Every garden needs somebody to maintain it.
Good point, ci! I am weeding every single day at the moment!
Ach, weeding, one of my least favorite tasks. As you might imagine the Piffka gardens are... informal.
I do like a plant that can hold its own against the onslaught of weeds. No wimps in this garden.
I still don't understand the joke about winter-flowering pansies. Do you mean that you truly can't grow anything in the winter? Sheesh.
ehBeth and LittleK must live in Alaska
Winter pansies can survive through short periods of snow here in Scotland! Longer term snow, well, I don't know, never sits for more than a week at a time here, usually just lasts three days or so!
Pansies can sometimes make it through our winters. Sometimes not. I figure it's worth the risk, so I plant 'em anyway. Gives me something to look at through the windows that isn't brown or white. (Piffka, it's too cold to go out in the garden anyway. But at least we've been getting a mid-winter warm spell for the last few years.)
Weeding? HA! Haven't you guys ever heard of mulch? As soon as you plant something, give it 3-4" of mulch and you can forget about having to weed. (Plant seeds in frames off the ground.)
Plants that flower in witner?? Whats this? Sounds great but, I dont believe it.
Roses...is it just me or does every garden have some sort of roses? I dont think its a necessity but, of all the gardens I can think of there is some variation of a rose somewhere.
How about a trelis or fence, wall to climb, etc or other such ornament?
My favourite winter flowering plant is primula. I can plant these in November, bought flowering from the garden centre, and they will flower right through to May, surviving hard frosts!
<img src = "http://www.boomspeed.com/thinkzinc/primula.jpg">
Eva--
I'm with you on mulch. Every gardener needs mulch--and mulch is so much more attractive than naked dirt.
Flowers don't bloom in winter when there is snow on the ground for several months at a time.
Keep in mind that I turned my furnace on in mid-September last year, and turned it off less than 3 weeks ago. That's 10 months of furnace use! (and i don't even like a particularly warm house) Now the temps are hovering around 100F - you've got to have tough, fast plants for these conditions.
Gardens should have some underlying structure, like the path.
Gorgeous primulas... commonly known here as primroses, I suppose they are in Scotland, too. I have some that have come back every year for five or six years. Nice colors but the slugs love 'em.
I hope this has not been said, and if it has, its so obvious . Every garden needs a plan that, when implimented, will give the gardener a sense of being tied to some structure, a path, a pond, some rooms, some areas of different colors and stuff. We had a plan done by a really good ILA and we met with her for weeks . I have no idea how she did this for so little money. We stuck to this plan as a schedule for many years and now we just sit back and enjoy (and weed and feed of course)
How about a cat that hunts undercover of the wildflowers that scares the crap out of you when you accidentally almost step on it?
Got one of those!
how about 2 small lurking dogs? i've got those. Miss Cleo just about took Setanta out on the weekend. She took to sitting right behind his feet in the daylilies when we were bagging yard waste - he almost went @ss over tea kettle trying not to squash her when he stepped back.
:: doggie sidebar - just got Cleo a new tag for her collar - trouble in a fur coat
::
winter flowering primulae! Ha! We have very few things that will bloom in the winter, one is witchhazel - love the stuff!
Yes, farmer, I said it two posts before you, maybe we had crossing typing...
well, I'm a garden designer (landscape architect) and have a bias towards seeing some amount of garden space have underlying coherence, no matter how blowsy and fulgent the planting. You enter the space how? you look where? in many good gardens there is a focal point, usually with a path to it, and some side nooks, some surprises. The components will keep changing if anyone keeps gardening, but there will be a basic pattern, whether it is the formal sort of garden with bilateral symmetry, or a meadow area with surrounding garden...a garden is more interesting if you don't perceive it all at once.
People like myself and my design partner don't care so much if you do pansies this year or not...as that you have flowering low plants right there tucked in as a blanket below...what? The actual plant chosen comes close to last in the garden design, after figuring out what is tall where, what is screening, what is a contrasting green, what draws the eye, what forms a dark underline, what is a specimen, like sculpture...
ok, ok, in real life, surprising delights happen by fortuitous passing by a stand on the way into the grocery store, and that adds life to gardens. Still, they are first of all spaces......formed by plants in soil and light and air and water and sound and sky....
not to say I don't care about pansies,or roses, though I have grown to appreciate gardens of just greens, or grays...or deciduous trees and their lost leaves...... but I don't care about the pansies first.
Again, not to knock pansies, but I see them as the icing, or the knots on the cross stitched pattern.
Yeah! Osso, did I know you are a landscape designer?
Well, I speak from a little piquance, in that much space in home decor magazines is devoted to gardens relative to horticulture; so are tv shows. Very few have a thing to do with actual spatial design. The one I did notice that approached it, years ago now, had Audrey Hepburn going through a garden, and it seemed to me it was her, herself, who was pointing actual spatial design out. Might be wrong, might have just been written for her, but maybe not.
I lived for decades in a place that was not so long ago a semiarid desert, (west Los Angeles) and I lived in the area that was emboldened by the import of exotic plants from all the world that thrived there with the right amount of irrigation. You too can grow a sequoia in the desert, or the golf course. Again, although use of exotics is another tangent, and I am not totallllllllly against exotics, all the emphasis in the sunday magazines is on that particular bloom.... and almost nothing on shaping space with appropriate plants. Even with the articles that talk about native plants, they just go on and on about the plants and don't explain how to make the spaces actually work.
OK, ok, I am ranting. Will quiet down. Soon.
