Friday, May 15, 2015

Garden bloggers' bloom day May 2015

Good lord, this is a bloomy month. Everything is blooming right on schedule, so I'll just show new plants or ones that I missed last year (or we'd be here all day).

Akebia longerracemosa 'Victor's Secret'

Papaver orientale 'Royal Wedding'

Camassia leichtlinii semiplena, Allium christophii, and Verbascum bombyciferum 'Arctic Summer'

Iris x pacifica 'Alison's pink lips'

Stipa barbata

Stipa gigantea

Parahebe perfoliata glows from across the yard

Verbascum bombyciferum 'Arctic Summer'

Disporum cantoniense 'Night Heron'

Erigeron glaucus 'Wayne Roderick' with Camassia quamash

Cistus obtusifolius

A very happy bloom day to you! Thanks, as always, to our host Carol at May Dream Gardens.

Tuesday, May 5, 2015

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.

Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Garden bloggers' bloom day April 2015

Happy bloom day! 


It's April, which means it's camassia month! Huzzah!

Camassia leichtlinii 'Blue Danube'


Iris x pacifica 'Civic Pride'

Iris x pacifica 'The Eyes Have It'


Hooker's fairy bells (Disporum hookeri/Prosartes hookeri)

Geranium phaeum 'Darkest of All'

Epimedium grandiflora 'Red Queen'

Tulipa 'Flair' with a bird-planted Cotinus coggygria

Cistus obtusifolius

Salvia 'Flame'

Syringa patula 'Miss Kim'

Lewisia cotyledon

Lewisia cotyledon 'White Splendor'

Othonna cheirifolia

False Soloman's Seal (Maianthemum racemosum)

Coronilla v. spp. glauca 'Variegata'

The blooms of Darmera peltata emerge before the foliage does.

A very happy bloom day to you! As always, thank you to our host, Carol, at May Dreams Gardens.

Monday, April 13, 2015

Hardscaping is hard.

We haven't been very good lately at taking it easy on the weekends. Last weekend they were calling for rain but then on the Thursday before the forecast changed to sun and I was like, "I guess there's no reason not to tear out the lawn in the backyard."


This was back breaking and it sucked so hard that I'm glad we may never have to remove sod at this house again. This was before, with our weird boards showing where a low deck will go.


As before, we put our sod on craigslist and a bunch of weirdos showed up and took it home. Enjoy your crap lawn! You're insane. Also, my back hurts.Those rolls were HEAVY. But now I can say I've removed every inch of sod from this property.


Then Greg and I sat here in our mudpit and drank a gin and tonic and bemoaned that our work was just beginning.


And then we moved two yards of gravel to the backyard . . .


. . . so that this guy could deliver two tons of rock to me.


And then Sunday morning I started working on a rock wall.


And then I had a crisis of confidence and nearly broke down because I couldn't tell if it was ugly or not. It looked great on paper! I'm still unsure of how to size the deck appropriately. So I pulled out some boards from the garage so I could make a poorly rendered mockup in Photoshop of what the deck might look like. Picture a beautifully stained 4 inch platform deck. And all of the old Home Depot retaining wall stones are going.


I need to redo the right side of the rock wall and bring it out a bit; I don't like the angle of the curve the way it is right now. The fake deck is currently 10x14 feet. I've looked high and low for some sort of guide for deck sizes (how much room do people need around a dining table? more than three feet?) but every guide is for a mega-deck in a yard where people hate gardening. I vacillate between thinking it's way too big and fearing it will be too small. Our deck just needs to hold a table that sits four people and our cute little bamboo couch.

We have two stupid things and one serious thing dictating the size and location of the deck. The serious thing is the drip line of the cedar, which we need to dig outside of, so it can't shift left any more, unless we cantilever the deck over the footings. The two stupid things are what-ifs that we never do:

  1. Really large dinner parties. Though we host barbecues, we've never had a large dinner party in the summer (I hate cooking when it's hot) and a long table could be moved to the open gravel area IF that ever happened. 
  2. Movie viewings. We don't own a screen but we borrowed a friend's screen ONCE four years ago and hosted a movie night. Greg wants me to leave this wall clear so we can hang the screen we may never borrow again:
The view from the deck
I'm sort of inclined to move the rock wall out even further, movie screen be damned (the front plants will be short, anyway). My main goal with this project is to get as much planting space as humanly possible while getting a slightly raised area for wining and dining (that may get a pergola or cover at some point). 

I'm already happy because we won't have a dormant lawn, come July. It made the backyard look so desiccated and sad all summer. All of the new plantings for the rock wall area will be drought-tolerant because I hate watering.

If anyone has opinions or advice, I'm all ears. Bigger deck? Smaller? Cantilevered? Get rid of it all and put in sod? I just don't know anymore.