Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day - May

For various reasons, ranging from rain--finally!--to work schedules to the discovery that my old rechargeable batteries* needed to be replaced, I'm late in posting my Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day lists for May. Tonight I had batteries, time, and a short lull in the rain.

The cool light of a rainy day isn't my favorite for photography, as the warm light at the beginning or end of a day seems more friendly to an amateur like me. I struggled to get good pictures of some of the more muted elements in the garden... at least 4 attempts at capturing the luscious darkness of the nodding geranium flowers failed. Even the good pictures, like the one of the Japanese maple and fading purple tulips, don't really convey the zing that the golden oregano adds to the whole scene.

My disappointment at the poor photos was definitely tempered by the discovery that many things were in bloom or in bud in the garden, though.

In Bloom:

1 - 'Black Hero' double black tulips (at left, swaying over achillea and bergenia foliage in the front corner bed)
2 - 'Caradonna' salvia nemerosa
3 - bergenia cordifolia
4 - 'Jack Frost' brunnera macrophylla
5 - 'Vodka' wax begonia
6 - festuca glauca (blue fescue)
7 - carex buchanii (bronze leatherleaf sedge)
8 - 'Chocolate Chip' ajuga reptens
9 - unnamed dark purple tulips
10 - 'Strawberry Margarita' portulaca grandiflora (annual moss rose)
11 - 'Avignon' orange tulips
12 - 'Mainacht' salvia
13 - dicentra spectabilis (bleeding heart)
14 - galium odoratum (sweet woodruff)
15 - 'Ozark Beauty' strawberries
16 - 'Anniversary' lamium (a.k.a. 'Anne Greenaway')
17 - 'Neon Lights' tiarella
18 - 'Crow Feather' tiarella
19 - 'Purple Knockout' salvia lyrata
20 - viburnum plicatum var. tomentosum 'Mariesii' (doublefile viburnum)
21 - geranium phaeum 'Samobor'
22 - 2 calendula officinalis that amazingly overwintered (yes, really!) in the front bed
23, 24, 25 - various vaccinium corymbosum (highbush blueberries)

In bud:

1 - physocarpus opulifolius 'Diablo' (at left, underplanted with 'Pine Knot Strain' hellebores and ajuga on its shady side, and an unnamed hosta and perovskia atriplicifolia on its sunny side)
2 - unnamed deep pink peony
3 - kalmia latifolia 'Olympic Fire' (mountain laurel)
4 - unnamed deep pink rhododendron
5 - 'Newe Ya'ar' salvia officinalis
6 - salvia officinalis sp.
7 - unnamed passalong bearded iris
8 - allium schoenoprasum (common chives)
9 - baptisia australis
10 - achillea millefolium 'Paprika' (yarrow)
11 - heuchera 'Marmalade'
12 - heuchera 'Regina'
13 - unnamed deep purple, ruffled heuchera
14 - vitis x labruscana 'Concord' (grape)
15 - unnamed thornless blackberry
16 - echinacea purpurea 'White Swan' (these plants are still so tiny that I'm going to remove this flower stalk, however)
17 - crambe maritima (sea kale)

Most of these things don't usually bloom at the same time, if my memory serves me. I swear that the bleeding heart and the ajuga were long spent before I saw any signs of flowers on my salvias last year. The cold in early April must have set a few things back and effectively crammed all of our early-, mid- and late-spring bloomers into a few short weeks. Whatever the reason, I'll take it... and enjoy.


*Note: the new rechargeable AA lithiums can apparently take up to 2 days for the first charge, so plan accordingly if you buy some. Hopefully that's a sign of how long the use time is, too!

Spring Green = Go

"April prepares her green traffic light and the world thinks Go."
--Christopher Morley

I am finding the above quote to be very true this year. And since I mostly neglected my garden in April when all of the traffic lights turned green, May finds me cleaning up a few garden fender-benders.

In the first picture, you see an overeager dianthus rear-ending the twisty blue foliage of allium senescens var. glaucum. It's not that I didn't know the dianthus would spread... it's that I had planned to move these beautiful little alliums before now. I want to show off their fabulous foliage, but haven't yet figured out a good stage for them and so they remain.

The 'Sum and Substance' type hosta that I dug up at work is obviously ready to get the summer started. I didn't take a big division, but some of those leaves are already bigger than my hand.

Notice the little purplish seedlings causing a bit of a traffic jam at the base of the hosta? Those are atriplex hortensis var. rubra. And to think that I was worried it wouldn't reseed this year... good thing I didn't find another packet to buy! I think that these babies will look lovely in the bed with drumstick alliums, baptisia australis, 'Lacinato' kale and asclepias tuberosa, so I'll be moving a few of them soon.

The last mess is really the worst kind--one of my own making. I bought a little quart of lysimachia ciliata, aka fringed loosestrife, at a local Master Gardener plant sale last year. The gardener who brought it assured me that it isn't a problem in her garden at all. Frankly, I detected some attitude in her voice while she answered my questions... at one point, she kind of looked down her nose at me and said in a patronizing tone, "You surely know that this is NOT the purple loosestrife that is a problem in local wetlands, right?"

Yes, I did. I also know that I am not immune to the pull of my own foolish pride every once in a while... and so my purchase was only partly due to my weakness for purple foliage. After all, I couldn't let this woman think that I was scared of a little loosestrife, right? Right?

The loosestrife behaved very well last year and bloomed prettily in late summer. As you can see in the picture, though, the little purple rosettes are all coming up at the edge of the pot that I used to contain it. This may be my imagination, but I'm afraid that they're taking spring's green light as an okay to jump ship and escape the pot. I don't love the plant enough to live with this worry, and I can think of a number of wonderful substitutes, so it's being evicted.

Within the week, I should have these and a few other messes cleared up in the garden. Only when all is moving along smoothly again will I give myself a green light to resume planting and other, more amusing spring projects. If that's not incentive to get to work on my spring cleaning, I don't know what is!

What Does Your Shopping Cart Say About You?

I have been rather emboldened by other gardeners' recent reactions to my Lazy Bed Construction confession. So much so that I will confess to at least one other odd behavior: When I'm out shopping at garden centers, I enjoy looking at other people's shopping carts and trying to figure out what kind of gardeners they are.

I try to look at the cart first, so I can guess by the plants whether the person pushing it is a first-time homebuyer, formal herb gardener, die-hard veggie grower, someone who has to have the latest variety of everything, or a shade gardener with a huge hosta addiction.

I rarely do find out whether I'm wrong or right in my assumptions, but the fun is in playing the game anyway. It's not about making judgements--there is no condemnation in my thoughts--but rather about idle curiousity and a love of imagining other people's gardens. (That cute young couple with the lovely Japanese maple... will it be planted under the window of what they hope will become their first child's bedroom?)

Of course, I play the game with my own cart, too. What does my shopping cart say about me?

I think that this one definitely gives away a few things: 1) I'm a fairly eclectic gardener, meaning that I don't have just one set garden style. 2) I'm not a typical plant snob, as evidenced by the purchase of groundcover sedums and "lowly" herbs like thyme, rosemary, and lemon verbena. 3) I am a huge foliage freak. See the 'Royal Glissade' and 'Palisandra' coleus, carex flagellifera, 'Gage's Shadow' perilla, 'Silver Falls' dichondra, pennisetum rubrum, sedum cauticola, etc.

I may be the only person who plays my little game, but I bet that almost all of us have looked down at our carts as we're waiting in line at the garden center and wondered: "What does this little collection of plants say about me?"