The garden is full of flowers and fruit right now. Here are some red, white, and blue photos:
And here are some other photos from around the garden and greenhouse.
I have no idea when feverfew landed in my garden. It seems like it has been there a long time. It seeds itself around in pots near the greenhouse and in the memory garden, as well. The fragrant, charming, and cheery plant is welcome wherever it grows.
Often, I’ll prick out volunteer seedlings growing among tree seedling pots and move them to their own pots for setting out in the garden as fillers when the time comes. They are flexible and easy–they can be transplanted any time. Their bright green, chrysanthemum-y foliage is beautiful on its own, but come late June or early July, hundreds of white daisies smother the leaves. They attract lots of interesting pollinators.
This year, I notice I have a semi-double seedling and a single form blooming in the memory garden.
My 2020 plans for these carefree plants are to pot more seedlings on and keep them handy for filling in during the autumn, since they aren’t shy about blooming even late in the year if given half a chance.
I’m not positive of the identity of this plant–it doesn’t look like most of the photos of Salvia hians, but there are a few photos I’ve seen that match it. Salvia pratensis was also suggested by a plant identification app. This plant was one of several that Fuchsia Society member Sally Abella passed to me from her garden. It has spread somewhat agressively around my garden, but because it is easy to weed out and has a lot of positive merits, I’ve never resented it enough to eradicate it entirely.
The leaves of these plants are large and hairy, but not fully felted like some of the Salvia clan. They form a loose rosette and then impressive, multi-branched spikes of blue-purple flowers shoot up in late June to crown the plants for a month or more.
My 2020 plans for this plant are to weed it out where it might be unwanted and nurture it everywhere else.
My brother brought me this plant for the memory garden in 2018. We were unclear about its identity, but I’ve since done some research and found out it is alfalfa! How sadly citified must I be that I didn’t recognize such a well-known crop plant? The plant is surprisingly ornamental. It gets big and bushy–three feet tall and wide and starts blooming in June with soft lavender-blue clover-like flower heads. It is planted in a tough spot under in poor soil under a Douglas fir tree and shrugs off that adversity.
In 2020, I’m just enjoying the simplicity of this plant and trying to see if pollinators like it as much as they seem to like other leguminous garden plants, like the lupines and clovers nearby.
This is a somewhat common houseplant and also a poplular groundcover in warmer areas of the world. My plants aren’t as purple as I’ve seen in photos due to a lack of bright sun, but they do grow vigorously, providing trailing stems and some lovely pink flowers now and again. Leon brought my original cutting back from his cousin Brenda’s house about six years ago. It was never on my wish list, but now I have about eight of them, as they are so easy to propagate and it feels so wasteful to throw trimmings away!
In 2020, I’m using these as foliage plants around the patio–I cut them back hard in early spring and potted them into better, fertile soil in larger pots. They are leafing out abundantly now and adding some lush purply-green to our back yard oasis.
Started from seed in 2017 for the memory garden, I don’t recall for sure from where the seeds came or the identity of the cultivar. Four of the plants remain in that garden and have cheery tubular flowers with contrasting throats and feature jellybean colors of purple and pink. They get about 15″ tall and are nicely uniform, starting to bloom here in late June, which times out perfectly after the columbines and lupines.
My 2020 plans for these plants are to cut them back after flowering, keep the weeds at bay, feed them, and hope they don’t die out like so many of the short-lived penstemon hybrids.
The garden is overwhelming right now in its beauty and bursting at the seams with life.
I harvested Goumi berries today, which is rewarding, if a bit tedious. I usually just use these for smoothies. They have a tart-sweet flavor and a big pit in the middle of each berry, and each comes with a stem that needs to be removed. The berries ripen at different rates so I had to pick just the ripe ones. Here they are, all cleaned up and ready to freeze.
On the patio, a hawthorn tree that we’ve had in a pot for close to twenty years is blooming–as best we can remember, for the first time.
I took cuttings today of native and non-native plants, red flowered currants, thimbleberries, salmonberries, red osier dogwwood, dwarf lilac, goumi berry, and aronia. I’m hoping I hit the timing right on these–it would be great if a bunch of them rooted.
With my macro lens, I captured a few fun photos in the greenhouse.
Some Hippeastrums are still blooming in the greenhouse:
The wonderful Voodoo lily fooled me yet again yesterday! I was walking along the sidewalk looking at the garden in the opposite direction and immediatly caught the whiff of decaying flesh. I though, “Oh, God–what died?” and started looking, but when I turned around, there were the amazing floral spathes of Dracunculus, bloody maroon and stinking!
My original bulb came from Jeff Tangen and they have spread out over time and I’ve moved offsets around the garden, but the best ones continue to be in the Douglas fir bed. Somehow, they manage to thrive in that dry shade and “reward” me with corpse flowers every year.
This plant has interest for at least half the year. The leaves are unusual, the flowers magnificent, if short-lived, and the berries that follow add to the show for several more months.
These plants need no care, so I don’t have many plans for them in 2020 other than to remind myself of their existence so I’m not looking for corspes when these flowers are the stink makers.
Grown from purchased seed about fifteen years ago, this tree took a while to develop but now is vigorous with impressive compound leaves. Like the nearby Idesia trees, I cut this back hard early each spring so that it stays shrub-sized with large, tropical-looking leaves. This is a treatment introduced to me from Christopher Lloyd in several of his books. He used this treatment with Catalpa trees and Paulownia trees, especially in his tropical beds. For me, it has been a way to incorporate precious tree seedlings into a yard that doesn’t have room for any more full-sized trees. Even with a deep pruning, the plant tops out at about twelve feet each year.
My 2020 plans, as noted with Idesia, are to keep on top of this tree’s vigorous growth while changing the area around it. I plan to redo the garden bed with natives and head back some of the marauding raspberries.
I have two of these trees along the driveway that came from seeds borrowed from the Arboretum. The tree the seeds came from passed away not long after, so I’m glad I got these when I did.
My trees do not flower or seed, since I prune them hard back early each spring. I grow them for their amazing foliage. It has a tropical feel to it, with deep coloring, contrasting veining, and red petioles. And the size is just big enough to impress.
My 2020 plans for this plant and for the bed they live in will be to keep them cut back aso they can serve as a backdrop for a cleaned-up (too many raspberries and weeds) and replanted driveway bed with some native perennials.