Want to see pictures of my mossy block garden on a foggy morning?
mama goose_gw zn6OH
last year
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WALATing in the garden this morning - looong, picture heavy post!
Comments (17)Thanks for the nice comments! The garden is my main hobby - and my passion :-) One of the reasons we bought this property was the existing ash, white pines, and young red oak that made a perfect setting for a garden. The rest was pretty much a blank slate, so it's come a long way in the past 14 years - and there's still more that needs doing... - thank goodness! (I'd be terribly bored if there were no changes required!) pm2- the clematis on the end of the garage is supposed to be Nike (I have a lot of clematises that appear to be not what the label said it was supposed to be!) The color is a bit odd this year - it's usually has a redder undertone - this is what it looked like last year: Perhaps the cooler temperatures this year affected the color....? As for the size and bushiness - I never bother cutting my group 3 clematies back hard. I just trim off any obviously winter-killed bits and trim them as necessary to neaten them up a bit. That seems to work for me to get vigorous bloom from them top to bottom! They get a small dose of clematis fertilizer in late May or early June. I suspect it'll be another two years at least before the clematises on the fence side of the swag will make it up to the chains. I had to replace a few that didn't make it through their first year in the ground (planted in late summer 2010). Thanks for the 'Golden Shadows' suggestion. That looks like a possibility. I actually have a Wolf Eyes dogwood a few feet to the left where it gets a bit more light and moisture through a break in the tree canopy: I'll have to think about whether the two different variegations would go together or not. Maybe the golden one could be shifted far enough to the right to give some visual separation while still screening the shed. thyme - my pruning technique for the heptacodium (and most things in the garden) is 'if a branch is in my way when I walk past, lop it off!' :-) Actually the heptacodium tree is an odd shape when viewed from the side. It is planted close to the old cedar clump so the heptacodium had no room to develop branches on the side closest to the cedar. If you look at it in the picture of the front garden from the road you can see that it sort of looks like half a tree! But if you look at it beside the bench in the picture through the iron abour, it looks perfectly normal! That is the way we most often see it so we don't particularly care about the odd look of it from the side.... I doubt that the heptacodium would snap unless perhaps it was in a very exposed place, so if yours has some shelter from wind, I wouldn't hesitate to prune it up a bit. The clematis swag started as a rose swag in an effort to try to control the New Dawn roses that used to grow on the south gate arbour. I loved the rose swags we saw in England and wanted to try one. It was very pretty; but we got tired of those wicked thorns! The Clematis montana on the arbour had started to climb on the swag so that gave us the idea of using clematis as a 'kinder and gentler' alternative to roses for the swag. So far it seems to be working out reasonably well. Copper pipes are handy to work with! Yes, the fence and gate is pipes threaded through a wooden frame. The gate just after we completed it in the garage: If I was doing it again, I'd have painted the wood the Bonsai green of the dark trim on the shed instead of the sage green we used. It is too much of a PITA to repaint it now! I don't treat the pipes at all - they rapidly turn brown so blend in to the plants and disappear. It'll be many years before the copper turns to verdigris green. It would be easy to make a trellis with copper pipes. The big clematis at the back of the garage is on a tripod I made with copper pipes threaded through wooden stretcher bars. The link below will take you to a thread in the clematis forum where I describe how it was built.... The iron arbour and tuteurs are also things I designed and had a local iron craftsman make for me: I like making things - but welding iron is beyond me! :-) Mario said 'if you can draw it, I can build it' - he was fun to work with but is retired now. Thanks mxk3 - green and serene is my major goal - for the backyard in particular. anitamo - the panel idea is a good one - I've given some thought to the possibility of doing something that would create a trompe-l'oeil arbour/gate implying the garden continues into the distance... I think it would take perhaps more work than I want to do at this point so I'll probably go with a tree/shrub if I can. But I still have a yen to do something trompe-l'oeil somewhere....! This post was edited by woodyoak on Sun, Jul 7, 13 at 12:06...See MoreMy garden this morning
Comments (81)Michelle/Hostacats, as I expected you are much younger than my DH and myself. We could be your parents. :) Not a bad thought actually. My parents moved from a rural county in north Alabama when I was small, during WWII. Of course, my many aunts and uncles and grandparents during those years were scattered across the south and while my mom worked at a military base, we traveled with my railroad widow granny to visit the family during the summers. I grew up with one part of my life suburban, the other part rural. My DH says I had a foot in three centuries, because that county did not get electricity nor indoor plumbing until I was almost a teenager. Heck, they were very proud to have it all, and I loved being with my cousins. I helped with the canning, hoeing cotton, churning butter, picking cotton, shelling peas, following my beloved grandpa in the furrows behind his plow, barefoot and talking mile a minute to him. He grew his own tobacco and hung the whole plants upside down inside his barn. Don't know what kind of tobacco it was, but he let me roll his cigarettes for him when I was about 4 or 5 years old. He was a great joker and my daddy looked like him, tall, lean, dark skinned and black haired, with some Native American background. You might say that part of my life could as easily be called late 19th century, a much simpler time. Thanks, Irawon. I can grow the star jasmine as evergreen here, and that is along 100 foot of chainlink fencing. The single pot of Maid of Orleans jasmine (Joan of Arc) all by itself can perfume the air, but it is tender and I keep it in a pot to bring indoors during the cold season. I like to name places of the heart. That's why I've always named the places I live. My first home that I bought myself was MoccasinLanding. When I sold it, I moved into a small house owned by a friend, lived there for a year on the river and called it Riverhouse. When my new fiance (old flame from college) and I bought the river house destroyed by Katrina one month after we moved in, I'd named it Fahanlunaghta (the place his mother was born in Ireland). It means, I am told, "fresh milk."...See MoreFrom the driveway and front garden this morning
Comments (5)peren.all - yeah, the mosquitoes are out in force and hungry here too! Yesterday I did a quick foray down near the 'wet corner' to whack off fading goatsbead flowers/developing seeds. I didn't put on my bug shirt - and was immediately under attack! I did a very rough job, and was out of there within a minute! There is still one more goatsbead to deadhead - DH will do it as the mosquitoes are less fond of his blood :-) I'm also useless in the heat so, while there is deadheading etc. needed in the front garden, it's going to have to wait until mid-week when it's supposed to be cooler again. ruth and rouge - the Niobe and regal lily combination is a 'happy accident'. The lilies were planted maybe 8-10 years ago. The cursed lily beetles do less damage to the regal lilies than to other lilies, in my experience (the regal lily foliage is very narrow and somewhat coarse-textured; I think the beetles may consider it a poorer food source for the larvae perhaps.) But the lilies gradually faded away (too dry/too heavy soil maybe....?). The Niobe (and Henryi) clematises that grows on the arbour wilted badly early last summer so I wasn't expecting much from them this year. I thought dryness might be an issue, so asked DH to water the base of the arbour whenever he was watering his veggie pots nearby. Bingo! Great looking Niobe this year, and the lily on the right ride of the arbour returned from the dead! :-) Thyme - I thought you'd like to see the heptacodium :-) I just checked my records - I planted it in 2002. I couldn't find a tree-form one so bought a small shrub one that only had 3 stems. I cut off the two smallest stems and let the other one become the tree trunk. It has certainly now surpassed the size I expected it to get - but we love it! (and so do the bees, butterflies and hummingbirds when it blooms!) The past two nasty winters didn't bother it a bit, so it's obviously very hardy. It doesn't have much in the way of fall color, and it gets too cold too early here to have the pink show from the calyxes make a show after the flowers finish in areas further south. But it's definitely worth growing! I can't imagine how much space it would be taking up though if I had left it as a shrub! Tree-form is certainly the way to go unless you have a huge space for it.......See MoreMonday morning pictures
Comments (19)Thanks for the encouragement! I had a busy morning and dozed away the rest of the day yesterday, so it was fun to read all your comments this morning. Ingrid, the pink rose is Princess Charlene de Monaco. Not an OGR, but lovely and fragrant. Anyway, progress will go from my usual crawl to a near standstill, now that it has gotten so warm. I am kicking myself for not getting more done while it was cooler. Here is more of the bed that gets the morning sun and afternoon shade. That's the DA Mary Rose in the center. I have a lot of flowering tobacco in here, most of it lime green. There is some of the Mutabillis here as well, but I cut it down. It reaches 8 feet high by June, but always reseeds, so I'll be seeing it again. The red in the picture is more flowering tobacco. I purchased seed one year, and somehow ended up with red. Every year it reseeds, because I'm just too slow about removing things once it gets hot. Lots of cardboard here. I was happy to read that you have a cardboard garden, as well Carol. It looks bad, but it's the cheap and easy way to go! I even have Hosta and a few Astible in the shade here. I planted them 5 years ago, before I knew better. They get extra water from nextdoor under the fence. That's the only reason they've survived.I know a good tidying up would help in here. Perhaps one evening when I'm feeling up to it. The very last of the Nicotiana mutabilis. It is lovely in full bloom, with fragrant dark pink, soft pink, and white little trumpets, all blooming at once. I'm hitting submit. I don't dare lose this. I must be getting braver, or losing my mind because I'm just about to show a very wide shot. Where are all the others? Robin?? I'm airing my dirty laundry here in hopes that others will see that ALL gardens have a place on this forum. Virginia, yours is too lovely to count. It's lush and well kept! I like the watermelon turk watchamacallit too. View from the patio, looking towards the morning sun/cardboard bed. Veggie box between patio and bed. View from the patio looking to the slope. Arch unsecured, more cardboard, more plans, more work:) On the right side of the arch is newly planted Lady Ashe climbing rose and Rooguchi clematis. They are being shaded from the afternoon sun. Ingrid and Sheila, I do have some Tea roses. I have Duchess de Brabant, and Flamingo Garden Tea. I feel as though I have more... brain foggy today. I kind of thought Paul Barden's October Moon and Siren Keep might have some Tea in them, but it looks like SK does not. I don't recall October Moon. I wish those Teas didn't get so ginormous here in So CA! I know I am in prime Tea growing land. I live on a tiny lot, and want to grow a variety of roses with annuals and perennials in between them. I like bouquet material!! I wish there were some that truly stayed 3x3 in So CA. Marlorena, yes I love the Orlaya. I bought a single plant last year, knowing I could scatter the seed around. I had not counted on how much better it would do this year, with its earlier start and our extra rain. It is 3x as large as the original was last year. They've thrown things off quite a bit in that bed. Well, now I know not to place them in front next year. Virginia, you're exactly correct. I couldn't stand the thought of all that Privet hedge instead of roses. The craziness was thinking I could remove any of it myself. The spot where I hacked at it was to give the Winchester Cathedral Rose in front of it some more light and air. It was doing so poorly. The roots of that mighty hedge sucked every drop of water and nutrients it could get for at least 10 feet in every direction. WC has bloomed more in the last 4 months than in the 6 years previously. I am so happy with the new space, with one drawback. My patio is now hotter. The hedge no longer shades it. This will be resolved as the roses grow. Anna-Lysaa, that slope is my biggest challenge! I emphasize with you. I did put one enormous climbing rose at the top. I tied him to the fence and I let him trail down the hill. He covers a lot of ground already, for only being in the ground about 8(ish) months. I only had space for one giant, and chose Paul Barden's, Mel's Heritage. I love it! I need to take a break. I'll have to look for mistakes later. "Herding cats", is no longer just a funny saying around here:) Lisa...See Moremama goose_gw zn6OH
last yearlast modified: last yearmama goose_gw zn6OH
last year- mama goose_gw zn6OH thanked chamaegardener (Z5) Northeast Illinois
mama goose_gw zn6OH
last year
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