Garden Angst: The Front Yard in Mid-July, 2012

I'm fairly happy with the front yard. There also a wide swath of pumpkin-colored daylilies in the hellstrip making it feel sort of like a three ring circus in mid-July.

In my front yard and typically the first impression visitors have of my garden is hostas. When the Master gardeners visited, their first comment was, "Oh, you're into hosta." To which I had to reply, that I really wasn't, but grass just doesn't grow there under the big white pine and in the shade of the houses on the north side of my house, in the sand.

Where I have a bit more sun I try and grow daylilies, because they will bloom in the sun, or shade; but really all of you reading this, you are short-changing the beauty of the daylilies by growing them in the shade. The corner with the 'Red Jade' crab is the farthest point from my hose connection. It is the hardest to water.

As my lot has street and alley on three sides, my gardening has always been about problem solving, defining the perimeter, and adding privacy.

This little spot looks a lot better in spring and fall. The color combos with sedum 'Matrona', the blue balllon flowers, coneflowers, filapendula, valerian, black Austrina pine just seems very dark. There's an apricot tree here, too, you can't see. I think the plants there probably aren't going anywhere, but there must be a way to "lighten it up". Anyone?

This is the long border, which I have been re-digging the last few days. As you can see the middle of July is definitely a down time for the long border. At one point, it had waves upon waves of bloom. Now the show is early spring and then late summer and early fall. I'm not sure what happened.

I painted the two trellis in this area green apple and have planted a lot more liatris as they bloom then. This just seems a sea of green and I am loath to plant out bedding annuals for a shot of color. It seems like I need some sort of broad, large leaved plant for some sort of focal point. I've thought of doing a swath of native beebalm and Jacob Kline mixed and have already divided and spread out a pale yellow daylily. (This is the area in my last post with the shovel stuck in it!)

Thoughts?

Gardening Horribilis: What Not to Do in the Garden

If you are going to stake that dahlia, do it in a way when it is young that by the time it has matured the staking and caging is not visible!

"Staking, and caging and rocks, oh my!"

There were no pink flamingos or garden gnomes, at least, although once in a while the right pink flamingo staged in just the right spot does have its appeal (or maybe this small nostalgia for pink flamingos dates me to my college years on the UW-Madison campus); but on the Portage County Garden Parade there was a lot of the horrible, what not to do in a garden.

Handsome Son knew there was something wrong. Suddenly his mother was in a picture-shooting frenzy, like sharks suddenly sensing blood in the water. He gently grabbed my elbow and murmured in my ear, "TIME TO GO!" and dragged me from the garden as I hastily snapped off a last few shots.

There was a garden I visited after the organic CSA, and the gardener with the no-mow buffalo grass lawn that is the sort of garden that makes me shudder. They think they are gardeners and they will have some beautiful flowers in vases on a dining room table somewhere, but they are also the gardeners that probably add plastic cushion protectors to their couches and lamps. They'll no doubt have the "good china" they use only for special occasions. Instead of working with their site and challenges, they use elaborate caging and fencing to get their garden to do what they want it to do rather than allow it to be what it should be.

And then there are the gardens with way to much pricey statuary and elaborate fountains often in their front yards. I don't know about you, but "plastic" and "garden" seems like it should be a non sequitur.

When I first started seeing these in the garden, I looked at them with my "crow eyes" (not to be confused with crow's feet 'ya all!), and though "bright, colors, sparkly". Okay... Now I have seen so many of these, I am thinking NO! THIS is not even as funky cool as bottle trees!

Okay, it's too much statuary when I can take a picture of your fountain (in your front yard) and the cherubs, too, all without changing the zoom on my camera.

Merd, hate to tell 'ya, your secret is out. Don't label your garden circles, all your paths, and every common plant. Let your garden slowly reveal its secrets. Do label the really cool plant you received and grew from seed from a garden pal in New Zealand that is not even supposed to grow here in central Wisconsin!

PLASTIC GARDEN fences. Grr!

Inadvertent Christmas in July (it just seems a tad orange in this picture, but trust me it is full-blown CHRISTMAS in person.

What is with that high edging? Does it keep out the ground squirrels? Sock monkeys? Gumby? WHAT!

If you shell out the big bucks for a beautiful grafted dappled willow standard, at least learn how and when to prune it!

And finally, you KNOW what I think of these!

Instead, walk over to that tree look up into its leafy boughs and give it a big hug. Stand there a moment and feel its life force, and then go grab a hose and water the dang thing!

Ornamentation in the Garden: Pots

A whole nest of ceramic pots at Olbrich Gardens. Grouping them probably makes their watering tasks a tad easier and is a good tip for the home gardener as well.



A reinforced cement planter at the home of Dr. Darrel Apps. This is a top quality planter made to withstand central Wisconsin's extreme cold and spring and fall freeze/thaw weather. For the last couple years, Darrel has planted it with a dark colored banana plant which he allows to freeze, and then digs it up, cuts off the leaves, and moves to his cool basement room. He calls it his banana cana and it is a heavy sucker, the root filling a 5-gallon pail.




My fish planter from Pier One. It is so cute, I have just placed it in the garden and have not planted it. Sometimes planters are nice empty, too. With its two openings it gives me a lot of fun possibilities to think about.
Ceramic pots are a great way to add a shot of color to the garden. For those of us gardening on a budget, these pots can be a pricey addition. In my experience, sometime about October and early November is a great time to snap up some great looking pots of a decent size at good prices. This year at Stein's pots went on sale in the beginning of August. The prices were great. All of my nice pots were acquired on clearance.




For a pot to make a statement in the garden, it needs a certain diameter and height. You want to err on the large size. The pots I have are about as big as I can easily carry, empty. I always plant these in situ. Crushed milk jugs are a key component of the fill in these pots, along with Styrofoam if I have any lurking from recent deliveries.

I like to take good practices from things I see in botanical gardens. For example, the only pots you see the Chicago Botanical Gardens using are to hold those plants that move into a green house in the winter. These tend to be Italian clay pots of huge diameters. Olbrich Gardens in Monona, WI tends to have a freer hand with the use of nice pots used in a variety of different ways. With pots, unlike growing plants in the ground you do have watering concerns on a daily basis. This is something That the CBG probably doe not want to deal with. Olbrich, on the other hand must detail a gardener to this task daily as their number have pots used in and about the garden has decidedly reached critical mass.

Other than good quality ceramic pots and Italian clay pots, there are the reinforced concrete pots. These are heavy suckers. I have one of these and it is more what I call an urn, than a pot. I am sure you have probably seen these in a cemetery somewhere. I got mine at Wal-Mart years ago for about $10. I doubt you could find one that can withstand the weather as well as it has for that price now.


A trio of cement planters as a border focal point.


Sometime a pot planted with just the right color foliage plant is all t takes to be the exclamation point n a garden. Forget the "thriller, spiller, filler" design idea.

Funky Garden Art

Yesterday, I went to the Outagamie County Master Gardeners Garden Walk. I took over seventy pictures of everything that caught my eye. Garden Walks are brain candy for gardeners, arm-chair and dirt gardeners alike. So I'm sure my next few posts will include lots of pictures, ideas, and thoughts on these gardens.

I will say, I've given small tours of my yard, but I have never groomed it to a level of a garden walk garden. Never at any given time have I had all my beds weed-free, edged, deadheaded, and mulched within an inch of their lives. Today, my small amount of lawn needs a serious trim. It it raining again this morning and I have social get-togethers the rest of the day. Lawn mowing is not going to happen, not with an electric lawn mower.

The first garden I will profile was by and far my favorite. This was a house where the gardeners certainly knew a thing or two about gardening. It was the garden on a small lot that hosted a grand old Victorian house built in a wonderful style. It was easily three stories and featured, probably a first level parlour with a bump out of five or six rectangular windows that I imagine encased a window seat. As we were leaving my son looked up and saw tomatoes growing in pails on a deck (that was little more than flat roof) on the second floor.

Similar to my house in Elgin, where I hung a stone woman within a huge, heavy grapevine wreath as an guardian spirit, this house had a green man hung under the eaves as its portal spirit.





I've always been a fan of bottle trees, especially ones featuring blue glass bottles. This one is easier than most to build as it is simply rebar stuck into the ground in a sculptural way. For some of you, collecting the colored bottles will be the fun part (Hopefully, not too many of your trees feature all small brown and clear bottles, unless they are Leinenkugels!)



A lot of the bird feeding art featured copper plumbing pipe and blue glass.


I've always thought these old exhaust vents would make great garden art!



These last pictures show their night lighting, and pay homage to early rural electrification, and were funky beyond what I've seen. I don't think my pictures capture their cleverness. For that, I would probably need to photograph them at night when they are lit after I had added a bottle to their bottle tree.