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...

It's another gorgeous, sunny, record-breaking warm day here, so I am writing from outside: Since it's so early in the season, there is nothing to do but enjoy the sunshine. We did everything we needed to do yesterday, including cleaning up the perennial border. The perennial border out front is mostly in good shape, and the biggest pain of its clean up is already done . All that was left was to trim back some of the dead stems that I didn't get to in the fall clean up. Some of that was on purpose, as the chrysanthemums still had some life left in them; other parts were just laziness. Anyway, we raked out some leftover leaves, trimmed away parts of plants that had died back, and gave everything a good once-over: These are our baseline photos of the perennial border for March. There's actually quite a bit going on in there — lots of plants starting to come up, and not just the bulbs. It's hard to see it in these photos because they are small, ...