Leycesteria formosa, my favorite plant in the garden this week

You can probably guess why. Oh, those pagodas of fruit!

I got this Himalayan honeysuckle from Ricki at a plant exchange. I've come to realize that if Ricki tells you you need a plant, you listen.

The foliage has a nice color with branches that arch and layer pleasingly.

The flowers are fairly unremarkable and I detect no fragrance on mine, though others report it has one. Reports also vary on its hardiness: Davesgarden reports 4a-9b while Annie's Annuals says 9-11. Has anyone below 8b grown this one? Where it doesn't die back to the ground in winter it can be cut back hard in the spring to keep its size in check. Mature size sounds to be 6-8' tall and wide.

Reports also vary about where it should be sited. Mine is in part sun and gets regular water. It seems content so far. I'm so glad I found a spot for it.

My favorite plant in the garden this week is hosted by Loree at Danger Garden. Be sure to check out what she's liking this week!

A gate. Finally.

Since we sunk the fence posts a few weeks back we haven't progressed much. I hung the stringers and outer boards on two of the sections but couldn't move further until we tore out the old corner post.

That post was almost completely rotted through and hosting quite a community of insects. Two summers ago, when I replaced that fence, I reused the post, feeling that it would hold up until we were ready to extend the fence, and it did.

This weekend we had to dig the old one out, re-sink a new post, then finish off the fence and gate. I took the boards off the front and watched in horror as gobs of insects emerged from their nest inside the post. The post lifted right out of its concrete footing and I asked Greg to get it as far from the house as possible, in case the insects I saw were termites. He dropped it right next to the house and I swear I've never wanted to marry him so badly, just so I could divorce him.

I flipped out, he moved it, we were cranky as hell with each other for a few hours. Normal home improvement stuff.

Next we had to dig out the old concrete, which wasn't too bad. We dug all around, then wedged a board under the lip, like a lever. Greg stood/bounced on that while I cranked with the pickax from another direction. And now we have this sweet concrete phallus to use as garden art!

This was an interesting project because I have built all the fences thus far, in some cases without any help. All of a sudden Greg had opinions on the building, and he was telling me to do things.

Anybody who knows me in real life knows that shit don't fly. Unless we're in an emergency and you're trying to talk me through landing the plane or delivering a baby in a taxi, don't tell me what to do. Anyway, I am the worst but we got through it. Greg is the engineer so he designed and prepped the gate. We hung it and leveled it (definitely the hardest part) and got it about 95% done.

Now we need to cut off the tops of the fence posts, rip down some narrower slats (we don't own a table saw), and stain and seal the boards.

I'm reusing some of the old boards to close the gaps on our back fence. As the boards have expanded and contracted in the sun and rain, the gaps have grown and we can see quite a lot of our neighbors' yard (and they ours).

I'm worried we'll forget to close the bedroom drapes and give our neighbors' kids an accidental anatomy lesson. So up the boards are going. They are wonderful neighbors but I'm happy not to see them through the fence.

But the thing that's making me happiest of all is the new gate, which means we have TWO entrances to our yard. We can complete one continuous loop through our front and back yards. Extending the gate also makes our backyard feel bigger and more spacious.

Before

Now

Next up: sod removal and the acquisition of a hammock to better enjoy the fruits of our labor. And maybe some sort of screen to block the view of the AC unit.

Mo' beds, mo' problems.

Last summer Loree gifted me the retaining blocks she removed from her yard during the great Bishops Weed expurgation. They sat in a pile in various areas of the yard, collecting spiders and looking terrible. My ultimate goal is to replace all of the retaining stones in the backyard with the same stone I used on the new shade bed but I spent way too much on plants last month and it's just not in the budget. I should use the free material I already have, right?

I started out a few weeks ago by dry fitting the blocks into roughly the area I wanted. Seeing that this corner was actually incorporated with the rest of the garden made me so happy. All of a sudden I realized how much this corner has been bugging me. But then I realized that I wanted to bring the line out a ways, so I had to remove some sod. And then I accidentally removed too much sod. I think I'm getting too good at it.

Side note: North Portland soil is much sandier than other parts of the city, where they have thick clay. Every time I get a plant from Scott I realize all over again how lucky I am, soil wise. His soil is sticky and unmovable and when it dries out it's hard as a rock. I've been able to see my soil improve dramatically (and quickly) by adding mulch every spring and compost every fall. My soil was badly compacted but I have almost no clay. I'm very lucky. The downside of North and NE Portland is that it was built atop a giant anthill. I could tell you horror stories of friends discovering ant infestations in their water heaters, so huge that grad students were brought in to study it.

Why am I telling you this? Because I discovered that every ant in Portland is living in this bed. I'll poison them if they come inside the house but out here they can do what they want. But, ugh.

Anyway, this area has been looking really good with all the ferns coming up, so good that I'm thinking about moving them.

I'm thinking about moving them forward and tucking another ninebark between the cedar and the pieris. 'Diabolo' grows insanely well in the northwest, sometimes reaching twenty feet (or so says Dan Hinkley). I don't think it would get that tall in a dry shady spot like this, but some height would be appreciated here. Or will the dark foliage just disappear in this area? I'm also considering a Mahonia 'Soft Caress.' Am I missing another shrub that would be good for this spot? Or should I leave it as is?

I'm badly in need of more plants to fill out this bed but I need to stop for a bit and let my wallet recuperate from April's shopping sprees and my trips to Rare Plant Research and Wind Dancer Garden. I thought creating this bed with donated stones would be thrifty but somehow I need to go shopping again.

Get opinionated on me. You all have such good suggestions.

I'm done with High Country Gardens

I placed an order with High Country Gardens back in March. The plants are intended to go in the entrance to my yard, which is currently a weedy, awful mess.

They charged my card at the time of the order, which is fairly unusual for mail order nurseries (in my experience). I should have received my plants the week of April 15th. That week came and went and my plants never arrived. I called them and was told that I was "in shipping" and that my plants would go out the following Monday. But no plants arrived.

I called again and they told me that Bouteloua gracilis 'Blonde Ambition' had held up the order. It would ship as soon as that was ready.

Still no plants arrived.

I got a mass email saying that their winter had been cold and their stock wasn't where it would normally be at that time of year. My plants would ship the week of May 13th!

Then I randomly received an email last week stating that they would be unable to fulfill two of my plant requests (Lonicera reticulata 'Kintzley's Ghost' and Gaillardia 'Arizona Sun') and they were refunding the money and crediting me $10 to use at the nursery.

I still have no plants. At this point I want to cancel my order completely but when you call you get put through to a voicemail box that is full and no longer takes messages. When I tried to cheat and choose the phone option to place an order I still can't get a live person. It's like they just disappeared, taking my money with them.

I've placed orders with HCG and had no problems in the past. Now that they've been sold to American Meadows the whole operation seems to have gone to shit. I don't think I'll be using that $10 credit. Buyer beware.

What do you think?

I was buying more rock this weekend so I could finally finish off the shade bed in the backyard. They've started giving me a discount at Oregon Decorative Rock, I'm there so often.

Greg thinks I should add a third layer of rock to make the retaining wall look more substantial.

That makes things a little tricky, since the soil level should rise to meet the top of the wall. You want the soil to meet the house at least four, but ideally six inches, from where the wood starts so you don't get termites. So I'd have to create a slope and grade the soil back toward the house. It's not impossible but it might look funny.

What say you? Add another level?

Leave it be?

I can't decide.

How to fill a really large pot

Do you have pots of soil lying around? Every time I move a plant around (which is a lot) I end up with extra soil. I don't know how it happens. I mean, I know why it happens but it's seems like there's way too much leftover soil. So I have random pots of it stashed all over the yard.

I've wanted a second galvanized tank for the area to the right of the bamboo and to the left of the Pieris for a while now. The long term goal is to have a pathway running in front of them, so it works to keep everything narrow and contained. This area was a weedy mess, covered in popweed and uneven with holes from where we pulled the clump of bamboo out of the ground.

My friend Carrie told me that Bamboo Craftsman was getting a shipment of stock tanks in this weekend, and while they were more expensive than Burns Feed, they were five minutes away. Burns Feed is forty minutes each way. And they were borrowing Greg's truck, so they could pick one up for me and bring it to me, in the lazy princess fashion I deserve.

I got a six foot tank, which is huuuuuge. I weeded and dumped a whole bunch of gravel to level the area, then started to wonder how I was going to fill this.

I started by grabbing all the concrete chunks and broken bricks I've recently unearthed from the yard. My yard has a seemingly endless supply of rubble. This ensures that when I realize that the container is crooked or off-center, I'll be SOL because the thing weighs a million pounds.

Then I added gravel because I put gravel in, on, and over everything now.

Then I grabbed all that sod I had removed from the new bed on the back of the house and installed it grass-side down.

This means I don't have to try and sneak it into the yard debris bin, which means I can remove more sod from somewhere else in the yard and sneak that in the bin.

For now it got six inches of mulch on top, which should hopefully put the final nail in the coffin for the sod. In a few weeks I'll take all the random pots full of soil I have lying around and amend it with compost and plant up this container.

I have my heart set on a colocasia I read about in Fine Gardening last summer, Colocasia esculenta 'Coffee Cups'.

Image source

When it rains the leaves fill with water until they hit a certain point (presumably when they get all steamed up), then they tip over and pour it out. I don't even care if this plant doesn't fit in with my garden theme; it's kinetic and beautiful. Remind me of this when I complain next fall about how this tank "just doesn't go" with my yard.

Snap to grid

I'm at that point in the gardening season where I want to do something, but if I want to do that, I have do this thing first, which means that I might as well do this other thing while I'm at it . . . and so now I have a bunch of projects going all at once and nothing's finished and everything looks like hell.

It started with this area on the back of the house, which faces north. I had the two shrubs back here ground out so I could start fresh.

This is the first time I'll have an area in shade that isn't dry. Hooray! So I started removing sod. But first I felt like I needed to address the area under our little deck, which is weedy and pitted and not sloped correctly.

I took some of the gravel that had been languishing on a tarp in the front yard and dumped it under here until everything was level.

You'll never guess where the tarp used to be.

I had to stop to take photos because the light was so good that night. Also, I was starving.

The back rain garden

I put down rock and I started planting, grabbing ferns and hostas from the side entrance, and the shrub mint and oakleaf hydrangea from under the cedar. And damn it if I didn't plant everything in two perfectly straight rows. What is wrong with me?

Every time I'd dig something up to move it so it wouldn't be in a line I'd somehow have a brain fart and the thing would end up back in line with everything else. And I ran out of rock, so this bed still isn't finished. How do you like that reveal?

As a palate cleanser, let's admire my new Darmera peltata. I bought it at the HPSO sale and the cashier proclaimed it "so ugly only a mother could love it."

This Oregon native is a relative of rhubarb and its leaves will grow to as much as two feet in width. And they also have flowers, which aren't very exciting.

I told the cashier that, come summer, she'd be jealous of my ugly plant. She just may not be jealous of the rest of my garden, which is a swampy half-finished mess.

One of these things is not like the other

One of my tulips mutated or reverted and is now yellow. And it had the audacity to produce an offshoot bulb! Part of me doesn't care, as I already have a mess of orange, pale pink, peach, black, and red bulbs. What's the harm in adding yellow to the mix? (For the record, the pale pink in the very back offends me the most in this scheme.)

In other strange surprises, I've found English ivy popping up in the backyard. One spot was in the rain garden, which made me emit this terrible gargling yodel-scream as I ripped it out. This is the part they don't tell you about when creating a bird-friendly yard: sometimes they spread your neighbors' invasive plants to your garden. It's a good thing they're so cute when they splash around in the birdbath.

Help

I just need to admit something right up front: this is all my fault. I have badly abused a tree and whatever the equivalent of the DHS is for trees should be called on me.

In the NE corner of my yard, the one I want to be the focal point of the garden, I planted a Cryptomeria japonica 'Elegans.' It was beautiful. 

But then we took off its braces and lines and it started slouching. It got much worse than this.

I finally yanked it in November and put it the only place I had room: the vegetable bed. And it immediately flopped over and I did nothing. I just left it like this all winter because I am a terrible person.

I needed to plant up the vegetable garden but I didn't have a big enough pot for the tree. I was hoping to pawn the tree off on Jane, who I was confident could teach it to stand up straight again.

So I plopped it here, just to the right of where it used to be. I was hopeful that it standing up straight-ish. I thought, "Maybe if it's a little more protected, with some shrubs to lean up on, it will be okay."

I even thought that maybe I could move it over to the left and plant the Korean fir to the left of that, and it would look something like this:

But then I realized that the Cryptomeria will always be bigger than the Korean fir. And while I was in the shower I thought, maybe I'll just plant a deciduous tree like a Japanese maple and be done with it. Yes, they're ubiquitous (and not evergreen) but they are pretty.

And then the Cryptomeria did this and I'm back to thinking it can't be saved.

Can this tree be rehabbed? And what would you plant in this corner? I feel like it needs to be anchored with something tall, preferably evergreen.

The view in winter

I currently have a bunch of grasses and Joe Pye weed planted in the back, so we'll have winter interest next year. I still feel like it needs an exclamation point, though. Maybe I should just move the potted weeping blue spruce here and call it good? If you have ideas or opinions, my ears are open.