PNW Garden Photos of 09

very nice shot - those are layered lenticular clouds. I have seen these over the Sierra Nevada range before. They are gorgeous when they're coloured from sunrise/sunset, and you can see more detail. What a great visual to start your day with!

BeaHive--Your Princes Irene tulip is just gorgeous. I love them. Mine are second year and not as choice. I thought they were one of the come-back-as-good-as-new types. We will see next year. I am afraid to put them in the ground for fear the deer will get them.

Thanks beebonnet.. My Irenes are new this year. I do hope they continue to return for many years. I planted them in remberence of my last Aunt. Took this picture just a few minutes ago.

Hope your weather is great. Lovely here in Silverton (74 deg)

This message was edited Apr 20, 2009 6:09 AM

Fancy frills is another pretty one if you like pink and all things girly!

Looking out my front window this afternoon! Yeah sun!

Oh--Fancy Frills is wonderful. Must remember that one for next year. Your front walk is so pretty. Silverton is the very best place to live and garden. Corvallis was great, too.
Yes, we are having a lovely day. Hot for us. Wind came up a bit, though, but that's the coast.
Thanks for sharing....

Too bad about that Star of Bethlehem not being hardy here, Bea. Oh, well! Nice pic of your front gardens.

Nice shots of the clouds, Raregem. I particularly like the view taken from your living room window.

Karen

Beautiful pictures ladies.

BeaHive, what a lovely front walk! What do you do with it after the spring bulbs are done, and how do you keep track of where everything is? Love a lot of the tulips but hate the planting part, so now I stick to the ones that I know will come back. The Impression tulips are my favorites. Mine are only now starting to show a tiny bit of color on some of the buds! Spring is really late here this year, but that is good. The bees will be out by the time the fruit trees start blooming.

PNW. I leave the bulbs in ground and have other things such as Dutch Iris and Bearded iris that take the place of the tulips and daffodils. Quite by accident , last year the CA poppies took hold and filled in most of the front yard following all the bulbs. It was great cover for die back on the bulbs. I also have roses, daises, rudbeckia, delphinums, hardy geraniums ,lilies,lupines , clematis,daylilies,astilbe, hosta's to name a few that grow thru the summer. In a month of so I will plant many sunflowers all over to fill in any gaps. There is so much planted on this 8000 sq ft lot.. it amazes me sometimes. I am sure I forgot many things...but as they grow..photo's will be taken. I have seen a few bee's but they are best when summer blooms come. I have tons of them every summer. Love the little guys!

Beahive, I just adore your yard! Picture after picture the color is just stunning! I am still trying to find places in my yard that the varmints won't eat up bulbs, but have had much more failure than success (not to mention lots of full, fat burrowing varmints!!!). I will assure both you and Beebonet that Princess Irene is one that comes back year after year IF you put it in the right spot. Mine is in a hot spot in full sun all year (and kind of planted between cedar roots that have protected it from varmints) and this is it's 6th? year. We are definitely behind you so the color is just starting to show, and it certainly hasn't increased...but still blooms for me every year. I also have lots of success with the impression tulips when planted in the right spot. It is so hard to dig around here, that if a bulb doesn't come back every year, it's not worth the effort!

Raejem. That cluster of bulbs is ready to go. They look like they will be pretty. Post when in bloom. I do not have trouble with varmints so far and maybe I never will. The soil is so damp due to a high water table and and natural springs everywhere. Three feet down is grey mucky clay soil. Had to raise the beds and made a burm out front to accomodate plants. Have lost some due to drainage issues.
Slugs are my worst enemy in this yard. Darn things. I am hoping lots of frogs will come by and eat them. Found this tiny frog hiding in a small cave in the rocks in my pond. He/She was only about an inch or two at best!

Wonderful pictures again. Love the clouds and the frog. Bea you've convinced me I need to put in more bulbs!

THanks all.

Karen, thanks so much for posting pictures of the knotweed. You did a great job of capturing the magnanimous size of a "weed".

Bea.... I know that I've said this before, but your garden is absolutely beautiful. Your walkway would be one of the prettiest places to camp!!!

beautiful skies this morning for you RJ and PNWMG! So interesting and fun to study. It reminds me of times that I've spent up in lookouts trying to identify cloud/weather patterns.

thanks for the condolences RJ. I'm sure that someone had good intentions when they planted them in the 1940's and just wanted something that would fill in and look pretty quickly. They probably had no idea that both were invasive pests. that's what I like to believe anyhow. I have had some luck with gophers and moles not eating some bulbs if I cut the bottom off of a decent sized nursery pots and the stick it in the ground, around a bulb that I have just planted. That also creates a use for a useless black nursery pots. The down side is that it need to be a pot that's longer than a standard one gallon size pot and I don't always have a lot of those sizes around. Although, I have started "stacking" two of them together and planting them that way to create a deeper barrier. So far, it seems to be working all right, but I haven't been doing that for very long.

This message was edited Apr 19, 2009 11:38 PM

Do you have any chicken wire laying around? Wire cages should work if the holes are small enough.

a few more pictures from last weekend

magnolia

polemonium

red..beautiful polemonium. I have the white/pink one but the blue is fantastic.

Redchick and Sally, I had never really thought about trying to protect the bulbs...I had just given up on planting them in the areas that I know the critters burrow through. Until this year, my dahliah bed had been left alone, but when I was weeding it this spring, there were little tunnels everywhere! I am really concerned about having lost most of the plants in that bed at this point. I had them totally decimate another dahliah bed, so gave up and planted daylilies there instead which they have left alone. Will have to try the protection thing and redo this dahliah bed if the damage is as bad as I am afraid it will be.

Redchick..love the magnolia! Don't see too many with that form and color. Fantastic.

They sky was beautiful again this morning. You would think that after being there for over 10 years, I wouldn't rush for the camera every time the mountain looked so pretty. This morning they had more of the color that Katye was talking about.

Julie - don't give up on bulbs. You can make little cages for them out of hardware cloth.
I use 1/2" mesh; it takes many many years for it to break down in my soil.
The cages protect the bulbs & are an easy way to move them all at once. Or, you can buy them for about $20-25 apiece, but they're a one-size fits all deal.

Katye-is that Mt. St. Helens?

I don't know - let's ask Julie!

I think Julie said at her first post of the picture that it was Mt. Ranier.

So, if it's Mt. Ranier, Julie must be looking out across the Colombia River? Those cloud formations are awesome!

Here's a map. South Prairie is where the red balloon labelled A is. You can see Rainier national park (the green square) to the southeast of South Prairie.

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=south+prairie,+washington&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=34.259599,56.25&ie=UTF8&ll=47.143963,-122.097931&spn=0.919129,1.757813&z=9

The Columbia is below that - it generally separate the states of Washington and Oregon. Highway 84 runs east/west along the Columbia River.

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=south+prairie,+washington&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=34.259599,56.25&ie=UTF8&ll=46.26724,-122.047119&spn=1.868329,3.515625&z=8

There's a cool map of the route of the Columbia River in this Wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_River

Thanks Kathy! Yes, it is Mount Rainier, and the park enterance is about 30 or 40 miles southeast of us, depending on which one you go to. These cloud formations don't happen often, and I am surprised to see them two days in a row. As I said, we have a ton of pictures of "our mountain" because it is so often breathtaking, no matter how often you see it. :)

I agree with you completely RJ. It is breath taking and I would never tire of the view of it! Feel free to share all of those pics that you have of it!!


Ok, I think that i's getting time to continue the thread. 300 posts seems to be about a decent time for the average computer speed???

Sooooo.....
New thread!!!
New thread!!!......... http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/t/977795/



This message was edited Apr 20, 2009 2:05 PM