How is your garden looking today?

It's sunny again today. I am cautiously optimistic that the roses will bloom sometime this summer

hahaha, poor Beth, it's worse up there than here!

Today was gorgeous! Cool and sunny. Really a wonderful afternoon. Threw 3 goldfish into the backyard "pond".

Soz, I have the best landlords ever!

Two of the peach-coloured icelandic poppies are blooming. Now to wait for the peonies to show their pink and white faces.

I'd say you were still living with your parents if I didn't know better...

Great landlords indeed. It makes sense, to be sure... you're planting a lot of perennials and that adds value to the property.

They usually have a company come in and do the tedious work and a professional when they need gardening done. I feel like I'm ripping them off when I buy $400 worth of plants ever other year. Last winter we had one side of the front garden ripped out to replace sewage piping. And then this spring the other side (the big part of the front garden at the front door) was mostly dug up to put in a sump-pump dainage pipe. Soooooo, I moved a lot of stuff around and got a lot from my mother's garden, but not nearly enough. We also lost a lot of last year's new plants due to extreme weather.

Beth, I'm itching to put in some peonies at my sister's. She wants my mom to sketch a general plan for the garden beds before we start putting in a lot of stuff. I keep telling her that she can plant them now and move them later.

littlek - peonies are not great fans of being moved. it is possible to do so, but the odds of getting the planting depth wrong increase with each move. if the crown isn't in the right spot, they just won't bloom. they'll just sit for decades.

let your mom do her design thing. she's good.

My peonie rose buds started opening today
I am so pleased! Last year it was so wet that the buds just rotted before they could open
Still sunny today! It was well into the 20s yesterday! Apparently it's all change by the end of the week tho!

Beth - yes she is, but she's just doing a skeleton of a design. Laura is too picky to let Ma do it all. So, Ma will sketch out the beds and edges, maybe indicate in a few key spots for foundation plantings (trees and shrubs). She may make some suggestions on what types of plants to plant in various locations according to the sun/earth quality.

The thing is that Laura will adore a plant and will plant it where it shouldn't be planted. She's starting to try to obey the laws of exposure, but she still doesn't think about things like soil quality and dampness, ease of care, etc.

Ah well, she'll live and (maybe) learn.

Hot and sunny, husband is sitting out on the patio sipping shandy(he just brought me one) and looking around.

Masses of climbing roses sprawling all up the high fences, honeysuckle, geraniums (the hardy kind), campanula, first flowers are on the lavatera,pansies .... in the chimney pots geraniums, campanula, large daisies, can't remember their name but they are in bud now, campanula, hibiscus not flowering yet - it looks great (not tidy, I don't do tidy ) - it's all sprawling and flowering and going mad!

Sounds loverly!

Vivien, isn't this spring and summer so nice compared to last year in the UK? The bedding plants weren't even flowering properly 'til late August last year in my garden, and yet here they are flowering already this year!

Trimmed the bushes in the front yard and threw the trimmings in the yard trash can yesterday, then raked and cleaned up the back yard, Didn't even lose one pound with all that! c.i.

tz yes true ... i live in the inner city - but the upside is that my geraniums (pelargoniums, not the hardy type) survived their 3rd winter outside in their chimney pots - unprotected and flowering non stop!! admittedly the flowers and leaves were battered but they had flowers on for Christmas!

The weather now is brilliant. I have been painting out in the garden instead of going into the studio. (the lawn in a bit multicoloured but it will grow out!)

My garden, if I had one would be full of leave to day after a very windy weekend.

Better than yesterday! Spent most of yesterday raking leaves, cleaning out spindly plants & trimming everything. Wonderful weather...76 degrees. Everything is "multicoloured" now, as Vivien put it.

Must get garden in good shape...sister is coming for a visit at the end of the week. From Seattle, land of flowers.

Seattle isn't the land of flowers anymore, Eva. It's been cold--we even had some wet snow yesterday morning. Time to pull out the dead stuff and spread leaves over the dirt in readiness for next spring. It's on my to-do list as soon as it gets a bit warmer...

I'm engaged in "shock and awe" tactics in my yarden. We had a wonderful summer with regular rains. Result, the garden turned into a jungle and at the end it was impossible (because of the occasional rains) to do an effective job of cutting it back.

Now we're in a largely dry period and I'm out there with every cutting and whacking tool I have, slashing my way through 11' Maximilian sunflowers (no exaggeration), shoulder-high stands of little and big blue stem and Indian grasses, huge pin-cushions of zexmenia, and straggly salvias and gauras. Pretty soon I'll actually be able to get through to the raised beds. Cut and haul. That's what I'm doing. Then I'll give it a fall feeding of Medina. Then I'm going to get drunk and swear off gardening.

Whew! Thanks for telling me that, D'artagnan. Now I can slow down a little...