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.