How is your garden looking today?

And not a bug or chewed bloom in sight. You'll have to let us in on how you keep your garden so pristine.

The pests have really ravaged our gardens for the last two years, so much so, that I doubt some of the plants will make it through the cold winter to start anew in the Spring.


Do any of the glads have scent? They are handsome indeed.

Thanks for that! The Bishop of Llandaff is just the colour I want - I have a lot of foliage plants already, so it would look pretty good there. Must check at our local garden centre.

No scent I think. Do you know, I've never sniffed them? And you don't even need to bend over. Much.

Pristine is not the word for my garden, far from it. It does its own thing. Plenty moss in the grass (more moss than grass now, I think) and the slugs have shredded the hostas. I let everything grow up, if it seems happy, and the little birdies seem to like it. It's a kind of small jungle.

"Annuals" mean disappointment once a year. 
Your lawn is always slightly bigger than your desire to mow it. 
Whichever garden tool you want is always at the back of the shed. 
The only way to ensure rain, is to give the garden a good soaking. 
Weeds grow at precisely the rate you pull them out. 
Nothing ever looks like it does on the seed packet. 
Autumn follows summer, winter follows autumn, drought follows planting. 
The only way to guarantee some color all year round is to buy a garden gnome. 
However bare the lawn, grass will appear in the cracks between the patio paving stones. 
Evergreens go a funny shade of brown in the winter.

"A favorite of birds" means to avoid planting near cars, sidewalks, or clotheslines. 
"Carefree" refers more to the plant's attitude than to your workload. 
"Vigorous" is code for 'has a Napoleonic compulsion to take over the world.'

... It has been so dry this week, 
the trees are whistling for the dogs.

... How well is your garden growing?
Only thyme will tell. 

Why are husbands like lawn mowers?  
They are difficult to get started, emit foul smells, and don't work half the time.  

Daisy daisy, how does your garden grow .............

Hey, I love my garden - every square inch of it. Lots of work, some backbreaking, and even harder when everything's done from wheelchairs and wheeled garden seats (or on hands and knees on some occasions!), but sooooo worth it!

Lawn - greener with every day that passes - newly seeded areas growing fast
Garden tools - in good order; mostly cleaned and oiled and stored until spring
Rain - huh, in England we have NO worries
Weeds - weed suppressing membrane makes sure none show their heads
Year round colour - so many shades of green, so colourful even when nothing's flowering
Evergreens - nope, not browning in any season

No way is it, or will it ever be, a show garden - but sitting out there on a summer's day, on a comfortable seat, the breeze rustling the trees, birds singing, the scents of flowers made more potent by the sun - ah, bliss!

I first saw this variety on Monty Don's prog.
I bought a couple of babies and to be honest with you, I stuck them in an area which I had seeded with wild flowers. The wiod flowers sprang up and looked gorgeous through the summer, and it wasn't until the red poppies died back about three weeks ago that I noticed these bright red flowers poking their heads through the various daisies etc.
I poked about a bit and saw that the Bishops were now fully grown and are still flowering away, long after the wild flowers had died back.
I've now decided to overwinter the tubers in the greenhouse and plant them in amongst my foliage corner, to brighten up the greens with a splash of red here and there.
That's if they don't go rotten during the winter.....

Haven't seen any of Monty Don's programmes for ages - was he on BBC1 or 2? The bishops are a beautiful colour - must admit, I'm a bit addicted to reds and oranges, but don't have any of either colour in the garden at the moment.

I used to leave dahlias in the ground all year round - didn't dig up the tubers and store them at all! Had a glorious display of several striking varieties. Then we had an unusually hot summer followed by a bitterly cold winter and I lost the lot! I do miss them though, and I've more or less decided that I'll plant them again next year.

I was given a great tip from an old boy at the plant nursery re. Dahlias.
He bought a few of those big rubber containers......


....lined them with two layers of bubblewrap, filled them with peat and plunged all his tubers deep inside after he'd dried them out on a windowsill for a week.
Stored under his bench in the greenhouse, he said they were fine, despite the endless sub zero winter.

Another green foliage/red flower you may consider is crocosmia red devil.

Thanks for the tip! I don't have a greenhouse, but we do have a brick garage, hopefully that would be okay for storage.

I have crocosmia growing in a container - can't remember the variety, pale pink or yellow from memory - must look it up. Will seek out the red devil next year.

I'm born and raised and moved from and back to and lived ever after, it seemed, in a land of warmth, land of shrubs, including native, and an immense number of available perennials, more as growers and nurseries caught on from the eighties until now, including an explosion of knowledge about natives to the area.

I only get annuals - or did - because of childhood memories in our rented house and yard in Chicago, thus my intro to marigolds and so on. A million years passed after that and I'd never use annuals myself (I'm thrifty, more or less, over time) but fine for special use displays and dearly beloveds like petunias... for others who love them.

Then I moved here to a place where stuff freezes. Dys, a long time friend on a2k of many of us, who also lived here, was very keen on annuals. Now I get it more than I did, understand the pleasure, though my own annuals are not much to speak of, stuff I did before, basil, sage, etc.

My new excitement, or secondary effort since I tried this once before, is that I took a couple of many pods on my neighbor's red yucca/false yucca plant. I like those.



Last time I planted the seeds, kept them in my kitchen, no luck.
This time I put them out in the piping hot yard in a small jar of sand (not a lot of dirt around here) and spurts of water, with mid afternoon shade, and the the seeds sprouted after I'd given up, maybe four weeks, and got rambunctious. Turns out, I should have waited until spring, according to online notes by others. This week I'll transition them to the kitchen - well, I'll transition one container to the kitchen, and leave the other one in the sand lot to await frost, snow, whatever..

Osso, your yucca looks very similar to the red crocosmia I was just telling vonny about.

So Osso, you get a freeze during the winter and searing temperatures in the summer?
You have to choose your plants carefully, I bet. Or go the annual route as you say, and start afresh each year and enjoy the show.

Hot drought plants......
Petunias
Pelargonium
Any sort of silver leaf plant
Rosemary
Lavender
Thyme
Er.........




Not really au fait with heat and drought.

Here's a nursery that was part of my learning, San Marcos Growers. I liked the owner's views, what I knew of them, and he talked - think he has been good for spreading knowledge. There is another one, Las Pulitas, that arrived later to my attention, haven't been there, but I like those places.
I say this, that as a designer I used to get tree nursery booklets featuring girls in the family sylphing around trees. But not from San Marcos.
I'd snort, but I still have one of those promotional efforts framed in plastic.

I don't post this to promote nurseries- just to give you a view of the plants.

San Marcos Growers
http://www.smgrowers.com/
Las Palitas
http://www.laspilitas.com/

I've grown thyme here as an annual (used to have it as a everlasting blanket..), can't imagine petunias having anything to do with this faux southwestern contractor failure house and clime, it doesn't at all match aesthetically anyway, much less in this intense place. (Dys/Diane's house had more shade and less new mexico stubness*.)

I just killed my one rosemary this year (it's been about seven years and may still be kicking), and killed most but not all of my lavender, 5 out of seven. That was in the burn of August. I'll replant, as I love those, native or not. Catmint does oddly well, fish out of water, even in the sun, but died last year. All in all, the lavenders have been peaches - I goofed with tempering water feed. My background is with actual soil, so I can mess up with genuine sand.

My Caesalpina in the back yard is waiting for transfer to the front.

Meantime, I'm going to have go hammer and nail to take out a Photinia that is in the way of getting to the reverse back gate. Now that is one thing that grows here.

*Relative to the olden new mexico territorial houses, my duplex looks fractionally more like them than theirs, which was more suburban. This is not a benefit, as mine was faux too, and theirs has a better roof.

Take a peek through this keyhole



for a glimpse at the sugar maple out back.

THANKS !

This morning's view of the backyard.

ITS GROUND HOG DAY SO THAT MEANS-----Im Starting seeds of aegeratums, spinach, lettuce and red beets. All thee are early into the gardening (as soon as ground thaws)> In fact, the Amish often seed spinach and peas right on top of the snow.

I'm going to try starting some peas and spinach next weekend if my back allows me to do so. I have to presoak the soil first for a few days. Things are bone dry here, not even the usual weeds are growing.

Bone dry? Our garden is waterlogged after weeks of rain. The bottom of the garden is under a couple of inches of standing water. A little stream ran across the boundary of our property once - until developers decided to fill it in! Our neighbours dug up part of their lawn and put in land drains, but that hasn't solved the problem totally. Hard to look forward to planting or sowing when it's like this.