How is your garden looking today?

The mutant lilac "trees" are about 20 feet tall and in full bloom. Buds on the echinacea and the peonies. Abundant wild violets.

The VA bluebells are blooming, the nodding pink clematis are too.
The jacob's ladder has tons of buds.
The korean spicebush in the sunniest spot (one of three) is about to burst.
Ferns are uncurling.
The trillium is almost done blooming.

We just bought 5 luecothoe, 3 inkberry (shamrock variety), 1 cherry laurel and a siberian carpet cypress to plant this weekend (praying for decent weather.

I've been planting, planting, planting this weekend. I've put in regular and New Guinea impatients, sweet potato vine, a new clematis, a couple new peonies, some additional 'wave' petunias and some rosemary. A few of the astilbe look sick, so I'll dig them up and try to save the healthy parts next week.

We met with a landscape designer on Saturday who presented us with a plan for three new bedding areas including a bunch of lilacs in two of the beds, a flowering crab in one with tons of underplantings, and a whole lot of work by me on one side of our entryway in the third area. I can't wait!!!

Soz, if you read this, I've been pulling garlic mustard out of the woods lately. It's invasive and if you don't keep up with it, it will choke out all of your native understory in a few short years. We now have trillium in bloom, jacks-in-the pulpit, and a number of woodland flowers that we lost to the garlic mustard about five years ago. Here's a good link on identifying the plants.

http://www.ipm.msu.edu/garlicmustard.htm

I mention this only because no one told us what to look for when we first moved to a woodland site and by the time we figured out what was happening were we had lost our understory and are now just recovering.

bergenia is blooming, lily of the valley is well-budded.

We have started to redo the 'zelkova bed'. It's a shady, root-filled, dry bed in the city where vinca doesn't evn like to grow. I planted various things in there, got hostas and thalictrum to grow, some bleeding hearts liked it....

Anyway, the property owners wanted evergreens We had some blech rhodies (the pjm - booooring) which weren't happy. The leaves kept winter-burning and that made the prop owners not happy. So, I researched and found out some things. I found some plants to put in that weren't yews or rhodies and I found out that it's probably not the winter weather that's nailing the rhodies (but, I'm not going to be the one to tell them that).

So, we bought 4 leucothoe, 3 inkberry (shamrock), one cherry laurel (one owner loved it and had to have it) and one siberian carpet. It's an odd lot, but they didn't want to spend more $ and that was going to have to do.

We ordered 4 cubic yards of loam and 3 of mulch (we could get free mulch at the recycling center, but it wasn't pretty enough). I asked for the mulch to be delivered a week after the dirt, but they brought it all at once. So, we have 2 huge tarp covered piles in the parking lot causing hell and it rained all weekend. We got very little accomplished.

We'll be working after hours all week to catch up. Prolly next week too. I should take a before and after picture.......

J_B, you rock!!! Rock rock rock absolutely rock. That is PRECISELY what is all over the place in my yard and I've been trying to figure out whether it's supposed to be there. I've been pulling 'cause I'm plain suspicious. Will keep pulling, and step up my efforts. (So far it's been rather haphazard, just when one of 'em looks at me wrong.)

Thanks!!

I'd love to get some trillium back there.

Did you see my topic on poison ivy? Really threw me for a loop. Just talked to my next-door neighbor and she says she just pulls them out, with fairly standard precautions, and it's fine. I think I know why the previous owners pretty much gave up on the backyard, now. (Front and side was immaculate, back was... really not.) It will be a big job but I'm feeling a bit more up to it.

littlek, take those pictures! I'd love to see it.

I went annual shopping today but the place I went to just wasn't very impressive. Got some snapdragons. <shrug> I think I'm going to get some lavender to put in a sunny bare spot in the front yard, and probably a passel of standard petunia/ impatiens for color (what I usually do.) I have four containers I want to fill -- two hanging baskets, two urns -- and would absolutely love suggestions there. All would be partial shade, with the urns more towards sun and the baskets more towards shade.

I'll try for pictures, I'll need to borrow a digital camera. And, we've already sort of started.

Soz, the wooded garden would be good with trillium, mayapple, VA bluebells.... all go dormant at the end of the spring. Also, check out dogtooth lily.

As for pots, they are not my specialty....

Begonias for color, foliage - can get varieties that hang or grow up. They need care and need to be kept damp. There are tons of varieties:




lobelia is an old stand by:


consider putting folliage plants in the standing pots - ferns, caladium, etc. Caladium comes in multitudes of colors, wants little sun though:
http://images.google.com/images?q=caladium&btnG=Search&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial

Fantastic, thanks. That's very helpful.

BBB
Weeding is very difficult for me (anything on the ground level) but I managed to send a few to weed heaven. Only another million to go.

My strawberries are blooming and forming berries like crazy. I can hardly wait.

BBB

I use a lot of impatients, coleus, and begonias in my shade containers. You can also make an herb container for partial shade.

Here are some links for other shade container ideas:

http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art23430.asp

http://www.taunton.com/finegardening/pages/g00009.asp

http://www.hgtv.com/hgtv/gl_container_gardening/article/0,1785,HGTV_3558_1369531,00.html

BBB - try a good old hoe on those weeds.

I did the containers today, we'll see how they go. I was a little overoptimistic with how much sun gets to that spot, I think -- I forgot that a tree provides a lot of shade. I made the container based on partial shade, might be more towards full. We'll see.

Got "million bells" and some green spiky-ish thing, didn't catch the name. (Not a flowering plant.) It certainly looks gorgeous now, we'll see how long it lasts.



Got this color and white, they drape over the side really nicely. I put the green spiky-ish thing in background.

cool! I hope it works well. You don't have a lot of play as to where you can set the pots?

There's that too, if they start looking sickly. I have two hooks on the side porch, I have two hanging pots (as in the pots themselves that I wanted to put flowers in), they just make sense, but I could probably find somewhere else for those if I need to.

We went shopping at the Farmer's Market for my Mother's Day present & bought three Katsura trees for a little grove Mr. P. promises to plant. Also got a gorgeous English Yew, a white rugosa rose, a tiny lime-green Smoke Tree, a couple of variegated willows, three fancy grasses called Frosted Curls and a painted fern.

I noticed that some of the shrubs I planted last year in the woodland garden are bursting with flowers. Since I bought them at half-price, I'm feeling pretty pleased. They had a lot of moss on them which I carefully pulled off when I planted them, I think that was at least part of the reason they were "on sale."

The Lupines are tall and purple, the Calla Lilies are lush with a few flowers & loads of buds. Nothing from the Lavatera yet. The Bleeding Hearts are nearly done. The yellow poppies I planted in one end of the rock garden have spread all across the area. I should be grumpy about that, I guess, but I love the way they look. They'll fade just as the hydrangeas kick into high gear. Meanwhile, I have some pink <??> that look fabulous next to the deep burgundy of a small Smoke Tree. Snapdragons are snapping and the nearby Euphorbia, newly planted this year, is looking very cool with its green flowers. Herbs are filling up their small bed. I need to pull the early tulips from there (which I put in for some reason I can't remember why -- what a mistake). I have one last parrot tulip, I noticed -- a nice purple & cream, heavily fringed.

What a great time of year -- the spring green is nearly intoxicating and going to the market and the nursery is like being a child with a sweet tooth at the candy store. I still need to buy some annuals. Are you feeding your plants? I feel as though mine are practically purring afterwards.... and then there is that great burst of growth. We have a lot of evergreens; each one has a fringe of pale green on the tips of the branches. I love that.

That's a beautiful color sozobe, so vibrant.

I caught 2 little birds taking a bath

Sweet! Are they some sort of finch? Nice fountain there.

Piffka, wow, amazing garden you have.

That is a nice-looking fountain, Jane. Those look like house finches. I think they are known as linnets in California. We have them here, too. Endearingly cute, I think, they always seem to be in pairs or more.

Is it the voyeur in me that loves watching birds take baths?

Sozobe -- Thanks. My yard has its moments but is not very well-managed. Over the twenty years that we've lived here, I've gotten a few things right -- and lots more wrong. I'm always forgetting what I put where which is a serious problem and all my fault. I also have the worst rocky ground immaginable, so I'll buy something and then be too lazy to dig a proper hole (hence the tulips in the herb bed). I have no plan... it has been mostly haphazard, which I do not recommend. I get almost no full sun because we love planting trees and rarely cut them back. We do not live in a development or city suburb, so this garden is very different from what most people have, even in my little town. My friends all seem to have nice, neat, coherent gardens which mine is patently not.

My serviceberry is blooming rather nicely this year:
I had pruned it back quite hard year before last so as to get it to bush out,so there wasn't much of a show last year.

Its autumn color, though, is a chief reason I got it, and I placed it up front for street-view appeal.

NN -- That looks beautiful against the evergreen backdrop. Those grow wild here... I admire them very much.