Port Potager

We added a small landscaping project to our to-do list this weekend:  It was incredibly sunny yesterday, so the photo isn’t great. Hopefully you can see that Kirk added a brick edging to delineate the small flower garden in front of my office. Before, it just kind of blended into the utility yard — and that meant that tons of weeds bled over into the flower garden. Now there are no weeds at all, since Kirk took a hoe to the whole area.  To keep the weeds out of our hair forever, we’re adding some landscaping fabric and will cover the whole area with wood chips. This will make a nice surface for the area in front of the compost bins and chicken coop, and hopefully any new weeds that pop up will be easy to pull. The new little wall left some space to plant, so I moved the hosta and black cohosh that used to be along the side wall of the office to the front bed. I also added some pink snapdragons to fill in the gaps.  From another angle, yo...

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...

I definitely didn't plan this. You may remember that in the perennial border I have a strict white and red color scheme, and in the cutting garden I planted mostly sunset shades. Despite those plans, it was hard to miss the pink and purple fiesta that burst into bloom mid-June: In the foreground is one of our rosa mundi bushes, looking a little bedraggled but still pretty after being picked over to make rosewater . In the background is a container full of bright purple pansies, which finally filled in after a very dry spring.   Here's the reverse view, with purple pansies in the front and roses in the back. Just one bloom of pink and white lupine this year — these are short-lived plants, but still worth having in the cutting garden for their strong stems and tough petals. In the background you can see purple salvia. Here's a better look at that saliva, with some dusty rose-colored yarrow to the left, and the roses and pansies farther in the...

Despite the cutworm scourge , the rose slug infestation , and spring's slow, cold start, June has finally arrived. And with that comes lots of color in the cutting garden: Here you can see yarrow, poppies, and lupines. Those yellow lupines have been a wonderful surprise. I planted them just last year, and this spring they have come up three times the size that they were. They are growing straight and tall, and look really great. There are some other flowers here too, and I gathered up an armful of them to bring inside before the rain comes again: In the vase are the yellow lupines, pink irises and poppies, white Siberian irises, some red yarrow, and some purple salvia (that last one's in the front and a bit hard to see in the shadow).  June is the very best time for garden flowers here: It’s the time just in between spring's rain and summer's heat. I haven't added any plants to the cutting garden this year, but instead decided to wait out a seas...

When I wasn't at the ball fields for the kids' baseball games this past (long) weekend, I finally was able to tackle a project I'd been meaning to get to all spring. The weather decided to cooperate (mostly), and I buckled down got to work on updating the perennial border.  The harsh winter we had wasn't at all kind to some of our perennials. Several plants that normally wouldn't have trouble overwintering died back to just a few scraggly stems, or bit the dust completely. Some casualties included both artemisia, some stonecrop, the carnations, and most of a heucherella (if you're really interested in the evolution of the border, you can scroll through previous posts about it to see just what I'm talking about). This left me with some holes to fill this year, which I did my moving some existing things around and buying some new plants. My hatchback full of plants include a white peony ("Mrs. Edward Harding"), three white salvia (...

Pale pinks and whites are long gone — time for the bright, hot colors of late summer! I'm warming up to most of the pink shades of the zinnias, although I left some purplish-pink ones uncut. Zinnias and black-eyed Susans (a lovely gift from a friend's garden!). Black-eyed Susans and cosmos. Black-eyed Susans, calendula, cosmos, blanketflower, and zinnia. Zinnias and yarrow. Astilbe leaf, snapdragon, zinnia, echinacea, and salvia.

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 week marks the last of the bulbs in the cutting garden. It might be a little thin in June until some annuals start to fill in, but there are some interesting shapes and colors right now, if nothing very big.  Tulip, daffodil, Jacob's ladder "Bresingham purple," and columbine "Nora Barlow." This is an updated version of the previous bouquet, swapping out the faded tulip for a yellow "New Moon" globeflower.  Delphinium and Baptista "Starlight Prairie Blues." Peony and hosta. Blanketflower "Moxie" and salvia "Merleau Blue." A closeup of the blanketflower shows how interesting its shape and colors are.  I thought the salvia needed a closeup too, since the color wasn't really coming through in the first photo.