I don't know about the others but I plant perennials as recommended and I let the annuals reseed and then pull out some of the volunteers. But I leave it real thick because I love that full look! I live in the desert so there are no problems with humidity and placing things close. Actually planting them close helps them to hold down the moisture so things do better for me this way.
You Show Me Your Gardens - Part III
It has been very warm here the past few weeks, in the mid to upper 80's (that is downright hot for Western WA :0) I garden in the morning until about 11 a.m. and then get back at it around 8 p.m. when it cools down. Took the camera out this evening for a few photos. This is some of the 30 yards of dirt I had delivered last week. Working on extending the flower bed to the end of the house.
Here is one of my yellow daylilies with wild black cap blackberries.
Daylilies and daisies. :0)
I just love this lily, she smells so yummy!
Look it's spiderman on my porch!
Great photos - what is the name of the fragrant daylily? It's a beauty. As is the Astilbe.
I wish that I knew. When we build our house two years ago I moved all of my plants from the old house. I hired the neighbor kid to help me dig them up and pot them and unfortunately most of them lost their ID somewhere between old and new.
Here is the really cool way they edged EVERYTHING in their yard. The small rocks are inset in a gravel and they can adjust the shape of the edge wherever they run into an obstacle for easy mowing. My husband and I are going to do all the edges in our yard this way as we go on. It was really neat and clean and BEAUTIFUL.
Oooh, I like that edging idea. My turf edge isn't holding up as well as I had hoped and there is no margin for plants draping over without killing the grass and the edge. I love Sherrygirl's concrete curb, but I can't commit to that!
This would also allow the flexibily of just turning the pea gravel into the soil to extend the bed just a tad here and there ;)
Suzy
yes! Good Idea Suzy. I was only able to peer in from the street at this garden, but the edges blew me away. I tried it for the first time in a new area we are working on, and it turned out pretty good. We had some limestone screening and some small field stones inset into it, wetted it down (because limestone screenings get hard and are cheap) and it is all set.
Gee, that's a pretty house...it took me a while to figure out that was the back and not the front. Mr. Clean would love that edge for mowing his lawn, but I wouldn't want him to have too easy a job of it -- the ultimate plan is for him to have NO lawn -- muhwa hah ha!
Suzy
I second that comment on no weed whackers. Those things are so annoying!
what fun gardens
another garden pic...
Steph, those are great photos! I take it they don't have Japanese Beetles in San Diego?
Here's a dahlia of mine. The roses look about the same.
Suzy
Illoquin
Ewwwwwwwwwh! Gross!!! LOL But that's nasty.
steph_gem
Beautiful gardens!
Sherry
I love it when the Stargazer Lilies bloom with the cone flowers.
oh my gosh i am in total shock over that picture. If I had those I would cry. My good friend kassia from the rose forum was telling me how horrible they were, but I never imangined. how devistating. evil bugs
Steph_gem, I'm with you - horrifying!! I am so grateful we don't have those here.
But, Toofew, your photo makes up for them - how glorious!!!
Suzy, Yikes, I see the Japanese Beetles once in a while, but never as many as yours! I try not to spray my gardens with anything. I have Praying Mantis in my gardens every year and they leave cocoons. I would just hate to lose that. But I WOULD spray if I had the Japanese Beetles as badly as you. Do you get them like that every year?
Steph, great pictures. I'm not a big fan of the gazing balls, but yours is making me think again. LOL
These 2 lilies are tall, I have forgotten their names right now. I think they are both orientals cause all my asiatics are done blooming.
Breathtaking lilies!!
Steph, I forgot to comment on your beautiful gardens - they're wonderful!
Too few -- nice photo!!!
No, I have never seen the JBs this bad before, EVER! I had some dahlias last year and they got maybe one or two JBs on them. They were sooo pretty and bloomed all summer to frost, so I bought a whole bunch more....The original dahlia still has virtually no JBs, but all the new ones look like the photo I posted.
There are many schools of thought on why this year is so bad, but somebody gave me a link that might prove useful. It talks about water....I just assumed I had so many because of the drought here...the birds couln't peck the grubs out because of the concete-like soil...but maybe I did this to myself. I had a zillion seedlings and it has been easier to turn on the sprinkler instead of watering by hand. No one else around me is watering, so my oasis is more attractive to them, or more are changing from grub to beetle because of the water? Something like that. They don't touch a number of the flowers, which I find interesting -- Rudbeckias, Petunias and Melampodium are unattractive to them. The love Dahlias, Roses, Raggend Reggie marigold (but no other) and another plant I swear I cannot even tell what it is, it's so eaten up.
The rose foliage looks, not like swiss cheese, but like TULLE! I swear to you, every leaf is like a fine tulle, only brown.
Thought you all would like to see how the other half lives.
Suzy
Suzy, thanks for all the great information ... makes me kind of glad I'm not watering too much. :o)
Here's my buddy ... I didn't take the picture.
Wow, I try to be as organic as possible, but that photo of Japanese Beetles is horrible! I think I'd freak out and get out the bug spray bigtime! No wonder you folks back East talk about them all the time. Isn't it so true that one picture is worth a thousand words?!?
We don't have a typical cottage garden, having gotten rid of all the lawn area. It doesn't rain in CA for 6 months straight, so we are accustomed to drought conditions and using plants that don't need huge amounts of water. Unfortunately many "classic" cottage plants are water hogs out here, so we use others that most regions would consider "exotics". Out here they grow great in the ground with minimal care.
In coastal Northern CA it's relatively frost-free: 3-7 days per year, although we broke that in February with a two-week frosty spell that killed quite a few plants and even young trees around here. Anyway, using evergreen plants is a real necessity because the garden must look good all year round.
Here's a bunch of photos taken a week ago:
Front yard
Here's the front from the other side. As you can see, our lot slopes sharply - not only front to back, but side to side! The pots in the driveway hold my tomato plants: we get so much shade on the sides and back of our urban lot, I can't grow them anywhere else.
Here's a closeup of some of the flowers in the second photo. The blue are agapanthus, the pink/cream are 'Peaches and Cream' shrub lantana. The golden flowers turning slowly brown are santolina and helichrysum, both silvery plants whose foliage adds a great note to the evergreen beds.
Skipping over the side yards for now, here's the backyard as viewed from my LH-side neighbor. We're particularly proud of this section because there was NOTHING here except the shed before we started landscaping. My DH installed the hardscape and did most of the design himself, as well. I did the planting, which is amazingly xeric, living mostly on runoff from other garden beds 60 feet away. I water it maybe once a month in the summer (admittedly our summers aren't that hot; 85 degrees is a heat wave here).
With a small house on a large urban lot, there's an 80' long sloping back yard. It was already divided in two halves (common around here) with the shed sitting on an old concrete patio, terraced with a brick retaining wall to separate the two halves.
If you walk down the path and around the shed in the previous photo, there's a garden bed in back of that shed. It surrounds a "trash tree" - a silver maple that rustles nicely in the summer breezes off the Pacific (aka: fog!). We put our recliners here and in the afternoon we have shade and blue sky above, with complete privacy on all sides. Pretty peaceful, like a mini-resort just outside the door!
If you sit in the recliners, you're facing the back of the property which is across from a schoolyard. I'm trying to grow some stuff to get above the fence, which will shield the schoolyard fence a bit more attractively than the green privacy fence the county installed! It's slow going, but I keep watering and working on the plant selection.
This bed runs across most of the width of the property, and surrounds a walnut tree that is very slowly dying from a fungal disease. For now, it still provides decent summer shade and helps screen some of the schoolyard, without obstructing the 180-degree view of the hillside. This view can also be seen from the back windows of the house, so it's important that the trees not grow too tall here. I have the silver maple topped every 3-4 years, otherwise all we'd see would be one big wide tree instead of a glorious east-facing hillside view!
Here's another view of the same walnut tree bed in the photo just previous, but looking straight at the fence rather than at a slight angle. It better shows the variety of plants I put in this bed, trusting that the allelopathy wouldn't kill them.
The 'Tropicanna' cannas add the punch of color that is just wonderful. They die back in the winter, though; I always cut them back to the ground in late January. In the morning when the sun backlights them, the leaves almost blaze with color!
Finishing off with a walk back up towards the front of the house again: remember the fourth photo that started off the backyard tour? Stand in that spot, but turn around to face upwards instead of downwards, and this is what you see as you start back uphill (yeah, gardening in this yard is actual EXERCISE, lol).
Here's what I mean about evergreen all year long - both our neighbors and us use this path for access. It starts with two variegated 'Gold Dust' aucubas separated by a huge Hellebore foetidus. An extremely vigorous unknown bearded iris fills in every spot it can with sword-like leaves, and blooms at least twice a year.
By the chimney, there is a dwarf rhodie (extremely fragrant flowers in spring, just gorgeous), an evergreen fern. What you can't see are the hydrangeas, azaleas (soon to be replaced by two Encore azaleas) and an unusual plectranthus groundcover I've never seen anywhere else. There used to be a gorgeous splash of dark red color from an 8' Japanese maple in this bed. But remember when I said we had a 2-week frost spell this year? It killed the poor thing as it was just starting to leaf out. It's going to cost me big $$$ to replace it.
Here's that plectranthus groundcover, mixed with one of those rare well-behaved Oxalis varieties, an O. siliquosa "Copper Sunset", as well as the sword-like leaves of yet more of that unknown bearded iris.
jkom...wow wow wow is all i can say.....it is gorgeous....; you and hubbie are very talented.....
jkom, I am positively speechless - glorious gardens!!!! Great job by both you and your DH!
Sticks told me I should post some of my garden pictures here, so....!
These are 75 sun coleus I purchased at our local Mennonite plant auction this spring, May 21, 5 varieties 15 of each. I probably gave 20 away and have planted all but 5. Paid .55 each but had to take the whole lot.
Joy
edited for a correction! duh
This message was edited Jul 27, 2007 4:04 PM
