The Best Way to Buy Delphinium

Note to self:  not the $4 short version available.  Wait and buy the $8 kind.  The short ones are getting et by slugs and they are not really doing anything.  The tall ones are dreamy, to wit:

Doesn't that Otto Luykens cherry laurel look nice in the background?  I'm attempting to grow some delph from seed in my boxed bed... will let you know what success I have.  They're not really perennial for me here, something gets 'em.  Maybe the heat, maybe not enough sun where I have them.

I am plotting about my back yard.  So many wonderful spaces in my neighborhood, so many great shrubs, trees, and plants.  My current plot involves taking about 2/3 of my back yard to make a garden room with curved borders, and then beyond that the "hidden" more functional space, potager-style, with narrow raised beds bordered by a fence with raspberries, blueberries, asparagus, cutting flowers, etc.  The slope of the yard has been confounding me but I think I need to just find a way!

Wandered the nursery this morning-- I needed it.  It's a gorgeous, present-from-God kind of day, after some painful events, and it was healing to look at Hypericum Hidcote and the tempting new hydrangeas.

Garden Problems

Too many thoughts streaking through my 45 year old brain like falling stars, leaving no trace.  When I'm gardening I'm thinking about children and to do lists and relationships and did I call so and so?  So let's see if I can recap for future information what I noticed in the garden this morning:

• It looks prettier this year than usual-- :)
• Some yellow leaves-- new Limelights, Monarda.  Carefree Wonder is a bit pallid.  Do I need fertilizer?  Iron?  Does rain (we've had lots) wash iron out of the soil?
• Noticing many more slugs since I started using cardboard to prevent weeds.  I don't mind a few holey leaves, just noticing.  Will I have to d/c the cardboard at some point?
• Need a good sunny space to put the tiny seedling peonies I have hopefully tucked everywhere and anywhere.
• Wonder if I should move the Heritage rose, which has never accomplished much, to a sunnier location.  I read that it can act as a climber-- on the fence maybe?
• I so want a berry garden.  Should this be done with raised beds?
• A raised bed full of peonies for cutting would be gratifying.
• Still not heard back from landscaper guy about new beds.
• Which new beds should be shrub intensive, so as to diminish work.  Much weeding today.
• Toyed around with planting Drift roses or spirea or perennials around the new planted area with the holly and Limelights.  Worried this would distract from the effect of the Limelights-- I want to see them bloom before deciding.  Plus, they'll get big and the other stuff will get crowded out.
• My Walking on Sunshine rose which I transplanted looks peaky.  Does it need fertilizer?  Not enough sun?  
• I need some kind of hoop or twine and stake arrangement for the mock orange and peonies in back.
• Lots of things need dividing.  Hosta, daylilies, daisies, Siberian iris.
• Need to take note of new perennial plantings so I can track them at least to the point of noticing when they disappear.  Didn't I have a--?  New today:  a pinkish-violet salvia between the two roses in the walkway garden.
• OMG, need an arbor or a stone wall with battlements to keep back the New Dawn.  It is a pity to cut off flourishing disease free canes, but it is a positive hazard.  If we put an arch there that might provide something resembling safe passage on the walkway.

Spring Table Flowers

My sister in law is coming, so it was necessary to spend my Ashcombe's gift certificate on something wonderful for the table.  My husband built it with a hole and a shelf-- you can put the matching center piece in and have an unbroken table, or you can put flowers or herbs in the center.  I wanted something wildflowery I could add to the garden later-- picked species delphinium (it is species, isn't it?), coreopsis Jethro Tull, some fantastic looking penstemon whose tag fell out, and a May Night salvia.  Those are my new Kmart bistro chairs and I spray painted the ancient wicker and added Kmart cushions, so we are moderately spiffed around here.

Help on the Way?

A friend has a neighbor with a lovely, interesting, leafy yard.  Turns out he's a landscaper.  We met at a party and he came yesterday to give us some thoughts about our sloped, weedy, bald-as-an-egg back yard.  He can help me with cutting beds along the back fence to reduce the mowing and raise the leafy, twiggy, sheltered, birdy factor.  Fingers crossed I can afford the help.  I am emboldened by my modest success on the side, but 100 feet of fenceline x 8 or 10 feet depth represents a lot of cardboard.

This shows my bit of garden in May-- Monarda thriving as ever, Jupiter's Beard and catmint well-behaved and reliable.  The pink Knock Out rose is huge.  I cut it back but it may just be too big for that space.  The Heritage is rather daunted there... never really amounted to much, though the blossoms are so wonderful.

Yes, that's a dogwood more or less inadvertently underplanted with Shasta Daisies (Becky).  I know, I know.

I need to think what annuals I want to tuck in... I put in some tall snaps already.  I'm thinking Profusion Zinnias at the edge and blue salvia scattered through the middle, maybe some pinks and whites too.

Ta-Da

Saturday the Best of Men built an enclosure for the AC unit so it doesn't get away.  At the moment said enclosure is drawing too much attention, but I plan to address that with plant material in a manner which I hope will become clear to me in time.  Here is what I did with my little spade and the intermittent help of my strapping spouse and equally strapping youth:

Before 

After:

That's the Golden Raindrops crab that is 6 feet from the house.  You can't tell here, but there are no major limbs (yet) facing the house.  So maybe I'll get away with it.  Stranger things have happened.  At some point I want the bed to be quite full with shrubs, but I don't want to go too crazy with perennials until that time arrives.  Maintenance is an issue.  Some of the mulch has cardboard under it.  My exterminator guy (mice) told me not to put it close to the house.  So it's mostly a couple feet back.  What do people do about weeds right up against the foundation, short of noxious sprays?  I use Roundup sparingly but I don't care for Monsanto, so am open to ideas.

Put to Bed

Thinking up post titles involves some atrocities.

I FINISHED the South bed.  Apart from mulching and edging and possibly some more hollies underplanting the tree I selected which is....

... a Golden Raindrops crab.  (Ducking and hiding.)  I am not fond of tree selection.  In theory it is cool, reasoned, and orderly process.  In practice either I wait until fall, when I seem to be looking at scratch-n-dent trees, or I do it in the frenetic 6 weeks of spring when the nurseries are packed, things are selling out like mad, I have to throw a burlap bag over the head of a nursery employee to get help, and stress has triggered my sympathetic nervous system such that my pulse is actually faster trying to capture and take home a tree.  When I do select a tree (wait, I read about this one... nice small fruits easy for birds to eat... the nursery manager likes this one... right shape...bloom color I wanted... spread is a couple feet too wide, can't I fudge that?... nice size tree... hey, good price!)

I do a lot of reading about gardens, my current hyperfocus.  I know this is not how you're supposed to pick a tree.  But I snag the tree and come home and then read about how the spread is too wide and it's susceptible to fireblight and you know, you really shouldn't plant a tree that close to the house...

Large men helped me install this tree (I didn't have to pay them, I have two on the premises).  12-15 spread, 6 feet from the house.  Yes, I can do the math.  We can call it "Larkspur's Folly."  It has hollies under it in what I fondly hope will be an attractive underplanted effect*.

I was so thrilled with the new bed, the first we've put in since we built the house five years ago, that I lured my husband out on a blanket to come sit next to it.  I will take pictures but without the mental & physical calorie expenditure of this fraught process, it won't look like much to an outsider.

But to me, it's lovely.

*Unless the hollies die because, as observed in the Penn State Extension Service publication on broadleaf evergreens, which I tracked down and read, they fry from a Southern exposure to winter sun.

In Which I Rock

I started out stymied.  It all seemed too hard-- damn hose wouldn't unhook so I could use it to outline beds, the graph paper plan looked bad when I did outline it (with electrical cord because hose, unhooked by attentive spouse with a pliers, kept knotting and twisting unhelpfully).  But I reminded myself how uncritical I am (always a plus, for this sort of project) and how you never learn anything unless you get some experience at it.

Lots of fascinating crawly stuff under those rocks

Little girls (at $5 each) helped me lift the leftover rocks from an earlier wall project out of the way .  Once the cardboard and landscaping fabric was lifted, the soil looked reasonably bare.  I adjusted the bed outline based on what I saw rather than my graph paper model. The beds had to be wider than projected, so I scalped them with the mower, and that helped me see and like the outline better.  I hauled planting mix and bags of compost and put the Limelights in on 5' centers.

Beds outlined, more or less

Now all that remains is figuring out the area by the AC unit.  I don't know if I can put a small tree that close (five or six feet from the house).   I want to put a tree-form serviceberry Autumn Brilliance there, with a canopy which I am perfectly well aware gets to a 15' spread at least.  I'll see what the nursery says.  There may not be a suitable tree.
May have to develop an Alternate Plan.

Anyway, I want to underplant there with the hollies.  I moved my Walking on Sunshine rose to the fence by the gate.  This will be a nice, sunny, amended bed and who knows, some other things might get tucked in, though I want to keep it pleasingly simple.  We'll see how I do with that.

Limelights planted

What remains?

-- get a tree or a suitable substitute
-- plant hollies on 3' centers, buy another if needed
-- cover remaining turf areas with cardboard
-- order mulch and mulch all
-- rejoice!  Be excited!  Can't wait to get a line of fat, nodding Limelight blooms this summer!  Whoopie!

Hoogendorn Hollies-- aren't they pretty?