Port Potager

Yesterday I wrote about the half of the perennial border that runs along the driveway . Today we'll walk around the corner to see the rest of it along the path that leads across the yard to the front door. Around the corner from the climbing roses, Siberian irises, and sedum ground cover is some white salvia. Behind the salvia is some red bee balm, which is just starting to bloom. The bees love  this section of the flower garden! There's also a male holly busy and another smallish peony (I really like the way these look even when the bloom is over, so I have a lot of them). Across the front is a wide swath of hardy mums that will bloom in the fall. Like I said, there are a lot of chrysanthemums here. Behind the mums are white lilies, Shasta daisies, and the female holly bush (that's the one that will have the berries in the winter). Beyond the holly the border widens near the front door. Across the back is a boxwood, rhododendron, and a big clump o...

The zinnias I started from seed last winter/spring has finally bloomed! So lots of that in this week's flower arrangements. Most of them turned out to be hot pink, which is probably my least favorite flower color (expect for that purple-pink of the most common New England rhododendrons — my all-time most despised color in the garden). I'm doing my best with what has turned out to be more pink than I expected, and am mostly pleased so far. Zinnia, echinacea, lilies, and yarrow. Snapdragons and zinnias. Phlox "David" (which smells even nicer than it looks!). Zinnia. Hydrangea.

I'll admit to being a smidge lazy with the flower arranging this week. Not only is it crazy hot here, but we are also tearing up the house to move our downstairs bathroom and laundry area around. It's not like a few vases of flowers are going to mask the dust and dirt that is settling everywhere . But I did go for some easy pickin's with the lilies that are in bloom this week. I love how one stem makes a whole bouquet, so their bloom was well-timed with our latest house project.  Roses (David Austin "Heritage") and lilies. Lilies. Echinacea. Lilies.

Summer flowers are here: snapdragons, lilies, daisies, hydrangea. I'm especially interested in what color the lilies turn out to be, since I bought them in a mixed bag collection, something I never do. So far, so good. Snapdragons, echinacea, yarrow, and lilies. Hydrangea. Shasta daisies and hydrangea. Astilbe, snapdragons, echinacea, and Shasta daisy.  I would ordinarily have skipped the daisy in this arrangement, but it was a perfectly healthy hold-over from one of last week's bouquets, and it seemed a shame to throw it out. Also, I always think of daisies as our wedding flower, and it's no coincidence that they are flush at our anniversary every year — our fifteenth was yesterday!

Happy summer solstice! The flowers in these bouquets have definitely rounded the corner from spring to summer as well. Fewer formal garden bulbs, more free-form wildflower types. Poppy, salvia, and yarrow. Roses. Peonies. Delphinium, lilies, blanket flower, and rose "Golden Celebration." Salvia, blanket flower, and yarrow. Salvia, lilies, delphinium, and yarrow. Foxglove and lupine.

This afternoon I planted bulbs in the cutting beds: All told, I put in 150 bulbs today. They included several varieties of daffodils, tulips, hyacinths, irises, allium, and lilies. For the cutting garden I'm not too worried about planting in a natural-looking way – straight rows to fit in as many as possible will do just fine in a place where most of them are meant to be cut down to bring inside anyway.  Faithful readers will recall that the bulbs in the perennial border were either devoured or relocated by our rapacious squirrel population. This time, we are working to prevent damage from the get-go: We covered the whole bulb bed with a roll of chicken wire. Instead of burying it, we screwed wooden battens directly to the edges of the raised bed to hold the chicken wire in place: In the spring, the green shoots should find their way through the holes in the wire, but squirrels will have a difficult time burrowing in. This solution isn't feasible...