Garden Bloggers Bloom Day - October 2014

Welcome to the October 2014 Garden Bloggers Bloom Day. It has been a year now since I started this blog and I am very happy with the outcome. I met lots of great people, gardeners and bloggers and I learned so much from them.
Here is what is blooming in our garden. Lets start with perennials:

Anemone tomentosa "Robustissima" 

The most floriferous Japanese anemone in my garden is this "Party Dress" variety. Very floppy and I give-up on finding how to stake it properly.

Kiss-me-over-the-garden-gate

Catchy title don't you think?  It is the name of the plant below.  Well, just wait to see the how irresistable the view is!  What to love more? The airy pink bloom, the height or the variegated foliage?
Started this from seed indoor. The seed came in a small envelope by mail from that amazing gardener and blogger Nan Ondra.  She gave away for free hundreds of packets collected, packed, labeled and mailed with her own hands last fall for the readers of her blog Hayefield. Will I ever be able to share my time and garden like that ?!

Here it is! As eccentric as the name! It got  3-4' tall for me. It could get as high as 6'.  One plant had very little variegation. The other three had variegation as close to the one in the picture.  Planted half of the seedlings in part sun moist soil and half in full sun very dry poor soil.  In the sunny area, the plants didn't make it past 3 feet and the foliage was smaller.  The foliage shown below is from one of the plants grown in part shade and moist soil.

Varigated-kiss-me-over-the-garden-gate or
Persicaria orientalis ‘Shiro-gane Nishiki’ (grown as an annual here in Ohio)

Thank you Nan Ondra!  Now lets hope this beauty is able to re-seed by itself since I am no longer planning to go to the pain of caring over tiny tiny annual seedlings until they make it to become this beautiful. Or maybe I will!

I will also share today's post with Floral Friday Fotos blog.

Foliage Follow-up -September 2014

This is my first attempt at joining Pam Penick on Folliage Follow-up meme at her Digging blog.  Folliage is very important for me..possibly more important than flowers, reason why I plant a lot of perennials because I like their foliage. For this month I pick just a few of the many great foliage plants I grow and will share with you more in future posts.

Purple Fountain Grass (Pennisetum setaceum "Rubrum") is the center plant in my front pots

The front pots never get watered by me, just the rainfall so the plants have to be drought tolerant.  Also, this area of the house faces west and gets the afternoon sun.  While the Purple Fountain Grass is not hardy to our area (zone 9) it is such a easy to grow, hard working grass.  I've been buying it for the last 4 years and I am still not tired of it. Every year I change the companion plants to vary the look of the container but I haven't changed yet the Primadona of this arrangement.  The filler plant this year is a cute spotted coleus that hasn't grown bushy enough and you can hardly see it here (possibly not enough water).  The trailers are Sweet potato vine on the back, Calibrachoa "Apricot Punch" and Wire Wine ( Muehlenbeckia maxillaries) in the front. The pots are placed near blue foliage plants as "Elijah Blue" grass, "Halcyon" Hosta and "Blue star" Juniper. You can also see the Sedum "Brilliance" and a taller pyramidal form of Dwarf Alberta Spruce.

Ornamental grass, Eulalia or Miscanthus sinensis "Adagio" (zone 5-9)

Garden Blogger Bloom Day - September 2014

Welcome to our September garden here in Ohio, USA (USDA hardiness Zone 5b). As you are going to see, there are lots of flowers blooming in the garden. This month I will have them organized by color to make it ..well more organized than it actually looks like this time of the year.

Whites

Autumn Clematis or Clematis terniflora

Yellow Wax Bells

Kirengeshoma palmate  or yellow wax bells is a species of flowering plant in the family Hydrangaceae, native to Japan [1]. It is a clump-forming herbaceous perennial growing to 25 in tall by 30 in broad, with palmate leaves, and fleshy, pale yellow flowers borne on slender maroon stems in late summer. This plant is growing well for me in a shady, moist location in acidic soil.

I never see nice pictures of this plant when I google it, reason why I want to post mine.  I had this plant for about 8 years and moved it around once when it looked very sick and sad couple springs ago. 

It has beautiful large foliage all season until late summer. I like the foliage a lot.  

In this May picture you see a bluish tint to the leaves  and a lovely texture.

The blooms are delicate light yellow blooming now since beginning of September. The stems that support the blooms are too thin and long for the weight of the bloom reason why they droop or fall all the way to the ground.  In this picture, some of the weaker blooming stems are supported with green bamboo sticks that are cut not too high and not too low so they hide well inside the plant.

The mature specimen I have is quite large.  It covers some of its weaker neighbors. It completely dominated two of my highly prized Ligularia, reason why they will look for a new home this fall. I am going to try to propagate the Yellow Wax Bell plant.  If I succeed, I will follow-up with a post about the details.

References[edit]

1. Jump up^ RHS A-Z encyclopedia of garden plants. United Kingdom: Dorling Kindersley. 2008. p. 1136.

How to grow tomatoes in a part sun garden

Garden Blogger Bloom Day - August 2014

Welcome to my one day late Garden Blogger Bloom Day for August 2014.

Here is Ohio, US we have hardiness zone 5b and I can tell you that all in all we had an awesome summer for gardening.

I was a much lazier gardener than last year so weeding still needs to be done, deadheading, and splitting but I can tell you this:  I loved this summer in the garden!  I strongly agree with Carol at May Dreams gardens that this has been the best summer in a long long time.

There are three beds in my garden that you can't pass by without noticing: The Roses Bed in the back by the patio, the Outside Path Bed which leads to the patio and in front of the house to the North is the North Front Bed loaded with July and August blooming plants.  So lets start the tour, shall we?

Roses Bed on august 16, 2014

Chamomile girl

You may remember from a spring time post that my daughter has decided to grow chamomile from seed for her little 4 sqft garden this year.  It was a slow process like with all the seeds but we all learned new things from it.  Here is the post on seeds.

Out of the many seedlings that sprouted, Alexis planted only two plants in her bed and Nic (the other tea drinker) took the remaining ones and tucked them in a far corner of the veggie garden directly in the ground.  All plants grew large and flowered profusely.
Alexis is been picking the flowers to have them dried for tea couple of times this month.
I am very proud of my daughter. When she want something she will get it done (like her parents).  If only we can find the things that she really wants!

Picking the flowers with a friend

Why chamomile tea you wonder?  As children, we had to drink a lot of this medicinal tea during our many colds and sicknesses.  It is a very calming tea but I have to be honest, I do not like its taste much. In turn, I offered it to my children when they were babies and as they were growing for colds and stomach discomfort and

my daughter has fallen in love with the taste. She likes a little sugar added to her cup and a slice of lemon (who blames her for that?). 

For more information on why you may want to grow this wonder medicinal plant, go to this article.

July is almost over

I've been "missing in action" for a month and a half but I continued to take lots of pictures of the garden during this time.  My husband surprised me with an early birthday gift - a new digital camera which in my opinion gives my garden justice (:).
Here are some of my favorite garden views during the month of July.

But where are the day lilies you say? No hemerocallis in this garden?

Here is a bad picture of the daylily bed followed by a nice collage of all the day lilies that I grow.

Till next time, happy gardening!

Heavenly early June blooms

The most beautiful and active month of the year -May is over but June is richer with larger blooms and nice sunny weather.  Kids vacation starts tomorrow and they are so so excited! I am too as I am tired of waking-up early.
Let me show you some new blooms from the week-end and the beginning of the week. The most reliable and the most popular perennials grown in a garden are blooming now like Irises:

My favorite is the white one:

Japanese Iris

Here is a collage of my entire iris collection:

Counter clock wise starting with the white: Japanese Iris, Siberian Iris, Yellow Flag Iris, 3 German Irises all received as gifts-don't know the varieties, Iris cristata 

Simple Peonies

Double red

Love the red double peony as it transforms in a alien flower at the end of the bloom.

Below is a collage of my individual peonies portraits.  Three varieties are missing as the buds are still closed. If you do not grow peonies, you should!  These are the easiest plants to grow! That is not what I said 14 years ago.  I planted my first purchased plant (without flowers or buds -big mistake) and it didn't flower for 4 years.  Then I pulled it out and threw it in the trash.  It might have been a wild variety or I might have planted it too deep.  Every other one that I tried after that was fine  and grew bigger and bigger every year including dormant roots which is how I started 4 of the 5 varieties shown below.

Lupines

Oriental poppies going and going - Papaver "Princess Victoria Louise"

Tradescantia

Widow's tears or Tradescantia

I left the Clematis known as the "Queen of the Climbers" for the end.  There are so many varieties out there. So far I grow four that bloom at different times of the year. I am sure I will continue to add more as I mastered the pruning of all 3 classes of clematis last year.

Clematis "Marie Louise Jensen" and me

Last year by mid June this clematis got a lot of attention when combined with the red rose climber "Blaze"  I posted that combination here and it is by far the most visited post on my blog.  The roses all suffered after the past frigid winter and died almost all the way to the ground.  I have been lucky that all started to grow again including the climber which has buds on one of the stems.  It will take a couple of years to recover to its former glory but I am sure that it will happen.
What is blooming in your garden right now?  If you have a blog, leave me a link to your last post and I will for sure check it out.
I shared this post with Floral Friday Fotos where beautiful photographs are shared by bloggers around the world.

Oh May! - Japanese Primroses

I don't even know where to start!  The garden looks marvelous in May! Especially at the end of May.  I can't seem to keep-up with the weeds but most beds are so grown that the weeds are not so visible.
I can probably write a post a day based on the amount of flowers blooming every day in the garden!  It is insane and gorgeous at the same time.
Lets make the focus of today's post the Japanese primroses which I started from one plant given by my neighbor and friend and a hand full of seed scattered in a moist spot eight years ago.  As long as you have continuously moist beds you can also grow these gorgeous candelabra primroses.
Primula Japonica charms all my visiting friends and gardeners with its showy pink flowers and spreading whorls of bright green, wrinkled edge foliage. It grows well in zones 4 to 9 and it will reach a mature height of 12 to 24 inches.  It is is seldom plagued by pests or disease and will live for many years if kept in suitably moist and shaded conditions.  

Primula Japonica

This spring I noticed so so many new seedlings of these primulas that I decided to build a new garden bed on a lawn spot that was always too wet to mow.  The result?  A stream of Japanese Primrose enchanting us this time of the year:

 See the stream of primulas?  And it is going to get better and better every year!

So I will wrap-up this post with this picture! My favorite garden view so far this year!