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.  

Blooming Today at Seven Oaks

Today's blog post is simply this: pictures of what's blooming at Seven Oaks.  Plus I couldn't resist snapping a quick picture of the perennial garden with my gardening helper, Pierre, jaunting along the pathway.  This is the garden we built into the steep slope next to the driveway.  We have one small section of pathway to complete and I have more sections to weed this year, but I wanted to take a 'before' picture today so you could see the bones of the garden...the hardscapes...the beautiful form that hubby and I created....and in a few short weeks I will take another image from the same spot and you can see it in bloom. 

Pierre in the perennial garden

Iris

Kerria japonica, shrub that attracts many pollinators

Yellow columbine grown from seed

Purple Coneflower or Echinacea in Bloom

Echinacea "Paradoxa" and friend

The Echinacea are now in full bloom throughout the garden, although the latest additions in 2010, Echinacea "Cherry Brandy," are shyly holding back their blossoms. I even found a few volunteers, or plants grown from seeds blown about by the wind, in the island bed in the middle of the lawn. Shadow and I went out to the garden at noon today, braving the scorching heat wave that's struck central Virginia, and she plopped down under the snowball Viburnum while I inspected the Echinacea.  I did a double take when I realized why Shadow chose to snooze under the Viburnum while I puttered about; it's tall enough to cast a decent shadow, and she lay down in the shade.  I only planted that little seedling in spring 2009 - they sure do grow quickly!

The Echinacea growing throughout my garden are from two groups I started from seeds. The first group started as a 'sampler' pack from Park Seed. I bought the Park Seed Coneflower Collection Echinacea and lavender sampler sets in 2008, started them from seed, and used the seedlings as a border around the island bed. I had a few lavender leftover, so that became the border around the rose garden and then a little hedge of lavender nearby.

Coneflower collection - White Swan, Purpureau (purple coneflower), Paradoxa (yellow). Petals are upright until maturity, then they point downward into the telltale cone shape.

The kit included Echinacea "White Swan," the Traditional "Purpurea" (purple, what everyone thinks of when you say Echinacea - Purple Coneflower), and Yellow "Paradoxa."  (If you buy the collection now, they swapped out the common Purpurea for Magnus, which has a more daisy-like appearance but is also purple.)

Echinacea is native to North America, which is another reason I love seeing the nodding, cone-shaped seed heads. The name comes from the Greek word for "hedgehog" because the first Europreans who saw the plant decided the seed cone looked bristly, like a hedgehog. I'm not sure if I'd have chosen a similar name. I probably would have called the plant "goldfinch mother" since it nurtures the goldfinches and kinglets that love to eat its seed. Every fall, flocks of the beautiful golden birds alight on the seed heads.  I collected seeds the first year; now I don't. I leave them for the birds.

Classic Purple Coneflower

This year I have a few more Purpurea seedlings snug in their nursery pots on the front porch, waiting for a cooler day to move them into the garden. I like to wait until I have at least three sets of strong, robust leaves on the plants before attempting to transplant them, and I have to wait for a time when I know I will remember to water them daily.  If I get too busy, I forget to water them, and in this heat the babies shrivel and wither away under the fierce glare of the Virginia sun.

If you've never grown Echinacea, they're truly easy care perennials, but they do need full sun and some space.  I recommend that beginners buy them as fully grown plants at the garden center, since the seeds require some TLC and nurturing until they're big enough to transplant into the garden. Some of my friends have had success sowing seeds directly into the garden; maybe you will, too. But do add Echinacea to the garden. Nothing says summer like Purple Coneflower!

Fountains of Phlox

Fountains of phlox flow everywhere at this time of year. As you drive the back roads in Virginia, neighbors have planted phlox along embankments, by mailboxes, and along slopes too steep to cut with the riding mower or tractor. You'll be driving along, turn the corner, and like a trumpet blast, there's a river of bright pink or magenta careening over the rocks on an embankment. Set against blooming white dogwoods, a native tree here that flowers at the same time, and spires of tall white flowering pears, it's like an artist took a brush and just slashed the landscape with color.


We planted phlox along the front walk, grouped in front of the azaleas, and a few in the flower garden. Now that we know they love it here and the garden ones spread out, we bought another 10 this weekend. I added them to the steep slope in the flower garden that grows dandelions and nothing else. Hopefully by next year, we'll see the start of our own rivers and fountains of phlox!

Phlox is amazing. It's hardy. It spreads out, and where it grows, weeds dare not follow. Occasionally the deer will chomp the flowers off, but they leave the plants, and the plants send forth new flowers in defiance. Add some rocks or plant them among rocky outcrops in your garden and you've got an automatic flower garden. I never water them, fertilize them or do anything other than admire them. How much better does a plant get than this?

Today's photos are all stock files from Morguefile, but they looked so much like our garden that I thought it okay to cheat a little!

Fussin' with the Flowers

We're fussing with the flower garden again. Hubby saw a photo in my Country Gardens magazine using the same stones we bought for the paths stacked as garden borders instead of pathway stones. The paths just aren't working out the way we planned them. It was a great idea, but actually doing the work is harder than we imagined. I put stones down in July just to see how they would look. They sunk into the ground somewhat, but the weeds keep coming back between the cracks, the sand washed down and ruined the shade bed, and everyone trips over them. They're uneven, it's really hard to match them up, and it's just been frustrating all around. Besides, I can't push a wheelbarrow over them so I'm stuck running pails of compost and mulch back and forth. With this much space to cover it's pretty frustrating.

So when Hubby turned to me with the magazine picture in his hands and asked, "How would you like this instead?" I wanted to shout "Hurray!"

Off we go to Jamerson's in Appomattox tomorrow to order the stones. We are going to stack the thick Buckingham slates to make the garden bed walls, put down more landscape fabric, and use the white pebbles instead on the pathways. The pretty decorative stones I bought at B & M Greenhouse in Farmville will remain as accents in the pathway.




The flower gardens are our fall and winter project. I can't wait to show you the progress!


Photos today are all from the flower garden...what's blooming now.

I just participated in Tootsie Time's link exchange. Everyone's swapping links to show off what's blooming in their garden - how fun!

Vegetable Garden Plans

Remember in grade school when you had to write an essay called "What I did on my summer vacation?" I thought of that this morning as I jotted notes in my gardening journal - "What I will do differently next year in the vegetable garden." I spent Saturday morning tending the vegetable garden and Saturday afternoon thinking about what I'm going to do differently in the garden next year.

Here's my list:

• Corn: Our neighbor Tom and his son Tommy dropped by in the morning, gifting us with a box of delicious sweet corn. Next year, I'm going to plant it in two week intervals so we don't get 40 ears of corn at once. We got sick of eating corn and some went to waste, getting too dry in the fridge to eat. If I stagger it, maybe we will enjoy it, get a break, and enjoy it again!
• Tomatoes: At this point I cannot keep up with the tomatoes. Nice problem to have, right?! I just can't pick them fast enough! I've given away so many but many are just left on the vine. Next year, I'm planting half as many. And I'm staking them. They have flopped all over the garden paths and I'm squashing tomatoes underfoot as I walk. I have to go the long way around the vegetable beds to get to the ones in the back so I don't step on tomatoes.

• Green beans: Either I have to invest in a pressure canner or plant less. I can't freeze anymore. I froze another gallon bag yesterday, with about 2-3 more gallons to freeze today. Green beans anyone? The ones we bought from Southern States, I must say, are absolutely wonderful - Blue Lake and a heavy producer.
• Cucumbers: I only got a few cucumbers this year. Next year I must plant more!
• Beets: Plant about a third as many
• Turnips: Plant only a row or two. How many turnips can one family eat?
• Peppers: Plant more of the bell kind and plant varieties recommended by the Cooperative Extension....ours are smaller than normal. I froze a lot and am giving away more.
• Melons: Plant fewer cantaloupes and more watermelon. I can't get enough of the watermelon. I could eat it all day long. Home grown watermelon is AMAZING.
• Strawberries: Would you believe I'm getting yet another crop??? I had berries for about six weeks, then they took a rest, and yesterday I harvested another cup. I love these every bearing plants and I bought them at Lowe's. They've now spread throughout the whole berry bed!
• Greens: More lettuce, less spinach. And I'll harvest spinach when young and eat it as salad.
• Onions: Plant more!
• Carrots: More! I had the most amazing, wonderful carrots...straight, long, sweet. Superb. I am still digging out pounds of them. They freeze or keep well. Yum!
• Squash: I lost most of my squash to squash beetles. Next year, row covers are in order to keep them from using my squash plants as a nursery bed. I must have raised thousands of those things!
• Broccoli, cauliflower and Brussels sprouts: plant them in fall or skip them entirely. It was a lot of effort especially for the cauliflower with very little to show for it.

Next year I want to try:

• Peas! Thomas Jefferson grew them at Monticello, John loves them, and if I don't plant as many beets...well, there's room for peas!
• Sweet potatoes: We love them and I'm hoping they grow well in Virginia.
• Potatoes
• Garlic: My neighbor Patty gave us the most wonderful garlic she grew. I'm hoping she'll give me a few starter bulbs.

And one last takeaway - I'm planting more flowers from seed next year. This year I focused on the vegetables, but you know what? I could have fit several trays of perennials under the grow lights inside. My Echinacea that I grew from seed is such a joy and a treat - I have lots of purple, of course, but yellow and White Swan everywhere. The helopsis grew from seeds I saved, and I've got more. I missed my snapdragons this year since I planted so few. The zinnias I sowed around the shed were wonderful but I could have done with a lot more. I'm not going to skimp on flowers next year. Seeds are so inexpensive, and I've already learned that Echinacea, lavender, helopsis and a few other perennials grow well from seed. So I'm going to try some new varieties in 2010!

Rain is expected today and all day tomorrow, which for this gardener is very dangerous indeed. I've got the Parks, White Flower Farm and a few other catalogs waiting next to my chair in the living room and that gift certificate my sister sent me for my birthday gently calling my name from the desk drawer. I've got some new iris circled....and daffodils...and...

Enjoy your day!

Minty Goodness and Butterfly Bush Babies

Many gardeners hate mint, but I love it. I can understand why. It's pretty invasive. But it's beautiful, smells sweet, and provides a useful medicinal and culinary herb.

When I was a little girl, Mr. Hoffman, the retired chemistry teacher who lived next door to us, used to pick sprigs of mint from the plants growing next to his porch. He'd hand me the crushed sprigs and I'd inhale the fresh scent of mint. I loved to pick the leaves and crush them in my hands.

To this day, mint is one of my favorite flavors. It reminds me of the horses I loved since I always carried Brachs peppermint candies in my pockets for them. My old horse, Kricket, was so loyal he followed me wherever I went. At a horse show I opened the back door of my little Pontiac Sunbird and reached into the back seat of the compact car to grab my riding jacket off the hanger and finish preparations for my class. The next thing I knew, I felt the tickle of whiskers on my neck and the warm, grassy-smelling breath on my face...Kricket had stuck his entire head and neck into the car behind me, and had one hoof up on the little lip of the door frame as if he was going to try to step into the car too! A quick peppermint candy from my pocket lured him calmly out of my car. I actually found an old photo, circa 1990, of me with Kricket and am pleased to share it with you (he died in 1991 and although I have leased horses, I have never had another one. Not yet at any rate. Time will tell)

My mint grows from a little packet of seeds I bought from Parks, and I'm disappointed. The flavor is bland. I don't know why.

If any of my Virginia neighbors want to trade, I'll take a few roots and slips of their mint plants.

I read online that mint frequently cross pollinates with other mint varieties, and you can often get new kinds. So a type of mint that was growing in my garden back in New York may be hard to recreate here in Virginia. My friend AJ has this problem. He loved a mint he grew in New Jersey, but now that he moved here he can't find another strong mint like that one.

I love mint tea, but today it's warming up and I was out in the perennial gardening pulling gigantic weeds all morning. So I'm hot and slightly dehydrated. I've got a huge pitcher of ice cold water with mint sprigs floating in it in my office and I'm drinking it up. Nothing is quite as refreshing as mint crushed in ice water!

Today I discovered that all the volunteer seedlings in the garden ARE butterfly bushes. Hurray! I've got a nice one growing in a super spot on the hillside. I only had annuals around it so it picked a great place to grow. Next year I will have a lovely Buddleia there. Another one I discovered after (a-hem!) pulling up all the weeds around it is already blooming with gorgeous purple blossoms. I have two white butterfly bushes and one purple one. I'm so glad the purple one reseeded. I have on my 'to buy' list the bicolor one called Kaleidoscope and Buddleia Black Night, the really dark purple one. We want to add a lot more of them on the edge of the forest. The deer don't seem to like them and they grow so well here.


Speaking of deer, the mama deer with the bent leg graced the orchard last night with her fawns close behind. The fawn was in the perennial garden sleeping under the bird feeder yesterday. John spotted him as he walked Shadow up the driveway to the mailbox to pick up the mail. I saw his darling little head peeking out from between a sumac and a pine tree. He didn't eat a single perennial. I'm grateful.

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.

Victory Over Weeds

Crabgrass is evil. It invaded my flower garden. I have never seen such an invasion. Yes, I was behind in my weeding - but this was ridiculous!

It grew on the pathways. It's overtaken the flower beds. It springs up overnight. It is growing among the gravel in the driveway, along the rocks lining the beds. It grows everywhere.

There are more weeds. Nature provides great variety.

Weeds with big thorns. Vining weeds with little thorns. Weeds that gave me a rash all over my arms and made me itch all over (and no, it's not poison ivy. Poison ivy doesn't make me itch. This was something else.)












I managed to lean across my creeping juniper and gave myself a wicked juniper rash. I looked like someone had rolled me in mud, then rubbed red paint on my arms with some white dots in between. That was after Saturday's weeding session and after the lovely rash broke out on my arms.

You don't want to know what I looked like after Sunday's epic battle continued.

I spent six hours weeding on Saturday, four hours weeding on Sunday, and two days later I am still so sore I can barely move. I dug up weeds. I pulled them out by hand. John used a pick axe on sections where they grew in such a mat I couldn't make progress.

We are about halfway finished. Yesterday, torrential rains and thunderstorms all day kept us inside. Today dawned bright and clear but more thunderstorms are predicted.

Weeds, you are warned: your hours are numbered.

I took photos this morning to mark our progress. Enjoy!

I am working safely at my desk until tonight when I am back in the garden...weeding.

Hot Color Combinations

I raced out yesterday without posting most of the pictures. Here's the pictures to accompany yesterday's post - now you can see the colors! Enjoy!

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!

My Hollyhock Obsession

With each passing season, I grow obsessed with a different plant. In spring it was the iris, and I vowed to add more. Then came my peonies, and I considered adding even more plants to the flower garden.

Now it's the hollyhocks.

I've never grown hollyhocks before. Last year, we planted some from roots that came with the Spring Hill Gardens Sunny Perennial kits, but they sent up leaves and no flowers. I understand that they are biennials, so I had to be patient. I also bought seeds at the dime store and sowed a little patch of them.



This year - pure heaven. Majestic spires of pristine white mingling with deep blood rich crimson against my yellow daisies. Soaring double pompoms of pink backed by single pinks and yellows, and double yellows that look like cheerful carnations.

According to the book The Language of Flowers, hollyhocks stand for fruitfulness. And I'm not the first writer to become obsessed with them. Celia Thaxter wrote the following in her book about her garden hollyhocks: "One enormous hollyhock grew thirteen feet high! At night, the lights from one window illumined him as he swayed to and fro in the wind, a stately column of beauty and grace. A black-red comrade leaned against him and mingled its rich blossoms with his brighter color, and near him were rose, pink and cherry, and white spikes of bloom, lovely to behold."

My thoughts exactly.

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!

Wildlife Update

When we first moved to rural southern Virginia after living our whole lives on Long Island, in the shadow of New York City, we expected a lot more wildlife than what we could see along the city streets. Our first year at Seven Oaks, the wildest things we saw were deer (constantly grazing in the yard and necessitating the cages around the fruit trees), wild turkeys, turkey vultures or buzzards, and one huge turtle that somehow decided using the orchard as a highway was a good idea.

We were really surprised by the lack of song birds, but this year, the song birds are here - an amazing array of brilliantly colored birds, with songs ranging from liquid trills to raucous cries.

We think what happened is that it took a while for the birds to find our nice, three acre clearing. For at least the last 20 years, our land was entirely loblolly pine. Without the diversity of tree species, many common birds won't nest or feed. Seed eaters can't find much and neither can the insect eaters. We think it took the birds a while to find our area and move in.

Now that the clearing has been here for two years, and we have nice, lush grass and clover, birds are more attracted. The new vegetable garden is a big hit with the song birds too. The bluebirds love to perch on the tops of the fences and sing, and we watched the female bluebird soar in and out of the vegetable garden with various worms and things in her beak. I have seen indigo buntings along the driveway, too.

It sounds as if somewhere in the woods close by, we have a nest of hawks or other raptors. Their cries are unmistakable, and the silences, followed by several voices in chorus, makes me think that Mom and Dad raptor are busy feeding their young.

Lastly, we've got reptiles - oh boy, do we have reptiles! Aside from the black snake I ran into on trail a few weeks ago, we had a huge one in our driveway. Thank goodness it just slithered off into the woods. Pierre caught a blue-tailed lizard or salamander last week and brought it right to me while I was watering the plants. John managed to release it back into the grass, but it promptly ran under the porch. Pierre refused to give up his vigil, his nose pressed against the screen that keeps larger animals from burrowing under the porch. I had to bodily haul him back into the house when play time was over.

We have this lizard friend pictured at the top of today's post living in the pile of slates we bought for the flower garden paths. The pallets are still sitting next to the driveway, since we can never find time to finish the paths.

I think this lizard is Sceleporous undulatus, or the Eastern fence lizard. The Virginia Herpetologic Society (a group of folks who study lizard species here) has information on this guy here.

Like our owls, he's one of the most common lizards in Virginia. But he sure is fun. Every day, he sits on the rocks and suns himself. He let me sneak up and snap this photo of him. We're starting to think of him like a pet. We need a name for him! He has such a round belly for a lizard. He doesn't seem the least bit afraid of us, either. I have to be careful not to let Pierre near him.

And although I will probably write a separate entry on Friday about my peonies, I just had to share these photos with you. I planted the roots in fall 2007, had greenery last year, and this year - amazing flowers. Since it can take 3-5 years for peonies to get started, I am thrilled with them. The white is supposed to be Festiva Maxima but it lacks the telltale pink on the petal tips, and the pink is one called Sorbet. I have a dwarf variety and a President Taft peony in the island bed in the lawn; the President Taft peony will bloom this year too. Enjoy!

Ode to an Iris

Here she is. My iris.

Blooming officially May 2. In New York, her blooming date was around Father's Day, so my guess is about right...we are about one month ahead of the season on Long Island.

This iris traveled from Huntington, Long Island, New York in a plastic bag with a little dirt in November of 2007 when my father in law sold his home and moved in with us. We planted it along the driveway before the garden was planned. I just stuck it in the dirt and hoped for the best. Last year we had a lot of green and one flower or two. This year, she's a mass of thick blossoms.

My father in law can't remember where he bought it, or when. "Oh, years ago," he says with a shrug.

We got a few blooms from it on Long Island. It had a coveted spot of sunshine in a little square bed on the lawn that houses my iris and the daylilies.

In Virginia...it is thriving. It is just soaring. It seems to love its hot, sunny location.

Irises LOVE this part of southern Virginia. I have never seen so many irises since moving here. All along the back country roads you see huge patches of thick iris growing at the ends of driveways, along farm lanes. Everyone's got an iris or two. You can even find ads in the newspaper from people who divided their iris and have plants to give away - they have so many, they run classified ads to give their plants new homes!

Our town, Prospect, is a ghost of its former self, with many of the old Main Street buildings boarded up or turned into apartments. There are a few large Victorian or turn of the century houses along where the old railway line used to be. I drive through Prospect on my way to church on Sundays just to look at the irises. At the corners, along the front lawn, edging the railway side of the street are enormous clumps of iris, some measuring three or more feet in diameter. Most of the irises are white, but you will see some blues and purples among them. How long they have been growing is anyone's guess, but some are clearly decades old.

One of my goals for the garden is to plant one or more irises every fall. I hope to build a collection along the edge of the woods...and knowing how iris seem to love Virginia, I believe that one day I'll have some real show-stopping clusters too.

If anyone has a guess as to which variety of iris this is - especially given the strong grape-soda pop smell of the flowers - let me know PLEASE. I would love to add more.

Here's to iris!

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.

Stop Telling Me It's Easy!

I'm just about fed up with well-meaning folks who tell me that this plant or another is so easy to grow.

The sweet old lady at Lowe's who told me: "Blueberries are SO easy to grow here in southern Virginia. My sister in law's place is just full of them."

Mine dropped dead within days (I think it might have been hours) of their roots touching down. I felt like the Medusa of the garden, turning my blueberries to withered brown sticks.

The gardening "expert" who responded to my enthusiasm for poppies with, "Well go ahead! They're so easy to grow, they just grow about anywhere."

Anywhere must exclude my garden. I have the great poppy massacre in my garden. Two died, one hangs on and refuses to die. I moved it from its unhappy spot near the roses up to the front, full sun island of perennials and shrubs on the lawn. I hope it's going to be happy. But really, easy? Not in my garden.

The climbing shell flowers that Jefferson is said to have grown at Monticello? Can't even find their remains. The bleeding hearts installed in the shade garden? One struggling specimen out of five lived to tell the tale. The Virginia bluebells purchased by mail order? What Virginia bluebells? They never even made an appearance.

When you tell a gardener, new or experienced, that something is EASY to grow, the implication - unintended, I'm sure, but there nonetheless - is that if the plant dies: it's YOUR fault.

Saying something is 'easy' to grow implies that it will grow - and doubles the disappointment when it doesn't.

Next time someone asks you for an opinion on whether or not this plant or that one belongs in the garden, instead of gushing about easy it is to grow, talk about its hardiness. Enthuse about how you ran over it with the lawn mower and it lived to tell another tale. Regale your enthusiastic gardening friend with the story of how you accidentally dug up your iris before they emerged and you unintentionally split the roots only to have it redouble its blooms that year.

The truth is always that each garden is unique. Soil, light, nutrients, water conditions...many factors influence whether a plant will grow, flourish or die. Even the most tolerant plants will falter if conditions aren't right.


Thus my blueberries and poppies didn't like something about my garden. Unlike the coreopsis, which I am STILL picking out of every nook and cranny from where it self seeded in the flower bed, these aren't "easy" plants to grow for me. They will take more effort, and I need to decide whether the effort is worth the reward.

But really, please spare me the "it's so easy any fool could grow it" wisdom.

I may be a fool, but I couldn't grow it!

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!

How Our Garden Grows

On Saturday we ran errands, then I joined Patty and her friend Gail at a country auction right here in Prospect. The farm auction was fascinating. We found out that the elderly couple who passed away had left their entire greenhouse business to their sons, and the men said they would sell plants directly to the public. They currently sell to the trade and at a flea market in Lynchburg. They invited us back to shop in a few weeks when the flats of annuals are ready and promised us "good farm prices". They won't have to ask me twice! The old Victorian farmhouse had a gigantic lilac bush that was over eight feet tall. It was already blooming and I had to stick my whole head into the bush and take a good drink of lilac perfume. An elderly lady walking behind me laughed to see my delight.

The farm auction was fun, but the dealers were out in droves from the big cities and outbid all us regular folks, so I hung out in the back of the crowd with the locals. I had only $10 to my name and even the cheapest items went way over that. At one point, the auctioneer held up a pretty - but cracked - glass candy dish. He started the bidding at $2, and I thought, "Well, maybe I can buy something!" But when the bidding went up over $10, I said a little too loudly, "Oh dear, that's really out of my price range." The man next to me chuckled and gave me a nod of approval. I think I'm starting to fit in.

How My Garden Grows!

With the temperatures soaring to 80 on Saturday and the heavy rains this past week, everything is sprouting. I spent time cleaning up the flower garden again and discovered my morning glories had reseeded. I've got glories sprouting up along the walkway and everywhere but where I want them, which is next to the trellis. I hope the blue ones reseeded. They're my favorite. I had blue, purple, pink and white planted last year. Today's photo shows the area from last June.

The Flowers About To - and Already - Blooming

• Bachelor's Buttons: My mixed purples, crimsons and pinks are in bud. My guess is I'll have flowers by the weekend!
• Dianthus: All of my perennial dianthus this year just have masses of buds. I can't wait.
• Phlox: If the deer don't find them like they did last year, the phlox are already double in size from their planting size last year and also heavily laden with buds.
• Gaillardia: Peeking out from new leaves are flowers buds. These hearty perennials are nonstop bloomers for me and I love their orange flowers.
• Trees and Shrubs: On our drive to Rustburg Saturday morning, we saw gorgeous Snowball viburnums just groaning under the weight of the big white flowers. Redbuds and dogwoods bloom everywhere. Azaleas are just starting to bloom. Tulips are almost done. The irises in Prospect - huge beds of mostly white iris in the front yards of houses dating back to the late 1800's - are already blooming. Mine are very far away from blooming, as are my neighbors. I think the south facing beds, so near the road and the former railroad track, may have a nice warm microclimate going. I have my eye on the peonies in front of a dilapidated old house next to the firehouse in the town of Prospect. Last year there were massive stands of pinks and Festiva Maxima. There's nothing like an old bed of peonies in spring to really lift your spirits. If they ever make a move to tear down that old house, I'll be first on line with my shovel to rescue the peonies. My peonies are a bit too young to have flowers yet. (I think; they may surprise me yet).
  

The cocoons on the buddleia are still intact. We can't trim the buddleias down and they are just going a bit wild, but I won't disturb the praying mantis egg sacs. We protect them carefully and try hard to make sure Shadow doesn't blunder into them when she 'helps' me in the garden.

John, his dad Jack, and I took a walk in the woods on Saturday afternoon and found all the redbuds. For those who have never seen a redbud, they are gorgeous trees that just burst with purple flowers. The bees love them. Our woods are full of wild dogwood too. Unfortunately, they were also full of Lonestar ticks, but luckily I'd worn light colored blue jeans and a light t-shirt and could get them off of me. That's our signal to stop walking in the woods unless sprayed with insecticide and covered head to toe. It's an unfortunate reality of life in the country that I'm only just beginning to get used to.

And on Sunday, She Rested
Sunday found me a bit under the weather, so after church, the couch was my best friend for the rest of the day. My gardening buddy Helen called with an invitation to come and play in her garden for a bit and take home some raspberry plants, but I had already nodded off. Perhaps I needed to recover from all the weeding I did during the week. In any event, she has plants waiting for me....