While I was gone, one of the places where I stayed had an organic garden on the grounds. The garden was gorgeous and a lot of wildlife inhabited it. Three hummingbirds seemed to live in the garden, and spent a lot of time nectaring at the flowers in it.
Hummingbird at cleome in Santa Fe foothills
Another hummingbird at cleome
Yet another hummingbird at cleome
I took a ton of pictures of the garden and will post more another time.
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It’s been raining almost every day since I returned from New Mexico, so I’ve done little in the garden but weed. (How easily most weeds slide out of soaked soil!) I’ve still got a big pile of plants to plant, and I’ve added more to it. The nursery is in the midst of their sale frenzy, and no surprise, as it’s the time of year nurseries go crazy for sales. They are selling off their remaining herbs at $1.98 each, so I bought several. I’ve got another horehound and another oregano ‘Hopley’s Purple’, as well as a “true oregano” (as the tag calls it), a basil that was starting to bolt (I saw how much the bees were going crazy for the flowers on the already-bolted basil plants, and bought it just for them), gotu kola (a medicinal herb that’s tender here and which I’m going to attempt to overwinter indoors), and four scented geraniums – lemon rose, ginger, lime, and an untagged one that smells sort of like an organic suntan lotion and has beautiful small, crinkly leaves that seem on the silvery end of green and gorgeous small white flowers (it’s the only one that was flowering at the nursery, and the last of its kind so I couldn’t check the tag of another pot of the same cultivar). That beautiful variegated scented geranium I got in spring hadn’t fully sold out, much to my surprise, so I almost got a second one, but decided that was excessive.
The nursery got another delivery of annuals yesterday, so I went back today to get some more plants and a couple of window boxes to put the scented geraniums in. I got four mums to pot up and put on either side of the building’s front door (and the pots to put them in), three ornamental peppers to replace one of the pansy patches that died while I was gone, two large pots of pansies to replace the other two mostly dead pansy/viola patches that also died while I was gone, and a gaura, which I got just because the bees and I like them. Later today I potted up the scented geraniums and the mums. I put the yellow double mum and the single mum with red petals and a yellow center in one pot and the double dark mauve mum and the double deep orange mum in the other pot, and they’re now framing the doorway, making the building look much cheerier. I bought less expensive pots for the mums than I normally would as I live on a busy street and am assuming there’s a possibility they’ll be stolen. (While I was gone, a marigold plant was dug up and taken, and several clusters of ripe parsley seeds were simply broken off the plant and removed by another thief. Such is gardening in the city.) The ornamental peppers were the nursery manager’s idea. She thought it would be neat to have something so different in one of the spots where the pansies had been. She knew the delivery was coming in on Thursday, and advised me to wait for them to come instead of impulse-buying a less fitting filler.
I still need to place my fall-planted bulb orders. I know that I’m getting the orders in so late that I’ve missed out on some of the returning customer discounts and early bird sales and such, but I’ve had such a busy past month I just haven’t had time to even organize it all. Yesterday I sat down and wrote out my annual list of bulbs I think would be good in the different microclimates, and soon I will go through and see what’s still available on Old House Gardens’ website and place an order. After I see what I get from them, I’ll think about what else I’d like to order and from whom. I also especially like Odyssey Bulbs and Brent and Becky’s Bulbs. Ideally I’d like to add some more colchicums to the colchicum bed since they seem to do so well there, but I don’t know if I’m too late to order them (they are not just fall-planted but fall-blooming, so they usually need to be ordered earlier than bulbs that simply are stuck in the ground in autumn to bloom the following year). I didn’t understand the full glory of colchicums till I created this bed last year. Being able to see them up close in a raised bed shows their best side.
A Bee in the City 
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