Cutting Garden Inventory

The cutting garden looks different every week, and I am enjoying having flowers available to bring into the house. Before I forget, here's what I have planted in these beds.

In the bed along the screened-in porch are all the bulbs. I was lazy and didn't record the varieties other than to write down "bulbs" on the plan of this whole section. According to a previous blog post, I should expect tulips, daffodils, and hyacinths here. I have so far had just a few white, double daffodils, orange, golden, salmon, yellow, and red-and-white tulips. There are no hyacinths in sight as far as I can tell, and there is a bit of an empty space where they might have been. I'm really wishing I had kept better track of specific varieties to know what to reorder when they (inevitably, eventually) peter out. And what to avoid.

Anyway, the shadier side of the bed has pink and white astilbe, toad lilies, and hosta, all of which have come up nicely.

In the bed along the fence, I planted (and I know because I smartened up and wrote it all down on a diagram) Tamora and Golden Celebration roses. While these are still quite small, I was able to interplant some annuals: bronze snapdragons and red and orange ranunculus.

Further down this bed are tall white lilies, a few random tulips and daffodils I inherited, pink and blue irises, grape hyacinths, blue allium (not looking too great so far, I must say), an asiatic lily mix, globeflower ("Morning Sun" and "New Moon"), Jacob's ladder "Bressingham Purple," and Baptista "Starlight Prairie Blues." Sewn over top of the muscari bulbs are cosmos in a yellow, white, and orange seed mix.  

The shadier half of the fence bed has (from left to right) sweet Cicely, foxglove (the color of which I cannot remember, since I bought it last fall in my "of course I'll remember what I planted" delusion), valerian, a light and a dark blue delphinium, and two columbine. One is "Nora Barlow," and the other is a mysterious orange variety that I — you guessed it! — didn't record the name of. 

Finally, the center bed I only filled halfway with perennials this year, as I am not made of money. The empty looking half has been sown with a mix of zinnias, cosmos, and marigolds (seeds I had lying around, for the most part). The permanent plants include Heritage rose, yellow and pink lupines, golden yellow chrysanthemums (which I don't actually think are going to come back this year), salvia "Merleau Blue," a salmon coneflower, one white and two pink poppies, another echinacea of uncertain coloring, coral yarrow, brown-eyed Susans, blue Veronica, and a golden Gaillardia "Moxie". 

Whew!

Now that they are planted, all that's left to do is to wait and see which ones do well — and to keep cutting and combining them in vases all summer!