Tovara, rock cress, and more 11 May 2008

A few more pictures from earlier this week -

Pansies, violas, and sweet alyssum

The sweet alyssum has really been nicely filling in the spaces I left between the young plants.

Creeping snapdragons, budded

There is something (I’d guess a bird, but I don’t know for sure) that likes to clip off the buds of creeping snapdragons and leave them lying beside the plants (you can see one at the very front of the plants in this shot). The same thing happened last year. For some reason, whatever is doing it seems particularly prone to clipping off the flowers that are at the very front of the plants, lying on the wall. I don’t know why and I’ve yet to find a way to make it stop, so I just allow for that probability. The vibrant green leaves soften the wall anyway, even when some of the flowers are removed shortly before they can bloom.

Foliage of tovara ‘Painter’s Palette’ (bottom) and bearded irises (with pea seedlings visible at the very top in the background)

The two bearded irises pictured here have done the best of any I’ve planted in the front garden. They are planted towards the top of the slope, so fellow dry-site gardeners may want to take note. The tovara, ‘Painter’s Palette’, is  a cultivar that is found much more often than the species form of this native plant, Polygonum virginianum (syns. Tovara virginiana and Persicaria virginianum). It has the maroon chevron marking pictured here and leaves display varying degrees of marbling with cream and white and paler green (there is little to none seen on the leaves here, but older leaves tend to display more marbling than young ones). It is best known as a foliage plant for partial to full shade gardens, but it will grow decently in a fair amount of sun as well. When it is happy it will seed around with abandon, and the seeds come true to cultivar form.  It’s seeded a little but not much everywhere I’ve grown it.  Every time I start a new garden I’m given some young plants by a friend who always gets many seedlings of it in her own garden. I have two plants in the front garden, and given that I’m used to growing it in moist shade, I’ve been impressed with just how well it’s done here at the base of taller plants partway down the slope. It doesn’t attain the heights it does in shadier, cooler areas, but then, many a plant is shorter in front than it typically is. I think the strong winds alone tend to encourage many plants to sacrifice height for robustness.

California poppy foliage (center) with young salpiglossis plants (rich green at top), rock cress bloom waving in wind (left), and pansy blooms (bottom)

The rock cress (just planted this spring) has done so well it’s almost unbelievable to me. Not only have all its preexisting buds bloomed, but it’s put out not only new buds, but whole new flower stalks! It’s coped so much better with the initial shock of being planted into this inhospitable site than even most other xeriscaping plants.  As of this moment, I would highly recommend it to others in a similar situation - a dry, poor-soil, sunny, windy slope of a site. Hopefully it will continue to do as well as it’s done so far.  (There are at least a few different plants that have the common name rock cress. The one I’m referring to is in the genus Arabis. I would guess it’s a cultivar of Arabis blepharophylla but the nursery tag doesn’t specify.)

Planting 10 May 2008

Yesterday, in the front garden, I planted the American Alumroot, the Prickly Pear Cactus, the two Small’s Penstemons, and the Sundrops, all mail-ordered from Toadshade. It was sporadically raining when I was planting, and rained a lot more after I finished.  I still had more to plant in front (I planted half of the ten plants from Toadshade that are going in front), but I prioritized the ones that are supposed to bloom sooner (though we’ll see if they actually do, since as I’ve said, many plants react to being planted in the unhospitable site by at first marshaling their energy into getting established), and I’ve got so much to plant in back that it’s ridiculous, but I worry less about the back because plants can survive longer in pots in the cooler, shadier back yard and because it’s less traumatizing to plant them into such a situation when it’s warmer out than to plant into the hot, sun-drenched, wind-tossed front garden during summertime.

Today I went to the nursery and, it being around our average last frost day, stocked up on stuff I’d not yet bought this year, all things that did decent or well for me last year:  Two Tall Verbena (Verbena bonariensis), two creeping purple-flowering verbena (hybrid cultivar “Lapel Blue”), a six-pack of gazania “Talent Mix”, one Angelonia (Angelonia angustifolia), one Hawaiian Blue Eyes (Evolvulus glomeratus), and one Licorice Plant (Helichrysum petiolare).  I also got one plant that is new to my gardening sphere and, as far as I remember (which may be wrong), also new to the nursery, Euphorbia “Diamond Frost”. This afternoon, I planted all of them. I’ve had such amazing germination rates of the seeds I’ve sowed in the front garden that it’s gotten difficult to find spots to plant things!  I usually have to transplant seedlings to be able to fit new plants in.  Well, there could certainly be worse garden problems!

Here’s more on each of today’s purchases:

• Tall Verbena:  I love this airy plant, and bees love it just as much as I do (butterflies have in past gardens, too, and I’m sure they would still if not for that pesky wind).  In Europe it is popular to mass it, either in a clump or in a line that’s a break between two other more robust plants (since it’s so incredibly airy, it’s much easier to see through than most tall plants, making it an ideal visual between-plant break). It’s annual here, but perennial in USDA cold zones 7 and up.  When it’s happy, it will self-seed around the parent plant and perpetuate itself in the garden in following years.
• Creeping verbena hybrid “Lapel Blue”:  This ferny-leaved verbena (much more ferny-leaved than most verbenas) forms more of a mat than most verbenas, and I found it a great softener for the concrete retaining wall.  Planted in front of taller, leggy plants, getting dappled sun most of the day, it did excellently, blooming - in purple, not the cultivar name’s alleged blue - non-stop from spring till the end of summer, at which point I decided it looked slightly straggly and cut it back, which resulted in it not blooming for a month (I don’t think I will do that again this year).  Two or three planted together will form a mat at least eight inches deep by at least a foot and a half wide.  In my experiences so far, most  other verbenas like a richer, moister soil than what the front garden provides, and more sunshine than what the back one provides.
• Gazania “Talent Mix”: This mixed-color gazania has got foliage similar to Dusty Miller (Senecio cineraria), which looks wonderful with the bold coloration of gazanias’ flowers.  I first became enchanted with this mix at the farmers’ market some years ago, but the farm that sold them stopped coming to markets after 2005, so now I have to buy them from the nursery instead. I find them to be worthy of taking the time to seek them out. (This is a gazania mix that can also be grown from seed.)
• Angelonia:  This plant is also known as Summer Snapdragon, because its flowers look similar to snaps’ flowers (and I believe it is a relative) but it has less of a propensity to die in hot and humid weather. (My creeping snapdragons, by the way, lasted all last year, till killed by frost.  It even turns out that one of them seems to have survived the winter [we'll see for sure when the sprout blooms], the only time I’ve ever had a snap survive here.  If you have sucky soil, a generally sucky site, and/or hot and humid summers, perhaps creeping snaps are your way to having summer-long snaps.) I grew some angelonias  last year in the front garden, and found that they did the best being partially shaded by other plants, towards the bottom of the slope so that they got more water than many of their compatriots.  The ones I planted later in the season did much worse than the ones that I planted early on.
• Hawaiian Blue Eyes: Last year was my first attempt at growing this morning glory family member. Its flowers are a bright lightish blue with a distinctive white eye, and its fuzzy foliage is also fairly striking. I first planted it in full sun as the tag recommended, and it did not do well at all.  I replanted it beside the arch of Aster ericoides prostratus “Snow Flurry” and it recovered and went on to prosper, winding in and out amongst other plants, sometimes giving the impression that other plants were blooming a crystal blue as its flowers poked out from beneath them.  It’s another tender perennial that’s generally grown as an annual in cold-winter climes such as mine.
• Licorice Plant: This plant’s commonness in no way diminishes its prettiness, in my opinion. This is a foliage annual, like Dusty Miller or Quicksilver. It has soft silvery-grey leaves and it trails or winds its way here and there. I planted it at the base of the slope in front last year and it thrived by the concrete wall, winding its way rapidly through other plants, twisting and turning this way and that, bringing silver to the bottom of the slope to go with the silvery-leaved fuzzy plants higher up the slope. Yes, generally silver-leaved and fuzzy plants both do better in conditions like the front garden’s than the average plant does, since both silver leaves and fuzz help plants to cope with heat and drought. Besides, silvery fuzzy leaves are just plain fun to touch!  Licorice plant is also a host plant for the Painted Lady butterfly here in North America.  (The also silvery-leaved and groundcover-behaving - but both native and perennial for me - Pussytoes genus [Antennaria] is host to the Painted Lady’s cousin, the American Lady.) Be careful if you are in a much hotter zone than I am; while licorice plant is well-behaved for me, I have read that it can grow to monstrous proportions when planted in the ground in truly hot zones.
• Euphorbia “Diamond Frost”: I have literally not read one bad comment about this plant - an annual here - so far (I looked it up before buying it when I saw my nursery had started carrying it this year), so I am curious to see how it does in my garden.  It’s supposed to bloom non-stop all season and is supposed to laugh at things like drought and heat.  So far it’s an airy cloud of tiny white flowers and little green leaves.  (It definitely does not look like what I personally picture a euphorbia to be, though I know that Euphorbia is a huge genus.)

Books and photos 8 May 2008

The New York Times is 2 for 2 this week: Today they have an interview with Wendy Johnson, a Zen-inspired long-time gardener. Again, the online version includes a slideshow. I’ve already found a used copy of her new book, Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate, and I’m thinking of quitting the gardening book I’m currently reading, An Ecology of Enchantment: A Year in a Country Garden by Des Kennedy, to start reading it instead. The latter is a book I recently bought thinking it sounded like the perfect sort of gardening essay book for me to read, but so far I’ve been underwhelmed by it (though in fairness, I’ve only read one section so far; it’s arranged by month, so I thought I would start with May, seeing as we’re in it right now). Even when I agree with the things he’s saying, I find myself feeling cranky about how he says them. For example, we both have a deep love of crabapples, most particularly when they’re blooming, but the way he talks about them annoys me. For another example, he seems to have absolutely zero concern for the possibility of plants escaping, which to be honest is something I would worry about even more in a country garden than I do here in my city one, since the damage can potentially be so much worse close to wild areas. Additionally, I find Des’ writing style to be overly flowery. So maybe Wendy Johnson’s Zen-inspired prose would be a breath of fresh air in comparison.

Speaking of crabapples, this is indeed the week they are blooming here, and they are as lovely as always. Here is one of the many shots I’ve taken of them in the area this week. This one was taken at the Charles River; you can see the river in the background, blurry.

…

This is one of my favorite weeks of the year here, when suddenly there seems to be an explosion of bloom: Crabapples and cherries and lilacs and azaleas and rhododendrons and sand cherries and the late magnolias (most of the magnolias now bloom before most of the forsythia here; many forsythia are still blooming now, all leafed out, looking drab - once upon a time they bloomed in late February or early March); tulips and late daffodils and grape hyacinths and columbines and perennial candytuft and vinca and euphorbia species and moss phlox and on and on and on.  This week I saw the Catbirds for the first time this spring and today, a sure sign of summer soon to come, I heard twittering from overhead and looked up to see the Chimney Swifts swooping through the sky for the first time since early last autumn. It always feels here in this cold-winter region like spring starts out as this demure being celebrating subtlety and giving us small jewels as hints of her presence and that this is the week at which she lets down her hair and exclaims, “Let’s have a big party!”

…

Somehow I seem to have drawn Sundial Lupine, Lupinus perennis, to me by talking about it here recently. On Monday I stopped in at the nursery as I had to walk by it anyway, and was shocked to discover a sundial lupine for sale there (the first time I’ve ever seen one for sale in a nursery in person), and in one of the biggest pots I’ve ever seen a perennial in there. I asked the nursery manager if she thought they’d be getting more in, and she said she wouldn’t guarantee it, so I bought it and took it around with me for the day. I planted it yesterday (luckily as it was shortly before I was injured). Below are a couple pictures; note how its leaves are thinner and often longer than hybrid lupines, and how they tend to be more upturned, catching the rain more easily than hybrid lupine leaves.

The manager said a lupine this big should definitely bloom this year, but we’ll see.  For more on this kind of lupine, check out this link and (for subspecies occidentalis) this link. Both also have photos.

Stock, blooming away merrily

At least five or six different colors came in just the three pots I got. It’s a great side effect, I think, of buying young plants before they’re blooming much or at all (though I know when one has a specific color scheme in mind, it’s less great). Stock smell so, so lovely, and being planted next to the honey scent of the white sweet alyssum in this year’s garden, it’s like an olfactory explosion in that area.

Urban Farming 7 May 2008

The New York Times has a nice piece today on urban agriculture, focusing particularly on market farmers who are growing their crops in the New York City area. (The online version also has a slide show.)

Here are some resources here in the metro Boston area:

• The Food Project in Lincoln, Dorchester, and Lynn
• ReVision House Urban Farm in Dorchester
• The Farm School in Athol
• Boston Natural Areas Network, which organizes community gardens, amongst other things
  
• New Entry Sustainable Farming Project via Tufts University
• Massachusetts’ Farmers’ Markets 2008
• NOFA Massachusetts’ Organic Food Guide 2007-08 (available online and in hard copy). This page also has a downloadable file, Local Availability and Suggested Food Preservation Guide (PDF).

And here is a really nice longer article (2007) from the magazine In These Times about urban farming in the US.

Erodium, echinacea, felicia, borage, & lupines (false & otherwise) 3 May 2008

More photos taken on the 1st -

Erodium (Heronsbill/Storksbill) - sorry this was the best shot of the lot.

Apparently it’s popular to give water bird names to hardy geraniums and their relatives. Hardy geraniums are often referred to as “Cranesbills” and this daintier relative is commonly called “Heronsbill” or “Storksbill”. This definitely does not seem to be a very common perennial as yet, as it took me some time to even find the right kind of Erodium on Google; apparently a much more common member of the genus is an annual weed in mild climates. I don’t remember my nursery selling erodium till this year, but this year the nursery manager recommended it as a good plant for my windy, sloped, sunny, poor-soil front garden, so I’m giving it a go. Bluestone Perennials sells a different cultivar than the one I planted and their page for it has more information on this type of Erodium (as well as a better photo of the flowers than my above photo, which was the best of a couple dozen I’ve taken; for some reason small white flowers don’t tend to photograph well on my camera). As I’ve previously found with many other plants that are originally from mountainous areas, it has been budding/blooming much more since our two days of rain.

Echinaceas and felicia

I got these echinaceas at that same annual herb sale at the estate run by the historical society that I’ve referenced in other posts (the sale was in April 2007, the same time I started this garden, and a nice cheap way to get some perennials). They were young when I bought them, and while I was slightly disappointed that they didn’t bloom their first year, I wasn’t very surprised. They were simply marked as “purple coneflower” and “white coneflower,” so I don’t know if they are cultivars or not. The one on the left is the allegedly purple one (purple coneflower - Echinacea purpurea - gets its common name from the Latin, like many other purple-called plants, as people often mistakenly think purpurea means “purple”; in actuality it’s more like “crimson”) and the one on the right is the white one, of which I have no idea if it’s a hybrid or what else, due to the low-info tag and its not having bloomed yet. I did notice this spring at the nursery that the purple coneflowers there came up before the white ones, just like in my own garden, and that the purple ones’ leaves started out bronzy-green while the white ones’ leaves started out a medium green, again just like in my own garden. (You can still see the difference in color in the young leaves pictured here.)

As to the felicia (the pictured one is one of twelve young felicias planted around the front garden), I had never grown felicia (as far as I recall) before last year, when its succulent-looking leaves at the nursery made me think it was well-suited to a hot, dry, windy, xeriscaped garden. After planting it, I read up on it and discovered that, while my guess was a fair one, it wasn’t really accurate, and felicia doesn’t take to hot temperatures as well as one might think from looking at it. Upon this discovery, I resigned myself to losing the plant I’d bought by late summer, but I turned out to be wrong (one reason why I suggest trial and error in addition to outside ideas). It certainly looked scraggly for a while, but it recovered and started blooming fiercely again, keeping going till frost. My favorite felicia so far is the one that I grew last year, a beautiful light blue daisy-type flower with a bright yellow center, the flowers giving the appearance of tiny clear skies with tiny suns in the center of each tiny sky.

Borage

[Hardy mum sprouts in the foreground; peas sprouting in the background]

I did some poking about for this post, refreshing myself on what the online literature says about borage. Much of it seems to be inaccurate, particularly about borage’s culture. Yes, it’s true that it prefers rich soil, but that’s about the only thing I could find that was accurate. For one thing, many sites said that borage’s top height is 18 inches. In the rich soil of an old garden of mine, it was a towering plant backed by a fence, perhaps reaching three feet and being smothered in blooms for at least three to four months. I’ve also read repeatedly today to absolutely not plant borage in a windy site as it will flop over and die. I’m glad I didn’t read that before growing it last year, as I’ve shown its inaccuracy. It helps if the prevailing wind is partially broken by a bigger, more wind tolerant plant, but I’ve found that to be true of a large number of the things I’ve planted in the front garden. Finally, as the picture above proves, transplanting a plant is not in fact as dire as the online literature claims (apparently it’s supposed to be impossible) and the plants are not as frost-averse as claimed. Yes, certainly, the younger a plant you can transplant, the better, but then, I’ve found that to also be true of many plants.

Anyway, as you can find copious references to online, in addition to being a great nectar source and a medicinal herb, borage is edible as just-plain-food, with the leaves generally being described as reminiscent of cucumbers and the flowers also edible (as always, be sensible - triple-check things you’ve heard/read and be especially sure that you are unlikely to have an allergic or averse reaction and/or contraindication to any food or herb BEFORE attempting to consume it - think of medicinal herbs as being like pharmaceutical medications).

Carolina lupine/False lupine (Thermopsis villosa) starting to bud

When I was a child I did not know what lupines/lupins were. They did not grow wild nearby there (not even in the public nature parks, as far as I ever saw) and no gardeners I knew attempted to grow the dainty, easily felled cultivars in their gardens because of our hot, humid summers. It wasn’t till, as a teen, I watched the Monty Python skit about the man who steals lupines to give to the indigent that I discovered what a lupine looks like. Lupines grow wild by the huge armful up in Northern New England, but down here, even in this area cooler than my childhood one, they still tend to die out in summertime or be killed by the intermittent snowcover of winter. In a past garden, I successfully grew the East Coast’s native (and endangered or eradicated in many states, partially because it will cross-breed with garden-planted lupine cultivars) lupine, Lupinus perennis, commonly known as “sundial lupine”. While I’d like to try again, lupines - like many wildflowers with either deep taproots or fragile thin root systems - are not the most easily transplanted plants, and there are not that many sources for sundial lupine, so I have yet to do it.

In the meantime, I’ve been growing the plant I’d love to go back in time and tell the gardeners I knew as a child about, the one faking being a lupine, with sunshiny yellow blooms brightening up the late spring garden, and a plant which laughs at humidity - the Carolina lupine or false lupine. This lovely, underrated plant is native to the Southeastern US and is a quite worthy garden plant. Over the course of its first couple years it will expend much of its energy establishing itself in the garden, after which it will be a subshrub - often reaching 4 feet or more in height and sprawling 2-3 feet across, smothered in its beautiful yellow lupine-like blooms for a month in late spring and/or early summer. Depending on what source you check, the coldest USDA zone can be anywhere from zone 4 to 6. I’ve never had any problems with it winter-killing despite us having sometimes had highs below zero F with dessicating winds and no snow cover at the time, so I’d say it’s probably hardier than the most conservative estimates, but please do bear in mind that a better established plant is always going to be more likely to survive any adversity, so if you live in a harsh-winter area I suggest planting it in spring to give it the best chance of winter survival its first year.

The front garden after two days of rain 1 May 2008

[Click for larger view]

The rock border is made entirely of rocks dug up from the ground in what is now the front garden.  There are many rocks left over.

Photos of a rainy day 30 April 2008

It rained and rained and rained here. It rained much of the time for two days. It was the most rain we’ve gotten in a while, though we’d had a fairly wet winter. Yesterday, when the rain temporarily lessened to a drizzle, I went out and took some pictures in the shady back garden. Here are some of them.

Fern-Leaved/Fringed Bleeding Heart (Dicentra eximia), bloomstalks waving around in the wind

If you only click one photo in this post for a larger view, make it the above one. Trust me.

Variegated Honesty / Money Plant / Silver Dollar (cultivar of Lunaria annua [syn. Lunaria biennis])

My old garden with the columbines also had self-seeded honesty (this is one of several cottage garden flowers that are technically biennial - blooming in their second year and then dying - but in actuality tend to perpetuate in a garden through self-seeding once planted; other examples are foxglove and hollyhock). This is the only time I’ve ever seen a variegated form. I think I got it last year from Select Seeds‘ mail-order catalog, but if so, they don’t appear to be selling it any more. Honesty is most famous for its seed heads, and all its common names derive from them. Here is someone else’s photo of them. I caution you that in some areas, honesty plant can be invasive, so please try to find out in advance whether that’s true where you are.

Epimedium, blooming, bloomstalks again waving around in the wind

Wild Ginger is sprouting in the background (vivid green). Here is a nice article on epimediums from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. I quite understand the author; I fell in love with epimediums at first sight, just like columbines. They have beautiful shows of blooms, usually in spring (sometimes into early summer), and the flowers are so enchanting - both individually and in their clusters. The leaves, too, are gorgeous in this difficult-to-describe way. Though they tend not to be evergreen here - in my experience, most claims of “evergreen foliage” regarding perennials turn out to only extend as far north as some areas with a rating of USDA zone 7 or 8 - they are constantly changing over the course of the seasons. And many epimediums can take dry shade better than just about anything else non-invasive. Some of them form clumps, while others turn into groundcovers.

The Wild Ginger/Canadian Ginger (native Asarum canadense). Sorry this was the best of my shots.

Toadflax and nemesia, waiting to be planted

Toadflax is the purple and yellow one in the bottom.

Corydalis ‘Purple Leaf’ and Saxifrage ‘Purple Robe’, blooming while waiting to be planted

The leaves in the bottom right corner are from a Colchicum, an autumn-flowering bulb whose strappy leaves appear in spring (in most species, including almost all of the ones planted in gardens).

Wild violets, native sedum (Sedum ternatum), and Heart-Leaved Alexander (Zizia aptera), also waiting to be planted

The plants in the above photo are from Toadshade.

Rain gage (about 1.5 inch as of this photo)

…

We are supposed to get scattered frosts here tonight. We’ll see if my garden is impacted.

Reconsiderations and native plants 27 April 2008

The pansies planted in the most sun (the most pastel grouping) are not doing nearly as well as the other two groups. I have yet to decide whether it’s worth it to try to find a new spot for them ASAP or to wait a little while, till the trees leaf out and the taller perennials further back get, well, taller, and see if that helps. It also seems that a slug or some other flower-eating thing is munching on them at night (why it is eating those and not the other pansies, though, is strange to me).

The nemesia ‘Sundrops’ that were planted on/towards the north side of the back garden bed definitely seem to be blooming more heavily than the ones planted on/towards the south side of the back garden bed. I don’t know if this is a temporary thing or if I should relocate the rest of the ‘Sundrops’ to the same area as the ones that are doing better. I don’t know if it’s because the ones on the south side are closer to a building that can cast shadows or because of something about the soil or because of their neighbors or what. So for now I am watching and waiting.

When recently ordering from Toadshade, it never occurred to me that the plants might arrive at the same time that the maples are blooming, nor that maple season would hit me so hard this year (one of my top pollen allergies is to maple pollen, pretty amusing for someone living in the Maple Central that is New England, but for some reason it’s worse this year; I wonder if the different species of maple are less staggered in their blooming than usual or something). Unfortunately, my reconsidering my timing in ordering is too late, since the plants are already here! So for now, I am keeping them (unwrapped) in (wide-open) boxes, hoping soon I’ll have a day where I can go outside without having such a bad reaction so fast. Toadshade, by the way, is a great nursery that I’ve been ordering from on and off for several years, one of the best mail-order nursery sources native North American plants, including some I’ve rarely seen elsewhere. They specify in their catalog what the native range is for the plant, including any states where it is rare, and also specify in what states it has escaped into the wild (if anywhere). In an old garden I grew tons of moist-to-wet native plants, and it was strange to have to skip over most of those this time, since this garden has “small pockets of moist soil” at best, rather than the naturally soggy soil I once worked with. However, it was lovely to be able to order plants that like sunny, dry sites, as that is something I am not as used to working with. Sun is not so easy to come by in today’s small urban garden plots!

I can kind of understand native plant purists, who think the best plants are plants that were originally native to one’s current very specific geographic area. However, I also feel like we have so changed our environment, especially in cities - which are by their very nature human constructs - that the best we can do is to provide plants that are food and shelter for the native critters whose lives we’ve also so altered. To that effect, I generally focus on native plants, but I also don’t believe that every native I plant has to have been originally found in the Boston area specifically. This area is no longer at all like what it was when colonists first arrived and to pretend that it is, is to me a bit silly. Additionally, since non-native and non-local native plants are often good sources of food - especially of nectar - I feel like incorporating them in an ecologically sensitive way (being particularly careful to avoid invasive plants at all costs) can be helpful to pollinators. I strive to have at least one or two good sources of nectar available (read: blooming) in my garden at all times.

Chinese chives, African daisies, pansies/violas, and other things 26 April 2008

More shots from earlier this week.

African daisy

Pansies in the foreground; California poppy foliage in the background

I bought a second African daisy with the general idea to plant it by the first one for contrast. However, when I went to plant it, I felt like it didn’t really look right there. So instead I planted it behind the lavender, which is just refoliating below the top (as seen in the foreground in the below shot), to draw the eye and to provide contrast with the silvery foliage of the lavender. Remember, the taller plant doesn’t always have to go behind the shorter one, especially if the taller one is loose or thin, and/or the shorter one is bushy and robust.

Behind the African daisy, Dianthus ‘Rainbow Loveliness’ is sprouting (the low green foliage to its right). Most of the other lavenders should have survived the winter too, but it seems they were killed by the trampling of the garden over the winter. Still, just in case they’re only playing dead, I’m leaving the plants standing for a few more weeks.

Chinese chives/garlic chives/Chinese leek (Allium tuberosum) and parsley

I got my Chinese chives from a division of a clump from someone I know. Here’s a link to information on Chinese chives and here is a link to culinary information on them and another.

Pansies and violas

… with dianthus foliage, autumn-blooming crocus foliage, etc.

Hyssop ‘Blue Fortune’ is continuing to grow since being planted earlier this month:

Pansies and violas

The yellow, black, and sometimes maroon viola is ‘Tiger Eyes’ (sometimes ‘Tiger Eye’). Its prettiness caught my eye and I thought it a good match for the darker pansies and violas in this section of the garden, but I did not realize that it’s apparently new and apparently pretty difficult to find until I did a web search just now to try to find a link about it for you all. Sometimes the blooms are just black and yellowy-gold in the front and sometimes they have splotches of maroon as well; it’s really unique. It’s also been a great performer, one of the most consistent bloomers of the ten cultivars of pansy and viola I planted this spring.

In this next shot you can better see the coloration of the two pansies I’ve planted as well as (hopefully) a better view of the other viola in this clump besides ‘Tiger Eyes’ (its name unfortunately currently escapes me), a pretty unusual thing with purple and shimmery copper.

Like the hyssop, the red-leaved euphorbia has been settling in well. It’s budded since being planted and looks like it will bloom soon.

Salpiglossis seedlings in the foreground.

Some Like It Hot 24 April 2008

Yesterday was our hottest day yet this calendar year, in the mid-80s F. Today the wind is strong, keeping temperatures lower, and it is still sunny. I took pictures. Here are a few.

Stock, blooming

Rock cress, bloomstalks waving around in the wind

Young salpiglossis plants in the background.

The creeping snapdragons (budded but not yet blooming), with the hen and chicks, the creeping thyme, etc.

Sedum, sprouting

with California poppy foliage