers. But what fascinates me most are the flowers. They're yellow as buds, then they open to that neon pink color. How does that work? I don't know. I have a few more in the perennial garden but they get lost among the bigger plants. Here I can really see them.

• This is the first time I am growing Blue Star Lithidora. I'm not sold on this plant yet. It seems fussy already and believe me - you won't survive this garden if you're a fussy plant. It sulks when it doesn't get drowned with water. That may be transplant shock. I don't know. Now it looks good. Hopefully it will survive. I do love the little star shaped blue flowers.

I've got all the books with all the 'rules' about perennial combinations. I ignore all the rules. I buy what pleases me. As long as the tall things are in the back and the short things in the front, it looks good to me.

What do you think?

Perennial Combinations

As you can image, with temperatures soaring near 70 and bright sunny skies, I was out in the garden for many hours. On Saturday, we finished off "the boat" as we now call the long octagonal flower bed in the back of the house. John fussed more with the underground sprinkler line. I think it's fine, but he's not satisfied with the connector to the house. We're trying to get the backyard done so that the patio can be finished. I'm super excited about that, not just because we get another outdoor living space that overlooks the back fields and woods, but because John mentioned to the electrician who came to bid on the job that we are going to put a pond into the little flower garden. I've wanted a pond forever! We found a natural-looking fountain at Lowe's last year, so we are going to wait until the fall when hopefully it will go on sale. We planted more shrubs into the perennial garden and walked the property, noting the next projects to work on while we replenished the soil in the bare patches on the lawn.

The biggest project by far was finishing the front beds in front of the porch. What looked like a simple job of digging a few holes for azaleas and perennials turned into a pick axe and many smashed fingers. We'd both forgotten that the area near the foundation of a house is always packed with hard pan, clay and gravel from construction. Poor perennials. At least today they are getting watered!

I designed a perennial combination right by the front steps that I think will be lovely once it fills in. I used aalvia "May Night" in the back, and planted some rich dark pink dianthus in front, along with lighter pink phlox. I like how the dark blue-purple flowers and gray-green leaves of the salvia look with the textures and colors of the dianthus. The deer ate the flowers right off of my phlox last year in the perennial garden, but this close to the front steps I doubt they'll find it. I planted something new with blue, star-shaped flowers whose name escapes me. I'll have to pop outside and look at the tag. If it wasn't pouring rain, I'd take a few photos of the perennial combination too and post them. Maybe tomorrow....

In the vegetable garden, carrot seeds went in this weekend.  I'll wait another week or two, then direct sow the seeds. The onions continue to thrive, and the radishes too. The spinach is rapidly overtaking both the Swiss chard and broccoli rabe in terms of growth, but the lettuce is already looking a bit peaked. The strawberries are really runnning wild, but more poor blueberries are dry, brittle sticks. Ah well. Learning to garden in a new area always takes time. Gardeners need a lot of things. Rain, sun, time and patience among others!