June Bloom Day

Doctor, Doctor, Coreopsis has set in!  When I was 7 or 8 my brother played the title character in a high school production of "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty."   I thought that was a great joke... once it was explained to me.  Even after learning that coreopsis is a flower, I thought it was something quite exotic and never saw one (or expected to) for years.  But that's only because I was raised in the city.  Coreopsis is actually a genus of native U.S. flowers and not particularly uncommon.  Along with this, which I believe is Coreopsis triloba, I also have "Zagreb" blooming, the popular named selection of threadleaf coreopsis, Coreopsis verticillata. 

More than Coreopsis, quite a lot of other blooms have set it for Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day this June.  Perhaps the most prominent blooms around here, detectable from a distance if conditions are just right, are the gardenias.  My mature shrub, planted by previous owners, is apparently not in a good spot and suffers constant yellowing of the leaves despite my attempts to please it with chelated iron.  But I love the blooms, especially their fragrance.  I have put another Gardenia in another spot hoping it will be happier in the long term.  I was pleased to see blooms on it this year, but it is too young and small to make much of an impact yet.  In the photo with the gardenia are also the blooms of the herb Marjoram.  Other herbs in bloom this June Bloom Day include oregano, just starting, and dill and chives, winding down.

Along with Gardenias are the Hydrangeas.  I have a pink mophead that I showed in May and various U.S. native hydrangeas.  My oakleaf hydrangea started blooming just after May Bloom Day but is very young and had just one bloom.  Likewise, my pink Hydrangea arborescens is also too new to have more than a single bloom.  But my Hydrangea arborescens "Annabelle" is several years old and has enormous blooms on it, like the one shown below.  Unfortunately, the bloom clusters are so large and heavy that a formidable windstorm a few weeks ago caused the shrub to more-or-less collapse.  Since that was the storm which dropped a small tornado on a different part of town, I am not complaining.  I'm sure Annabelle will be just fine.

A first for me this year is Sweet Alyssum.... please don't laugh.  I know this plant is common as dirt for some people, but I have tried sowing seeds many times without success.  This year I discovered that the best time to sow them is in fall, in my area.  Of course it was already winter by the time I found out, but it was such a mild winter I gave it a try.  I probably shouldn't even show this photo, which isn't much, except that I'm happy to have finally had a small success with it.  I'm hoping that now that there are a few plants, it will self sow.  If it does, then I don't have to figure out the best time to do it!

Another first for me this year is this St. John's Wort, 'Brigadoon'.  I've had this for a few years but this is the first time it has bloomed.  I've moved it a few times but it seems happy enough in this new spot.  I like the spot too because it's not going to clobber anything delicate nearby!

Here's another plant I had to move because it was a little too spready.  I really like the color of this yarrow "Cerise Queen" and would love to have it combining with other plants in my pseudo-cottage garden, but when I tried that, it spread maddeningly even the first year.  So now I'm trying to use its spreading tendency to my advantage in a spot around the trunk of a young tree, to make a buffer between the tree and the lawn.  I don't want grass right up to the trunk, which would risk damage to the tree from a string trimmer, but the tree is still too small to shade out the annoying bermuda grass.  But yarrow seems to be a good buffer.  It doesn't suffer much from competing with either the tree or the grass, does a reasonably good job masking the fact that I don't weed the grass out as often as I should, and can be mowed on the edges with impunity.

Another spreader that I have not kicked out of the garden yet is bee balm.  This will bulk out considerably if I let it, but doesn't have the same annoying habit of popping up at a distance from the mother plant.  This is the first bee balm bloom this year.  I think there will be a lot more soon.

Similarly, this is the first of hopefully many four o'clocks, Mirablis jalapa.  I like this multicolored variety, which has blooms of multiple solid colors as well as striped and speckled ones, all on the same plant.  I suspect I will have a lot more four o'clocks to show on July's Bloom Day.

One of my favorite plants is this Veronica or speedwell.  I don't know the cultivar.  I think it was just labeled "blue".  It combines very nicely with black-eyed susans and purple coneflowers, and seems to have a very long bloom period.  It began blooming just in time for the previous Bloom Day and I think it may continue to the next one.

Uh oh, I'm running out of time....  I mostly take my Bloom Day photos in the evening after work.  It seems like every time I get the chance to get out and take some photos it gets overcast and windy.  Overcast is pretty good for photos, but that means I need a longer time exposure and the breeze is not helping.  Oh, well, I'll just go with it.  This is a butterfly bush, showing off the silvery undersides of the leaves as the breeze starts to turn into a gust...  now I have to run!

Check out May Dreams Gardens to see what's blooming for other gardeners on this Bloom Day

Gloriosa superba

Here's something new under the sun.  Well, not really, but definitely new for the Sprouts and Wildlings garden!  I planted this curiosity two autumns ago, but last summer it got only one bud that was quickly chewed by some kind of insect and so I didn't get to enjoy the bloom.  But my patience has been rewarded.  I'm excited by this bright, colorful, bizarre flower and its eccentric habits.  

Gloriosa superba "Rothschildiana" seems fantastic to me in every way.  These rippled red and yellow flared petals are outlandish.  It's a lily, but before now I have never seen a climbing lily (excluding in the book that tempted me to buy it, Garden Bulbs for the South by Scott Ogden).  Not only that, how it climbs seems singularly odd to me.  I know that some climbers climb by suckers or root hairs and others twist their stems around the supports.  I know that some climbers have tendrils and others just hang on by thorns (like roses).  Up to now, I thought that clematis was a little strange, the way its leaf petioles are used as tendrils.  Gloriosa lily is just a bit stranger, in my opinion.  The climbing tendrils are elongated leaf tips.  You can see it in the bottom of this photo, where the large light green lily leaf (typically shaped for a lily except for that crazy tip) has wrapped around the stem of the Abelia it's climbing through.

The Gloriosa lily may not be hardy in my garden, although it's in the warmest microclimate I have -- this past winter was probably not a real test.  I hope it lasts for years, but it may turn out to be a one-time pleasure.  Even if that's the case, I'm glad I gave it a try and got to learn about and enjoy this strange and wonderful beast in my own garden.

For other strange and wonderful beasts, check out Macro Monday on Lisa's Chaos.

First view

I found Town Mouse and Country Mouse's blog recently, and the idea to do a "first view" of the garden on the first of the month with the specific intention of doing wide angle shots.  I almost never do wide angle shots for two reasons.  First, I don't think I'm as skilled photographically with them -- the photos just don't really pop or draw me in like the ones in books and magazines.  Second, my garden isn't really up for it.  I have a lot of lovely flowers in my garden, but my garden has grown "organically" (so to speak) as a bit of a hodgepodge while I've been learning what grows here and what doesn't.  It's only recently that I've spend much time thinking about the big picture in my garden beds... and thinking about it doesn't mean I automatically have any skill.  Both of these demerits are things I'd like to improve on, so forcing myself to shoot a couple wide angle shots of the garden once in a while can only help. 

Above is the main bed in the backyard, what we have always called the butterfly garden.  This is the first bed I started and my main goal was to attract butterflies.  We do get a lot of butterflies, but this was also the only place I had to try out new plants so there was quite a random assortment.  Early this spring, I undertook a reformation of the butterfly garden, taking out some thugs that had taken over, moving some things elsewhere, and putting in some new plants.  But I don't have a great head for garden design, so my idea was to first attempt to make it look good in the summertime -- peak butterfly season-- and then when I see how that looks, work backwards into spring by adding some more plants where possible.  The bed already has some fantastic late summer and fall plants, asters and sunflowers.  It's not much right now though.  Verbena-on-a-stick attracts a lot of butterflies, but it doesn't make a garden all by itself.  The one shown below is the second pipevine swallowtail I've seen here.  The blue color on the wings made my mouth drop open.  When I figure out where I can put it, I guess I ought to plant a pipevine!

I have discovered that one great way to get a lot of color is with self-seeding annuals.  The butterfly garden is just about to explode with annual black-eyed Susans (Rudbeckia hirta), like the one in the foreground of the first shot.  The photo below is the front garden.  I hesitated for a long time before putting a garden in the front, since I didn't want my mistakes on display for all to see.  But this is where the sun is -- and the existing plantings from the previous owners were hideous -- so eventually this garden got put in.  Self sowing annuals bring a lot of color to this bed, and right now it is a riot of larkspurs.

There are some perennials here, the clematis of course on the inside of the fence providing the most intense splash of color.  In the middle of the photo is a mass of catmint.  It's not showing up that well in the photo due to my lack of wide-angle skills.  This is my least favorite lens as well.  Maybe if I get a new wide angle lens I'll be a better photographer?  Well, I can always dream.  I love the sort of cottage-garden look of the self-seeding annuals but I'm glad I came up with the idea of the half-fence to give this garden a little structure.  It encloses a patio and some small garden beds and gives structure to these beds on the outside of the fence, but there is still a wide strip of lawn in between this and the sidewalk as a nod to tradition and to avoid boxing in the whole yard and isolating it from the neighborhood.  The fence is shorter than normal as well, just enough to give a feeling of enclosure without actually blocking our view of people going by.  I think it functions a lot like a wide front porch, which we in our neighborhood are not lucky enough to enjoy.

Sidewalk crack blues

Last summer my husband (with a little help from me) laid a patio in our front garden, thereby "completing" the front garden project started in 2007.  You are probably smart enough to know that laying a patio should be one of the first projects, not the last, in creating a new garden space.  You may even be smart enough to have done it that way once or twice.  But in our case, knowing that it takes a major effort to scrape together enough time to do any project, we actually did this on purpose, and it worked out all right. 

The patio was made with concrete pavers and I asked for some gaps to be left for tiny plants.  Somewhat poor drainage is a chronic problem in my garden and I was looking forward to seeing if some new things might thrive in the gravelly gaps.  Wooly thyme for example.  Will this survive for more than one season this time?  I got that and another kind of thyme for two of the gaps.  For another, I kind of wanted something like this:

The above photo was taken in Sintra (Portugal) at the Sintra Palace in 2009.  These adorable pink and white daisies are growing at the foot of balustrades one storey above ground level, and there is no soil here.  This is sharp drainage indeed.  But since I don't actually know what this adorable plant is, I don't have it to plant in my patio.  I did see something similar in this winter's catalogs, but what I saw didn't really seem appropriate to hot and humid Virginia.  I think I need a little more information before acting on this impulse.

Meanwhile, I had another crack to fill.  This one is right on the edge of the patio where an aster keeps flopping, so it seemed too high-risk for a new, special, catalog-bought plant.  But what to put in it?  By coincidence I read hints that two plants I already grow and love might like these conditions even better.  In the heat of June just as the patio finished up, I tucked a sad-looking sprig of the spring blooming "Georgia Blue" speedwell (Veronica umbrosa 'Georgia Blue') into the crack.  It didn't look too happy the rest of the summer, but started perking up in the fall, lasted through the winter, and bloomed in the spring.  Here it is in March:

This creeping speedwell is a favorite of mine.  I first noticed some in my next-door neighbors yard where the carpet of sky blue so early in the spring was very charming.  I never got around to asking her about it and ended up buying some on sale out of bloom without realizing it was the same thing.  How pleased I was to have my own!  What I hadn't noticed on my neighbor's was the lovely reddish foliage it keeps all winter.  I'm still in love with this plant, although I have noticed that this year it has spread alarmingly.  It stays very low so it doesn't seem to be a threat to nearby plants, but I was surprised to lose track of an entire stepping stone that has a mat of speedwell draped over it.  Probably not a good plant to put in my bed of annual self-sowers, not if I want to see new seeds sprouting next year.  On the other hand, it seems to do a good job smothering weed seeds.  Interestingly, "Georgia Blue" is not named for the state of Georgia, but for the country.  This species is native to Eastern Europe and Siberia.  Not the kind of birthplace I would expect for something that likes my garden.  It seems to like the patio crack as well.  
On an even more random impulse, I dropped a bulb of Ithuriel's Spear (Tritelia laxa) into the same crack.  Now where did that name come from, I wonder?  This may be the only plant I know whose Latin name is easier to pronounce than its common name.  Who is Ithuriel?  Looking on Wikipedia, I see "Ithuriel is one of the 3 deputy sarim of the holy sefiroth serving under the ethnarchy of the angel Sephuriron" -- so I still don't know.  But it goes on to say that John Milton portrays Ithuriel in the Garden of Eden where touching Satan with his spear he forces him to take on his true shape.  I have Ithuriel's Spear in my garden, too, and snakes as well, occasionally.  I hope they don't touch, because I greatly prefer snakes to Satan.

I ended up digging some small bulbs up unintentionally as we were preparing for the patio.  This is a beautiful plant and does very well in the regular garden bed where I first planted it, but it's a California native and I read some lyrical description of it blooming among summer-browned grasses in California.  That was enough to make me drop one of the displaced bulbs into the crack: after all, it must like dry conditions, right?  I thought the bulbs seemed small and imagined myself in two or three years being surprised to see its blue blooms coming out of the patio (but that more likely they wouldn't survive).  I was even more surprised to see them bloom already this year!  This unusual placement gives a more intimate view of this lovely flower and bud.  I love the stripes on the backs of the petals and on the buds.

Wildflower Wednesday: Venus's looking glass

Thank you to Clay and Limestone for hosting Wildflower Wednesday.  I've been wanting to contribute but the fourth Wednesday keeps slipping by without me realizing it.  Finally I caught one.

The wildflower I chose is Venus's looking glass, Triodanus perfoliata (Specularia perfoliata in my old guide).  This is an annual wildflower that pops up regularly in one spot in my garden.  It's small and many people probably consider it a weed, but I have a liberal weed policy when it comes to pretty native wildflowers.  To me, the flowers are very lovely and the plants themselves are even rather cute pre-bloom.  It is usually a single stalk about six inches to a foot tall, with small round leaves clasping the stem.  It looks a bit like a fairy wand might.  When it blooms, the flowers appear in the leaf axils all down the stem.  Usually I get only a few well spaced out stems, but this year in a newly cleared spot I found a small colony and the overall effect is fairly showy.  It's an annual and doesn't spread aggressively.

Here's a vocab word: oligolege.  I know from reading about gardening for butterflies that butterfly larvae (caterpillars) are very particular about the plants they eat.  The most familiar example is probably the monarch which eats only milkweed.  Now I have learned that some bee larvae have similarly picky tastes when it comes to pollen.  Some species eat the pollen of only a single genus (or even a single species).  This is called oligolecty.  According to the Illinois Wildflower site I was looking at to learn more about Venus's looking glass, there is a species of bee, Colletes brevicornis, that is an oligolege of the Venus's looking glass.  So if compulsive weeders were able to eradicate this lovely little gem of a wildflower, this species of bee would go, too.  That's a good reason not to be too neat in the garden, if you ask me.

Spiderwort

I'm not sure how this spiderwort (Tradescantia virginiana) is managing to survive, since it has become pretty severely overshadowed by a neighboring shrub.  And yet, every time I walk by I notice it has several blooms on it that seem almost to glow in the dark recesses under the shrub.  I am always attracted to blue flowers, which is probably why I planted this, but it wasn't 'till I looked through the macro lens that I really took a good look at the crazy yellow stamens or the fringe of blue filaments.   Now I like Tradescantia even better.  You may have also heard some odd lore about this plant.  Apparently the stamen hairs change color in the presence of nuclear fallout.  Hmmm.  I'm not sure if that's this plant's particular superpower, or if it's just that this is the one that was chosen for the study, but if you notice your Tradescantia blooming with pink stamen hairs, I'd suggest relocating.  Today I'm joining Macro Monday, hosted by Lisa's Chaos.

May Bloom Day -- oops

Good gracious!  Am I really five days late already?  Well, even so, I can't completely miss Garden Blogger's Bloom Day, not this month, with all this great stuff in bloom!  I'll only cheat a little bit.  While some of these photos were taken a few days before the 15th and some were taken today, all of these flowers were actually in bloom on May 15th.

I'll start off with Clematis x jackmanii.  This is its third year in my garden.  The first year it was great and then last year not so great.  I'm glad to see it thriving again.  Maybe last year I pruned it too late.

I love taking macros, but with all these great flowers in bloom, maybe I can make an attempt at a grouping.  Here are four of my favorites: the clematis, sundrops (Oenothera fruticosa), larkspur (Consolida ambigua) and speedwell (Veronica spicata? or is this taller one something else? -- unfortunately I don't remember).  Purple and burgundy is not my favorite color combination, but the neighbor's Japanese maple is a better background than the neighbor's car, which is what I got the first time I framed this shot.  That's a serviceberry with lots of ripe tasty berries on it, peeking in from the left.

A closeup of the sundrops.

I've been looking forward to the larkspurs for a long time, since the foliage comes up, tantalizingly, in the winter when I am desperate for flowers.  I'd sown seeds of larkspur for several years hoping for a drift of them before I finally achieved what I wanted in this bed with the birdbath.  They came back this year here and in neighboring beds (like the one shown above) but I'm just as happy with them everywhere they have appeared.  I'm not crazy about the pink ones (one of the seed packs was a mix) but lately I've seen photos of white ones.  I think a few white ones would set off the purple ones nicely and be more attractive than the pink.  I'll have to look for some more seeds.  There's also an "Earl Gray" color in my population that I like, but none of them are obvious in this shot.

Here are the larkspurs with two more favorite self-sowers, chamomile and French hollyhock (Malva sylvestris).

Here is the other star of the garden that I have been waiting for, the Virginia rose (thanks to my husband for the photo).

The mophead hydrangea is just starting up

Virginia sweetspire (Itea virginica), just planted in December by my wonderful husband, is blooming its head off.

I'll finish up with some herbs in bloom, including thyme (also photographed by my husband)...

...and dill. The end of the dill is a sad day.  I think I like dill almost as much as the black swallowtail caterpillars do.  Fortunately, unlike parsley or basil, the dill still tastes fine as it begins to bloom.  But soon it will die back and I'll have to wait for next year.