My Favorite Spot 8/9/06

This is still a work in progress... but I love the textures and colors here. They are a welcome respite from the boring garage, which my boyfriend likes to describe as "indiscriminate beige, with darker indiscriminate beige trim." I'm testing alternate trim colors to further remedy that, as you can see on the near window. The fence behind the garage was also beige before I painted it this spring, and I think that I'll be incorporating the fence color into the trim somehow...

... but as usual, I digress. Back to the plants. This part of my backyard is very narrow, and it's a pain to have to turn the mower around in such a tight space, so the grass in the foreground will soon be sacrificed for a path that leads back to the Japanese rock garden. You can kind of see on the left where I have started to lay the flagstones. They're in the dirt, with some thymes already planted around them. On the left of them (out of the frame) is an espaliered apple tree underplanted with borage and flanked with two blueberry bushes.

The rest is a hodgepodge of culinary herbs like sage, lemon verbena, and lemon balm (planted safely, I hope, in a chimney tile)... edibles like cabbage, swiss chard, carrots and red onions... perennials like hollyhocks, false indigo, asclepias tuberosa, salvia, dianthus and Russian sage... and even a couple of ornamental grasses and a "Sky Pencil" holly.

The hollyhocks are only there because my winter sowing was a little more successful than I had expected, and the cabbage were a coworker's extras that I brought home. All were plopped as filler while the baptisia is still small. There are a bunch of other transient plants in the list above, too, so this won't look the same next year at all... and as much as I am enjoying it now, I'm looking forward to its next incarnation, too.