More gravel. More grasses. More sleeping.

I've been an insomniac my whole life. Last fall everything got way worse and I basically stopped sleeping. Things are a lot better now, thanks to a light box, melatonin, and what they refer to as "sleep hygiene." At night I cut out blue light which means for the last two hours of my day I live in a world without the internet or TV. I have to read books or work on projects that don't require the Internet. This means I mostly read books because every project leads back to the Internet.

I was reading Beth Chatto's Gravel Garden the other night and I wanted to look up some plants she described . . . but I couldn't. I just had to jot down a note to research it later. It's probably for the best, since I'd just end up on Plant Lust, then I'd fall down the rabbit hole of Google Images and various garden blogs. How did people garden before the Internet? And how much more productive could I be without an iPad?

In our own gravel garden things are chugging along. We've figured out where we want the deck and now we just have to figure out how to build it. The original plan was to wait on the deck until next summer but as I had rock being delivered, Greg said, "Maybe we should just do it this summer," hence my mad scrambling and panic a few weeks back. All of the sudden that vague rectangle on the paper plan needed to be finalized.

We've marked out the spot for the new deck with yellow spikes that I WILL trip over at some point. We're still deciding whether we want to build the deck before or after the wedding in June.

The parabola-shaped rock wall was changed to an even curve. Greg thinks this is a downgrade but my brain likes it better.

I need to retool some of the planting because I totally planted on a grid and I didn't overlap my plants enough, so I have big blobs of the same plants that don't meld nicely into the other blobs. Anyway.

What did I plant?

The centerpiece of this bed is Arctostaphylos 'St. Helena.' I went to Xera and pumped Paul and Greg for their opinions on the very best manzanitas. I originally wanted A. viscida 'Sweet Adinah' but they warned me that it's prone to randomly losing branches and it's incredibly picky about soil, location, and drainage. St. Helena has those big beautiful leaves and will handle being in a northern aspect (though it's still getting 6-8 hours of sun a day) better than others. I also like how blue the leaves are.

Arctostaphylos manzanita 'St. Helena'

I wanted this bed to be low water and I wanted a lot of grasses. We've got a whole bunch of Schizachyrium 'The Blues', Pennisetum spatheolatum, Anemanthele lessoniana, and Festuca roemeri.

Schizachyrium scoparium 'The Blues' in the garden of Greg Shepherd

Pennisetum spatheolatum send up hundreds of little exclamation points

Anemanthele lessoniana in my side yard

Festuca roemeri Photo source: The Evergreen State College

I have a bunch of Achnatherum calamagrostis on order, which will also get squeezed in here.

I also shoehorned in smaller shrubs like Baptisia 'Purple Smoke' and Hypericum 'Albury Purple.' I also rescued a crapload of Salvia 'May Night' from the front garden so something in this bed wouldn't be tiny. Can you tell I love purple?

I also bought one of those stupid Digiplexis annuals on a whim, which I now regret. I do not like that pink.

Baptisia 'Purple Smoke'

In other parts of the garden, I tore out the flowering currant (Ribes sanguineum) that used to live in between the two clumps of bamboo. I hated the color of the blooms and it's a pretty boring shrub. I vacillated for years about ripping out this one. It's drought tolerant and low maintenance but it wasn't sparking joy, so out it went. I planted a new Ribes in the front garden and it blooms a nice hot pink that plays nicer with all of my orange flowers.

In its place I planted Tetrapanax papyifera 'Steroidal Giant' (which is hiding behind the clump of Acanthus spinosus), Miscanthus purpurescens, a cananna (Canna musafolia), and three Calamagrostis foliosa that I rescued from another part of the garden where they didn't get enough sun to color up like they should.

The back rain garden finally got edged too. It's always had a soil berm edging it, which just petered out into cedar chips.

We're not missing a stone, that's the overflow notch.

It looks pretty silly right now because I'm still futzing with the stone placement. Then all the cedar chips in the pathway will get scraped up and replaced with gravel. I still have so much work to do but I'm pleased with how everything is coming along.

We tested happy hour in the garden this weekend and it still worked! Whew.

I feel so much better

Remember how I said that I felt off because I hadn't bought any plants in more than six weeks?

Scott and I took a trip to Wind Dancer to comb through Carolyn Kolb's remaining stock and stuffed my Honda to the gills with grasses. That wonderful spray of airy seedheads is Pennisetum spathiolatum. I bought it for my hell strip but now I'm wishing I had bought many more because I can think of ninety places it would look great.

Carolyn has closed Wind Dancer but she has begun garden coaching. I'm seriously considering hiring her because her garden is incredible and her plant knowledge is seemingly endless. And I need help, especially in the backyard. She also convinced us we need to attend the Salem Hardy Plant Society fall sale on September 14th. There's a really nicely curated selection of vendors (Dancing Oaks! Desert Northwest! Sebright Gardens!) and it sounds like the location is great.

We actually got real rain this week, which was wonderful. Sadly, it's probably not enough to soften the ground enough to plant these. Have you started buying plants again? Did you ever stop?

One of my most exciting acquisitions was Pennisetum 'Burgandy Bunny.' (Zones 6a-9b)

What you can't see from my crummy photo is that Carolyn had this planted adjacent to a Salvia 'Amistad' and some dark purple sedums, creating all of these wonderful color echos. You can bet I'm going to steal that.

Happy Friday!

I'm deeply, madly in love with my meadow right now.

A neighbor walked by last night and said, "Wow! The lawn looks great!" :)

The saddest new planting bed ever

I whined and complained that I wanted rain so the ground would soften. After about five days of heavy rain we got a sun break and I headed out to plant the future meadowscape:

Despite the rain, the ground was still hard as a rock in places. Despite my sincerest desire to not hurt the dogwood, I ran into a lot of roots and might have just said, "Eff it, let's hope it lives." I really hope it lives.

Keeping with the tradition of doing everything wrong, I also planted everything too closely together. I followed Carolyn Kolb's recommendations for planting grasses . . . sort of. She recommends cutting off the bottom 1/2" from nursery starts (my bread knife worked perfectly), roughing up the roots a bit, then giving the grasses a smidge of granular fertilizer and some compost to get them going.

Despite the fact that I've been sitting on these grasses for over a month, I had neither compost nor fertilizer on hand. Fish emulsion a few weeks after planting will have to do.

Everything looks so lame right now but I'm hopeful it will look great come spring. And next fall should be spectacular. I have a mix of switch grass (Panicum virgatum 'Shenandoah'), Pennisetum 'White Lancer' (Pennisetum macrourum), and little bluestem grasses (Schizachyrium scoparium 'Blue Heaven'), plus a fountain grass for good measure (Pennisetum alopecuroides 'Redhead'). This is part of the master plan that Scott drew up. Hopefully I won't screw it up too much. I need to smother more lawn so I can fit in the rest of the grasses and plants I have planned.

The inspiration for this planting scheme was a photo by Pam Penick, located here. Large swaths of different colored grasses will be intermixed with some bright drought-tolerant perennials. My goal is to water this once a week or less, once established.

I'm trying to tell myself that this will grow and look okay but I always doubt my spacing. But hey, this looked lame once, too.