Port Potager

May and June are the prettiest — and most aromatic — months in the garden. Here’s a taste of what’s busting out all over this month: Alyssum , miniature petunias, cosmos, pansies, and sweet potato vine. Coleus, miniature petunias, impatiens, and heucherella.  Peonies, snow in summer, veronica, and Siberian iris.   Irises.

Despite the cold, slow start to our spring, flowers are blooming all around us. Many of the flowers I've planted this year were selected for their scent in addition to how they look, and now it's clear that this was a great decision: Catching the scent of flowers on the breeze is one of the best parts of being outside in the springtime. Here's what's blooming now: Irises , which smell like violets. Actual violets (which, unsurprisingly, smell like violets). Chamomile , which smells like apples. Stock , which smells like cloves and baby powder (which is to say, they smell wonderful enough to make me break my rule against fuchsia flowers). A close-up of the white stock shows how nice they look, too. The lilac is a bit past its prime in the looks department, but still smells great. Sweet woodruff , which smells like vanilla and fresh-cut hay. Heliotrope , which smells sort of like grapes or fruit punch. ...

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...

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 (...

Tropical Storm Andrea dumped a ton of rain on us last Friday, which did a number on the perennial border. I expected this: Peonies are gorgeous, but they don't do well in the rain. In general, the white flower garden requires more fastidious deadheading, because white petals turn to brown in a blink.  Knowing that the rains would clobber a lot of our spring blooms, I made sure to snap some photos before  the rain. Early June is one of my favorite moments in this garden: Here you can see that some giant white peonies are already flopping over. I have them in a hoop, but I don't think it's a tall enough one to handle the weight of these flowers. You can also see red climbing roses poking up above the peonies and small white geraniums. These need to be trellised, and should eventually fan up the side of the window. On the corner of the border you can see another rose bush trying to climb without a trellis. When we build one, it will go up the corner of the...

Lots of peonies this week! It's that time of year, but I also did a rescue operation on a bunch of them. They look great now, but it's supposed to dump a good 3-4 inches of rain here tomorrow afternoon, and that will pretty much destroy all those layers of petals. There are also lots of dusty pinks and muted sunset tones, which shows more of the color scheme I was working in the cutting bed plants. Poppies and globeflower "New Moon." Same poppies and globeflower as above, but the bigger poppy has lost its petals. The pistil and stamen are so interesting with its purple pollen that I think it actually improves the arrangement. Pink irises. Siberian iris.  (I swiped these are from the perennial border.) Pink iris, strawberry foxglove, columbine, and globeflower.  (This iris is the one that was still open a few days after I cut the original stem in the photo above. I am hoping the foxglove continues to open up the stem so t...

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...