Today is beautiful here after yet another heat wave – comparably cool, sunny and breezy, with temps in the mid-70s F and feeling cooler still. The cold front came through last night, one night after Hurricane Earl thankfully failed to produce the wind and rain that had been predicted. With the cold front came abrupt, gentle rain, despite no rain in the forecast. Still the rain is not enough to make up for the deficit here, and already this afternoon many plants have started to look weak, most especially the crop plants in their big half-barrel planters.
But today is a good day to transplant – especially compared with all the hot, humid days we’ve had this summer – and transplant I did, in two main batches. I pulled (a lot of) weeds from the big area to clear out more space to plant, and then I planted a lot more in that area, more than doubling the space that had been planted this year. I also discovered that the azalea I thought had been choked to death by the insidious and invasive plant, black swallowwort, actually has resprouted from the bottom and has one little branch of life, branching out into two twigs. Hopefully now that I’ve cleared out a lot of the black swallowwort that was strangling it, it will start to grow better; but we’ll see. In that area I planted some asters, salvia ‘Lady in Red’ (which FINALLY is in at the nursery in very big pots), a perennial salvia, the showy goldenrod I’d gotten way back at the plant swap in late spring and had brought with me from my last garden, and some more sad-looking herbs I got free at the nursery – comfrey, another bronze fennel, tansy, and…another one or two. I also transplanted the catmint I’d planted in my last foray into that section, which looked sad by the fence. After I planted it the first time, I realized that after over three years gardening on a site that was eye-level, I am no longer used to not having to plant the shortest things in the front if I want them to be seen by others, and immediately suspected moving the catmint would be best for it, but wanted to wait and see. The coryopsis I also planted in my last planting in that area has started to bloom after the rain. I just love that shrub. In my first session of work, I also planted a few things in the small strip – two big pots of autumn-hued rudbeckias (‘Denver something’ and ‘Autumn Colors’) I’d gotten at the nursery at the same time as salvia ‘Lady in Red,’ as well as a penstemon and a second tansy, and I moved one of the pussytoes, which was much less happy than the other one.
The plants I’d mail-ordered earlier this summer from High Country Gardens came this past week as they were scheduled to do, and in my second batch of work, I sorted them into two groups based on which section I planned to plant them in and then planted the ones that were going in the small strip. I added 4 or 5 more echinaceas (more plain ole species ones as well as some ‘White Swan,’ that cultivar whose seeds the birds so prefer), several more agastaches (varying species and cultivars; agastache is one of the main specialties of HCG, and they do a lot of breeding and selecting of them), 2 Russian sage ‘Little Spires,’ 1 salvia ‘May Night,’ 1 butterfly weed, and 1 sedum ‘Autumn Joy.’ I’d hoped to get to the rest of the HCG plants today, but I found that after all the bending and twisting involved to plant things in such a thin-soiled, heavily-planted area, I was too tired and hot and sore to go on. I spent a few minutes appreciating all the hard work I’d done, and then came in to wash up.
In the little strip I’ve done the same thing I did when I started out in my last garden – heavily planted it with annuals, with some perennials mixed in, and observed how things do, using that information to procure more perennials that seem suitable (or that have already proven themselves to do well) as the season draws to a close, so that next year they will start to grow more robustly, and can take over more of the space from the annuals. Being without a fence and getting sun literally nearly all day, it is far more catching of passing eyes than the fenced-in, two-shrubbed main garden area, so between that and wanting to feel an immediate sense of accomplishment, I made it my top priority in gardening here. I’ve gotten mostly compliments on it, so hopefully I’ve succeeded at my goal. The moss roses, lantanas ‘Trailing Lavender,’ and marigolds have done especially stunningly, and the purple-fruiting ornamental chiles (2 with marbled green-and-white leaves and shorter, dark purple chiles, and one with purplish-green leaves and longer, lighter purple chiles) bring a bit of fun, funky flavor to the section.
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