Port Potager

Today's Flower Friday is a tale of two cutting gardens. On one hand, we see the happy mayhem of just cutting whatever happens to be blooming and throwing it into a mason jar: Baby's breath, phlox, black-eyed Susans, zinnia, bachelor's buttons, penstemon, hosta, and snapdragon.  On the other hand, we see the result of some carefully controlled color selections. When I first started planting the cutting garden , I chose perennials in a range of sunset colors: orange, peachy-salmons, golden yellows, plus deep purples and blues for contrast. I also tried to choose seeds for annuals that fit that scheme this past spring as well (though looking back, I can see that some things didn't bloom). Anyway, the idea was that anything in bloom at any given time would look good together. I guess that's true of the first bouquet, but below is a primo case study of what I was going for with that sunset color scheme: Echinacea, yarrow, roses, foxglove, and Chin...

I only have one bouquet today, and this one I only barely managed to bring in before the sky opened up yesterday. It's super-pretty, though: Snapdragons, rose, Chinese forget-me-not, astilbe, and yarrow. It's a little hard to tell in this photo, but those snapdragons at the bottom are a deep, velvety red-purple, which really sets off the delicate pink of the rose. So much pink this year! It's definitely growing on me.

I introduced a lot of annuals to the cutting garden this year, and since they were all grown from seed, it took quite some time for them to finally come into bloom. But here we are in mid-July, and the cutting garden has a lot going on. I should have taken a picture of the garden itself before doing said cutting, but I didn't think of it in time. Here are some vases I threw together to bring inside: Chinese forget-me-not, echinacea (two kinds!), and yarrow. Snapdragons, Chinese forget-me-not, yarrow, delphinium, echinacea, astilbe, zinnia, and baby's breath. Chinese forget-me-not, snapdragon, delphinium, astilbe, echinacea, yarrow, and bachelor's buttons.

This week I've been self-medicating my winter depression with flower seed catalogues. We are just a couple inches away from breaking the record for the snowiest winter of all time here in Newburyport, but I've been thinking about color instead of white. My second stop for seed shopping was at Johnny's Seeds  (my favorite). These pictures (obviously) are all from their catalogue.  Florist Blue Boy Cornflower Apricot/Peach Mix Strawflower Covent Garden Market Baby's Breath Sun Ball Drumstick Flower Arena III Apricot Lisianthus Chinese Forget-Me-Not Animation Mix Snapdragons Johnny's Sublime Formula Mix Larkspur I really can't wait to get these started. It's like planting hope.

Ok, this is it. We've had a full six months of cut flowers, but we're having frosty temperatures here now, and these are the last bouquets of the year. It's been a great first season for the cutting garden, and I'll be sure to go over the photographic record before going shopping for more seed and perennials next year, so I can fill in the gaps of color and bloom time for even better arrangements next year. Baby's breath, calendula, and zinnia. Zinnias.

As the flowers and plants of the perennial border grew in this spring and summer, it became clear that a few things weren't working out the way I had planned. One of the biggest issues was that these echinacea look great, but are doing so well that they are much taller than the wormwood and decorative grass behind them: So I dug out both silvery wormwood plants and moved them. One has a new home here, right at the part of the bed that curves around to the driveway: This nicely fills in a hole left by digging up the incredibly invasive gooseneck loosestrife that was there previously. At the nursery they suggested that this more "cultivated" variety of loosestrife wouldn't take over the bed, but that turned out to be completely wrong. It formed a very dense mat of roots, but hopefully we got enough of it out that we can control any shoots that try to come up between the nice plants. In the spot where the other gooseneck loosestrife was I bought a nice bi...