Garden Confessional

Azalea 'Rosebud'

 Forgive me, for I have sinned.  I bought a plant I did not plan to buy, nor did I have a place in mind for which I was looking for just that particular plant.

I trialed it in this spot for about a week by digging the hole and placing the shrub still in its pot in the hole.  I left it there just to see what I thought about it in the landscape.

The tag

You can see how it would stand out even just in bud when I walked through the shrub section of a nursery in Green Lake.

I'm always looking for flowering shrubs for my shrub border.  Azaleas are tough here, so I typically stay away from them, but I am hearing of some good gardeners having some successes with particular cultivars so I've been trying to up my game.  I have a couple azalea mollis and a PJM, and some unnamed species.  'Rosebud' joins this group.  I am hoping it is not deciduous like mollis and evergreen like the others, but I honestly don't know at this point.  I realized with my extended winter this years, I just don't want to see through my primarily deciduous shrub and tree border.  The neighbor adjacent to me there has a ridiculously hoarder/trashy/junky run-down property, the blight of our particularly nice neighborhood.

So what plants do you need to make confessions about this spring? 

In Bloom

My mother visited me yesterday.  She commented. You need that garden walk today!  Everything is in bloom!"

I have to say, I don't think my apple, crabapple, and lilacs have ever been in bloom at exactly the same time.

Cinnamon asks, "What should we plant n that bare spot?"

Spring at The Paine

While at The Paine, it always amazes me when I leave and realize it is on a city block in the middle of downtown Oshkosh and that it shares that block with other houses.

With all the white, blue,yellow, pink and purples; this splash of red really stands out.

I think this is Washington Hawthorne.  Often a vector of bacterial and fungal diseases, pricey, short-lived, and hard to find in retail; minimally it IS hardy for me.  I'm not sure why I don;t grow it.

Euphorbia Polychroma and Virginia bluebells

Add some ostrich fern and variegated Solomon seals to the mix

Sometime just underplanting can magically make something ordinary seem mystical.

Bergenia and Virginia bluebells

Classic

This, too. Makes me want to buy two half sphere plastic bowls and some concrete...

Because of the intimate size of The Paine's garden, it makes me feel like it is a garden I could aspire to have on my small lot.  When I look at my shrub and tree border on my alley or my hosta underplanting my white pines and my hedges I sometimes feel I have likewise created something from nothing.  I think I enjoy The Paine more because of its size, not lack of it.

More Pictures from The Paine Art Museum and Garden

Redbud in full bloom, always a treat, as we are on the edge of their zone here in central Wisconsin.

Virginia bluebells out-maneuvering dandelions, yay bluebells!

Pretty soulianga magnolia  blooming with a red leaf plum for backdrop.

A dainty mulitflora daffodil

Woodland path, with a perspective that seems much more distant.  This path narrows from four feet to about two feet in a would guess less than 16 feet.  It wides out again at the bend.  It is carefully constructed visually.

Bottlebrush buckeye (I think!)  This is so not part of the trees you see in my zone.  It looks like some magical tutti-frutti candy.

There's not a lot of sculpture in this relatively small garden.  No clue who this might be.  Handsome Son thinks "a Paine, who must have been a pain to have this head done" and placed in the garden.  (He thinks he's a life comedian.)

"Really, Mom?" 

Back of the Paine House, Handsome Son asks if chemists can make enough to have a house and garden like these.  "Maybe a small portion of the house, and then you could work on the garden."  I hold my hands making a small viewfinder for him.

Coming: More pictures from the Paine later this week.

Sunday in Pictures: Tulips in Bloom at The Paine

Fritallaria Michailovsky

The color is fairly accurate and certainly unusual.  This is really the only fritillaria that will grow for me.   It would be cooler if this was the one with multiple flower stalks out of the single bulb, but no.  It doesn't languish, but has not increased for me either.

Cold Weather in the Forecast Cold Weather in the Forecast

Red stemmed, red flowered trillium with mottled leaves

Well, I mowed the lawn, at least in the back yard.  What little lawn is in the front is alive, but not growing.  Also, not greening up are a couple three-foot sections of my privet hedge.   The buds of my forsythia froze.  Now with frost in the forecast each night through Monday I am concerned for the apricot which has been in full bloom for three days (which is three weeks later than usually and seven weeks later than last year).

After a near fruitless year last year and with Spring so late this year, contemplating a  hard frost now, let's not.

I realized with the deep leaf mulch in my shrub and tree border along the alley way that I have missed a big opportunity to plant this hedge with spring ephemerals.  Each year I tell myself this poor trillium needs a better place to be than competing with the hydrangea and lily of the valley. This year when I noticed the purple tipped eyes I transplanted the majority of it to the shrub border.  Upon emergence it is very similar in root structure to the lily of the valley.  Rather than transplant something as aggressive as the lily of the valley to my border I left a pip of this to compete against the lily of the valley.  Even so the part I moved already appears much bigger than it has in other years.

I also planted seven Virginia bluebells into this border along with the stray daffodils coming up in places I never remember planting them (Those ants, again!).

Very little has really leafed out.  Within the last two days there is a shimmer of green, tender leaves to be burnt by frost has appeared on some trees.  My katsura tree has tender baby leaves.  My pear and 'jade' crabapple are loaded down with buds.

Of all things, my sweet autumn clematis appears dead.I'm still crossing my fingers for it, though.  It showed no signs of distress last growing season, and I kept it watered throughout its bloom.  My roses, which I will admit are in protected spots all seem to be leafing out.  The village's 200 Knockouts along our main avenue mostly died out, at least to the ground, after doing well for five years,  A lot of finger crossing there, too.

The family garden has been too wet to till, so the potatoes are still uncut and not planted.   I guess fall potatoes it is.  In  the potager, I have planted a handful of shallots, a few spring onion, three savoy cabbage seedlings, and a couple varieties of lettuce, and seeded some broccoli.

And as today is Mother's Day, I am seeing streams of posts from gardeners honoring their mothers, including a post by one of my sisters who posted a link to a time lapse of our ultimate mother, the earth. 

Happy Mothers' Day.

What's My Line?

Something blue in my garden, not sure if its some sort of species hyacinth?

Anybody? (What is this, or in that very old TV show, "What's my line?") There's only one, so I'm really at a loss.  I never buy just one bulb.

Clematis alpina 'Blue Dancer'

Bought late summer on sale, buried way deep, I obsessed on watering, fertilizer.  When it started to emerge this spring I dumped another spade-full of dirt on top. Now it seems so vigorous, I'm worried 'Blue Dancer' is really 'Blue Thug'!  I'm crossing my fingers for a wild flush of bloom!  (But, I'm afraid not, clematis Group 1, and not a lot of growth from last year. Probably 2014 is really its year.)

Life Will Find A Way...

Bloodroot growing between my foundation and deck

There is another group of gardeners gardening in MY garden.  Ants! They carry the seeds of plants everywhere,I see them working, particularly on natives. Bloodroot in foundation cracks, yesterday I found a wild ginger plant growing under my juniper 'Blue Star'! Way under...  and hepatica acutifolia everywhere!

Crazy little gardeners!  They need to pick up a copy of MY garden plan.

These ants, they know my weakness.  I have a hard time weeding out desirable plants growing in the wrong places.

Dang ants!

And then let me tell you about those lilies of the valley!  They are intent on colonizing the pea gravel path out front!

Emerging Geraniums

I like perennial geraniums. I think this is a under-utilized perennial in our gardens.

This is the native, geranium macropetalum.

Potted Combinations

A pot combo I created in 2011

Nearly all the plants in this container are perennials.  This pot works because it works the color wheel.  The lime green and deep burgundy red is an effective combination.  In retrospect, I would have included more of the coleus 'Religious Radish' (seen in center left of the pot).  I used a huge black plastic nursery pot and real soil mixed with peat and perlite-- this sucker was heavy-- but it also lasted all summer and didn't cry out to be watered everyday in summer. Black can be a very elegant container color, but sitting on a deck with a sunny exposure and filled with fake dirt, it probably would equal plant death for annuals.

In this pot are:

Canna 'Australia'
'Tiger Eyes' Sumac
Panicum 'Heavy Metal'
'Blackie' Sweet Potato
'Dragon Wing' Begonia (2)
Lysimachia 'Gold Coin' (3)
Coleus 'Religious Radish'
Hosta 'Stained Glass'

Beyond That Greenhouse Hanging Basket

2010 Olbrich Gardens Hanging Basket

..
What makes this basket goes beyond the concept of "thriller, spiller, filler" touted so often by designers.

First, this basket is large, at least 14". This was a "whole basket" planting, meaning  slit were cut in the moss basket liner to plant additional plant.  To help retain moisture, the woven basket most likely has 10" circle of plastic lining the very bottom and the soil mix has either perlite or vermiculite included to retain moisture for the plants.

When choosing plants, the gardener did not limit the choice to annuals, but included a summer bulb and a perennial, and a temperperennial begonia with a dark purpley-red under leaf.  The filler/spillers chosen were chosen for their colorful foliage.  For this particular basket, a dark, thin leafed sweet potato and sweet potato "Margarita' were both used.  Also, a pink and green caladium bulb and a blue hosta were used.  These more upright and larger-leaved inclusions were planted in the top and center of the` basket, while spillers and fillers were planted toward the outside and down the sides in the slits. While a commercial basket this size might include  up to three different type of annual plugs with 3-5 of the flowering filler, 1-3 of the spiller and 1 plug of the thriller; this basket often uses a single plant.  I think eight different plant were used for a total of nine or ten plugs in all.  I think three of the petunia were used.  This petunia  with a lime green picotee edge and a dark eye zone is where the color theme for this basket comes from; lime green, pink, dark purple.