Much of the front garden, as of yesterday:
If you click to see the larger view, you can get a better idea of the mix of annual flowers/foliage plants, perennial flowers/foliage plants, and herbs that I grow (no veggies in sight yet). Many of the perennials are still quite small right now. I’ve read that yellow is the flower color that most draws the eye and that can be seen from farthest away, and in the larger version of this shot that definitely seems to be true, at least for me; my eyes immediately catch on the yellow pansies and for the violas that are both yellow and purple, to the yellow parts.
Yesterday I planted the comfrey and the seedlings of larkspur and nemesia, all in the back garden. Two of the nemesia plants are larger plants in larger pots, so I prioritized the smaller nemesia. Though I’d been considering keeping the nemesia in pots till after last frost (since they have turned out not to be as frost-hardy as I realized), the seedlings were already rootbound and I had to water them a few times a day just to keep them alive and figured it was worth risking planting them. They are ‘Sundrops’, the cultivar that has so many of the major gardening writers all aflutter, and their large blooms echo the primrose blooms much more strongly than I would have expected before actually seeing them in the ground, and look lovely planted in the same bed.
The larkspur aren’t blooming yet, but hopefully they will get to it before hot weather kills them, though now that the tree canopy is starting to leaf out (as of the past couple days), it should soon start to be 10-20 degrees F cooler in the back yard than the front one, which will help cool-loving annuals like larkspur survive longer before dying. The larkspur, by the way, is just the standard cultivar, ‘Giant Imperial’. In my experience, at least in this area, it’s the only one available, even at the farmers’ market. To grow another cultivar, I have to buy seeds and grow it myself.
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Nemesia ‘Sundrops’ (mixed color cultivar)
Primrose ‘Harbinger’
The larkspur seedlings are settling in really really well. They’ve been growing lots in the less than a day since I planted them.
Saxifrage ‘Purple Robe’, waiting to be planted
Corydalis ‘Purple Leaf’, also waiting to be planted
