Archive: 2017

Our garden season in Maine is short; but as you can see from the above view down the side slope from the patio border to the driveway, there’s still quite a lot happening in the garden in mid-August.

If July is daylily season, the stars of the August garden are the summer phlox (Phlox paniculata). I have been taking advantage of my new front garden project to add more of these. Two varieties, ‘Blue Paradise’ and ‘David’ are old friends that have been growing in the back garden for years. ‘Blue Paradise,’ the earliest blooming of my summer phlox varieties,  has already been flowering for weeks and is beginning to look a little tired. ‘David’ is just beginning to open its flowers in the fence border.

As I add more phlox to the garden, I’ve been taking advantage of the amazing selection offered by Rachel Kane at Perennial Pleasures in Vermont, a nursery that specializes in growing and propagating old-fashioned garden varieties. The pink phloxes below include ‘Robert Poore’ (the photo doesn’t really do justice to its intense color), a variety that Kane has named ‘Old Cellarhole’ (because that’s where she discovered it growing), ‘Bright Eyes,’ and ‘Miss Pepper.’

Although the daylilies are past their peak in mid-August, there are still more than a dozen varieties in bloom, including these which had flowers open today.

The Casa Blanca lilies are adding beauty (and their glorious fragrance) to the August garden.

While the lilies have just begun to bloom in August, the flowers of Geranium x oxonianum are garden stalwarts that have been blooming since early June. I occasionally think about cutting back their long floriferous arms, especially now that they are putting up new blooms from fresh new mounds of foliage at the centers of the plants – but I love the way they weave their clear pink flowers among other plants, as here with the blue balloon flowers (Platycodon grandiflorus).

Composite flowers (now in the family Asteraceae) also come into their own in August. These include the flowers of Echinacea purpurea ‘Magnus’ blooming their hearts out along the Lavender Walk.

But also the flowers of Liatris, here Liatris spicata ‘Floristan Violet’ blooming with daylily ‘Late Summer Breeze’ and L. spicata ‘Floristan White’ blooming with ‘Orange Bounty.’

In the back garden, the lemon yellow composite flowers of the tall rudbeckia ‘Autumn Sun’ (or ‘Herbstsonne’) light up the back of the blue and yellow border.

And around the edges of the garden, the native goldenrods (Solidago) have begun to bloom.

Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day is the creation of Carol at May Dreams Gardens and is hosted by her in the 15th of every month. Visit her blog to see what other gardeners have in bloom this August.

Filed under: GBBD, Photo essays, seasons Tagged: Casa Blanca lily, daylilies, Echinacea purpurea, flower beds, goldenrod, hardy geranium, Hemerocallis, Liatris, native plants, phlox, platycodon, rudbeckia, Solidago

I’ve been in a bit of a slump this year with my new front garden project, without the clear goals and timetables for reaching them that are typical for me. I thought the gratification of getting the Side Slope (below) and Fragrant Garden plantings created in year 2 would give me momentum, but this year’s projects just don’t excite me in the same way.

My 5-year schedule called for completing the Clover Path and the Shrubbery this year. The Clover Path may not engage me in the way that creating perennial borders does, but it is a critical structural element in the front garden design. The Clover Path provides an entry point into the lower garden from the driveway; it connects the lower and upper parts of the new front garden, and it frames the Front Slope, the Shrubbery and the front and side perennial borders. The widening of the path at the curve by the Shrubbery also creates room for a small seating area, a destination in the lower garden.

So I have been slogging my way through the Clover Path project and expect to get it done this month. In late spring, I laid out the borders of the path using a garden hose and some pieces of rope. I have been removing existing vegetation (unless it is clover!) and tilling in some compost. I had hoped to get the top half of the path prepared and seeded before the end of June, but other garden chores captured my attention and energy. Thinking I had until fall to get this done, I was working at a leisurely pace – until some research on planting clover revealed that, unlike grass seed, clover must be sown in spring or summer, no later than mid-August. This unexpected deadline lit a fire under me, and I hope to get the soil preparation and seeding finished in the coming week. Nevertheless, because my late timing is pushing the envelope, I have bought extra seed so that I can re-seed next spring if necessary.

My other planned project for this year, a planting of shrubs at the west front corner of my property has been delayed. I am scheduled to take a course on “Selecting Native Woody Plants for the Maine Garden” at the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in mid-October, and I realized that it made no sense to design and plant this shrub border before taking the class. My goal now is to prepare the soil for planting this fall, design over the winter, and plant next spring. I have made some progress on this, getting trees limbed up to let more light into the planting area and beginning to pull up some of the existing vegetation.

Another project has been added to my agenda for this year. I’ve decided to create a small rain garden to collect runoff from the roof at the corner of the house by the Fragrant Garden. I don’t really need a rain garden, since my very sandy soil drains quickly; but I am hoping that by creating a depression where rain water will collect, however briefly, I will be able to grow some plants that require more moisture than my conditions generally provide. (I am dreaming of a ‘Quickfire’ hydrangea.) Because this is a small area (about 25 square feet), I should be able to get it done quickly, preferably within the next 4-6 weeks. I have already added a flexible extension to the downspout to channel the water in the right direction. Next is to dig the depression, amend the soil, and put in plants.

I must admit that I am pushing myself to complete these projects in order to stay on track and get to the year 4 project that I find much more interesting – creating the Front Slope planting. (Indeed, I have already begun some preparatory work on this big garden area.)

Filed under: front garden, garden design Tagged: clover lawn, Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens, flower beds, garden design, hydrangea, native plants, rain garden, shrub plantings

Garden Revolution: How Our Landscapes Can Be a Source of Environmental Change by Larry Weaner and Thomas Christopher (Timber Press, 2016) is part of a trend in garden design to use natural plant communities as a model for gardening. In  this sense, it fits together well with Darke and Tallamy’s  2014 book The Living Landscape (see my review here) and Rainer and West’s 2015 book Planting in a Post-Wild World (see review here).

Where Darke and Tallamy focus on mimicking nature’s layering of plants in the garden and Rainer and West focus on creating gardens of plant communities, Weaner and Christopher focus on the processes by which plant communities develop and change, particularly the ecological process of succession. Plant communities are almost always in the process of becoming something else. Where I live and garden in the northeastern United States, for example, the processes of ecological succession mean that all plant communities are either forests or on the way to becoming forests. (As I’ve weeded hundreds of oak seedlings and thousands of tiny maple seedlings out of my flower beds this year, I’ve been reminded of just how quickly my property would revert to forest without my active intervention.) Weaner and Christopher advocate a style of gardening in which you figure out what kind of soil you have and what plant communities naturally grow in that type of soil and then design a garden that uses a naturally occurring plant community with human interventions to shape the process of ecological succession (for example, stopping the process by which a meadow would turn into shrubland and then forest by mowing the meadow once a year).

Although the kind of wild-looking garden landscapes that Weaner and Christopher favor are not what I’m after, I found valuable insights for my own gardening in this book:

• I had always heard (and believed) that plants which grow in poor conditions will grow even better in rich garden soil. Not so, Weaner and Christopher argue; many plants that grow in difficult locations are poor competitors that thrive there because they have carved out a niche where they have few competitors. Put them in rich garden soil, and they will be crowded out by more competitive plants, often weeds.
• There is a tension between the idea of a garden as a composition of plant colors, shapes, and textures and the processes of plant community development. Good design requires thinking about how the plant community we are creating will change over time and an openness to those processes of change.
• Disturbance is an important part of the ecological process of succession in plant communities. As gardeners, we can intentionally use disturbance (e.g., mowing a meadow, cutting down trees to create a forest clearing) to create desired results and we can avoid disturbance (e.g., pulling weeds) when it will create undesired results.

Before I was even halfway through Garden Revolution, it was already influencing my thinking about my garden. When a clump of self-sown blue Siberian irises bloomed in a flower bed that I had designed as a composition in shades of pink and lavender, I resisted my initial impulse to dig them out. So what if they changed the color scheme of the planting? The pink irises I had originally planted in this location had never really thrived, and these blue irises were healthy and happy and looked lovely in the company of pink flowers and green foliage. It was time, I realized, to let go of my pre-conceived color scheme and let nature guide me. The insight that not all  plants thrive in rich garden soil has shaped my thinking about how to design the new Front Slope planting that will be my major garden project next year. As I begin to work on that design, I am imagining a gradation of soil types from heavily amended rich garden soil at the top of the slope to unamended native loamy sand at the bottom.

I consider any garden  book that leads me to see my garden with new eyes or think about garden design in new ways well worth reading. Garden Revolution did both and I highly recommend it.

Filed under: Garden Books, garden design Tagged: Claudia West, Douglas W. Tallamy, Ecological Gardening, Garden Books, garden design, Larry Weaner, Rick Darke, Thomas Christopher, Thomas Rainer

Kids play pretend they are adults is just the most adorable thing you get to see. The next DIY project will show you how to make an indoor playhouse which will help your kids have the most fun! As you can notice, 2by4s are required for this neat homemade project. There are actually building plans provided, so you can easily go through all of the steps necessary of making a big toy like this. Do take into consideration that it will require some nailing and other work of this manner, so if you have a friend who knows his or her way around this sort of stuff, make sure you send that invite! The final playhouse is decorated with flower box, small furniture, and even a welcome mat, all the little details that make a thing like this more fun to enjoy. Good luck!

 

Learn how to build a fun and magical indoor playhouse for your kids at JenWoodhouse