Whose Bright Idea Was This?

I guess it was bound to happen: My foliage tunnel vision finally came back and bit me, so to speak. I tend to forget about the baby-pink flowering phase of sedum 'Matrona' because I love it all the rest of the year... but why, oh why didn't I think about it when I planted it next to this soft purple Russian sage? The combination is so sweet, is it not? Ugh!

In an attempt at purging that appallingly cutesy sight from my brain, I'm also posting this picture of my reblooming lantana. The blue "berries" are pretty, but keeping up with deadheading them means I get to enjoy more of these bright yellow flower clusters. And they handle being planted in my dry chimney pot quite well, so they are definite front-runners to inhabit this space next year again. Just please remind me not to move one of those disgustingly adorable 'Matrona' sedums over here beside the lantana. Or maybe I need to go with one of the orangier varieties next year, just to be safe.

I swear my garden doesn't "do cute"... I'll just have to remember to tell 'Matrona' that. (If not for her lusciously moody foliage, she'd be evicted for this already.)

*sigh*

Ornamental Grasses

It is very appropriate that Layanee and Shirl chose this time of the year to ask people to showcase their ornamental grasses... it's the time of the year when most of them start to come into their glory in our gardens, with fall colors and showy inflorescences. They also offer great fall and winter movement--check out this post of ornamental grass videos by Craig at Ellis Hollow to get a taste of that virtue.

When I headed outside just now to take pictures, I found that I have more grasses than I realized. With no other good way to list them, I'm going to show them from smallest to largest.

The smallest by far is a carex that I couldn't resist because it's so darn cute! These fuzzy leaves of lady's mantle show you how tiny carex conica 'Hime Kansugi' really is. You have to look over the lady's mantle and between two tall clumps of oriental lilies in order to see this grass, but it's a sweet reward:

Last year, I picked up a pot of black mondo grass that had two small plants showing. I divided them and put one in each of two containers, then planted them out in the garden in the fall. Here you see that one of the plants was happy enough to start to spread this year--I hope it continues to creep closer to the 'Jack Frost' brunnera:

Possibly my most unusual grass, carex platyphylla is a broad-leaf sedge native to the U.S. It is said to be drought-tolerant once established, but I found out the hard way that it doesn't like too much sun at all. You can see the crispy edges that remain from its early summer sunburn, but judging by the new growth it's happier now that it has been moved to a shadier spot. (Click the link above to see a less sun-damaged plant on the High Country Gardens site.)

Blue fescue that I started a few years ago from seed. I had trouble siting these until I decided to let them soften the base of a chimney tile that I set in the garden and planted with lantana. (That's not another grass, but foliage from gladiolus bulbs in the background.)

The bronze carex flagellifera has happily mingled with golden creeping jenny and other foliage plants in an urn all summer. I'm going to take it out and put it in the ground somewhere to see whether it will overwinter. It's one of those carex (carexes?) that are sometimes said to be hardy to zone 6, other times only to zone 7. You'll see two more such zone-stradlers later in this post.

Can I count liriope with the rest of my grasses? They certainly belong by all appearances, and I purchased two different variegated varieties on clearance last week, the golden l. muscari 'variegata' and the paler 'Silver Dragon':

Three clumps of the controversial carex comans 'Frosted Curls' (some say it should only be sold as c. album or c. alba, not c. comans) overwintered in my front garden this year. Three more were purchased as annuals this summer and planted under my purple ninebark in the hope that they are similarly hardy in spite of their "Zone 7" tag. Here is one of the original trio next to an 'Amber Waves' (I think?) heuchera:

I have several clumps of the red-tipped Japanese bloodgrass, but only because I actively divided the small one that was here when I arrived. I always marvel at reports of their invasiveness, because I wish that they would spread more for me than they do. Here you see the red tips of one clump, set off by the silvery carpet of woolly thyme that is cascading over the retaining wall and pooling around the feet of a blueberry bush:

There is a certain grace to the Japanese forest grasses in the genus hakonechloa. I have two, an artfully striped h. macra 'aureola' that is two years old, and a newly rescued clearance pot of h. m. 'All Gold' that already looks happier planted out in the garden amongst the 'Chocolate Chip' ajuga:

This New Zealand sedge, carex buchanii, is sometimes listed as hardy to zone 6 and sometimes only to zone 7. It overwintered in my garden, and I love the way it combines with the powdery blues of sea kale and lavender, the yellow-edged lemon thyme, and the purple leaves of 'Purple Knockout' salvia lyrata:

I think that I might need a couple of larger pennisetums to help eliminate the lawn grass in the front yard. For now, the only members of that genus that I grow are the 'Rubrum' annual fountaingrass and the smaller 'Hameln,' which resides in the drought-tolerant front garden with sedums and golden oregano:

I have shown my 'The Blues' little bluestem before, but here's another shot that shows how well it mingles with the pyracantha that is being wall-trained. I love the powdery blue foliage next to the dark green firethorn leaves anyway, but when the berries turn orange it's like frosting on the cake:

About the same size as my little bluestems are my chasmanthium latifolium, Northern Sea Oats. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture of these and their gorgeous bamboo-like foliage with showy seedheads while I was outside. 'Rotstrahlbusch' panicum virgatum is said to be the "best of the red switchgrasses" in marketing materials, but I feel that a couple of other varieties like 'Shenandoah' color up much better. That said, I still like my three clumps of this grass with its airy sprays of flowers in September... but they are hard to show off in pictures, hence its absence from this post as well.

Sorghastrum nutens 'Sioux Blue' is my favorite of the taller grasses in my garden. I started with one last year and added two more this spring. The first pic shows my original plant just after I gave it some new neighbors midsummer. The second is a detail shot of its golden flowerheads, at about 5ft in height right now:

I have a regular medium-green miscanthus sinensis in the front yard garden, but here you see m. s. 'Morning Light' and 'Gold Bar' still in their pots waiting to be planted in the backyard:

By far the largest ornamental grasses I grow, most of the golden zebra grasses are either m. sinensis 'Strictus' or 'Zebrinus.' This one is from a name-unknown chunk that my aunt and uncle bequeathed to me two years ago, but I'm guessing it is 'Zebrinus' because it's not quite upright enough to be ID'd as the other.

(Layanee, really... too gaudy?!?! Say it ain't so!)

Well, that's it for my ornamental grasses tour. Not a bad tally of grasses for a lot that's just a shade above .1 acres, if I do say so myself!

Structure(s) Needed (subtitle: A Bout of GADS)

***edited to add Carol's 100% correct diagnosis of my little "problem" to the title of this post. See comments for details. :)

Knowing your shortcomings is important, and I admit that one of mine became apparent while I worked in the yard this week: Having lots of projects "in the works," all of which are only halfway finished. I don't know why I have such a problem with this at home, because I love the feeling of accomplishment that comes along with finishing a project at work. So it goes, I guess.

The most pressing problems involve my failure to provide the necessary structure for certain plants that require it. Remember the Dortmund rose I've been raving about for a year now? My thoughts when I planted it this spring went something like this: "Well, I'm working 70 hrs/week right now at the garden center, so I'll just get this guy in the ground and put up a trellis for him later."

"Later" is a pretty unspecific time, but I'm pretty sure that it has come and gone in any case. Dortmund sprawls through the bronze carex on the corner of my porch, lax and limp instead of upright and thriving. One thing that I failed to consider when placing it was that the rest of the porch post above the brick you see in the picture is a wide, smooth, house-colored expanse where my house numbers reside. I can't cover those, and I really have no other logical and visible place to move them.

The other thick porch post is on the far side of my house, nowhere near the driveway or front door. Not good for porch numbers--and being the northwest side of the porch not great for a climbing rose, either. The two brick pillars that flank the front steps are topped with simple metal posts that don't show up much visually but keep the porch roof from sagging in the middle. Again not good for porch numbers, but possibly workable for a climbing rose support since I don't mind them being completely covered. They would get a bit less sun there, however.

My other option is to leave it where it is and direct most of its canes toward the side of the porch (with a few strays artfully arranged to show the house number) once they reach number-height... I'll probably need to sketch this out to get a visual before I make a decision on which way to go here. (Any thoughts or advice from those who have grown climbing roses? This is a first for me.)

My other pressing project is to finish the grape arbor, so I can stop cutting back the poor grapevine and start harvesting more grapes! I did get one post up and level (with the help of a sledgehammer-wielding boyfriend) but then a thought occurred:

The lot line on the left of this picture will soon be designated by a new fence, and I know that the length of backyard I am fencing is not evenly divisible by the 8ft fence panel size. Maybe it makes more sense to make the arbor fit the leftover odd size (assuming it's close to what I want anyway) than to make the arbor first and fit the fencing around it? It would certainly make for a cleaner look. So I put the rest of that project on hold until the fence goes up.

So the fence needs to go up soon, but I can wait to move the rose until the spring if need be. After seeing these unfinished projects on a post, though, I really want to get going on them already! Ah well... maybe I'll just go out and clean up the trimmed blackberry brambles and weeds that you can see in the Japanese rock garden above. I just noticed that I stopped my trimming to get the first red arbor post in the ground, and never picked up my mess when I was done. (Might I have some form of project or garden ADD?!)

On the Road--er, Sidewalk

Tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of the publishing of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. I was probably too young when I first read the book to grasp every nuance, but it was still an eye-opening experience. I have long meant to go back and read it again... but frankly there are other writers of the Beat Generation whose voices and writings I enjoy more than Kerouac's. (Maybe "enjoy" isn't always the right word--sometimes gut-wrenching would be more appropriate a term--but you know what I mean.)

In honor of this influential novel, and spurred by a recent flurry of "A Long Walk" posts from chuck b., I thought you might like to take in some of the sights that I see while giving my Garden Assistant her morning and evening constitutionals. This morning we just did the short block, as it was already hot outside and Coco has no way to take off her heavy fur coat:

Gnarled tree roots from a badly positioned treelawn specimen. In some places, they are more than 8 inches higher than the sidewalk, and you can often see where the bluestone squares were lifted and the tree roots cut in order to relevel the sidewalk.

The guy who put this front bed in is a renter, and his landlord paid him back for whatever he purchased to put in this front bed. I know this because he bought most of it at the small garden center where I worked in 2005. The lilies are amazingly fragrant in the late summer during our evening walks.

The older couple next door to him has a thing for old-fashioned annuals, which they start from seed and use to fill the bed in front of their foundation hedge. The nicotiana on the right opens up at night, but its scent--if it has one--doesn't travel far enough to reach us on the sidewalk.

This used to be my favorite landscaping. Where the new weeping cherry is on the left, a stately, dark grey, completely dead 20ft. tall tree resided for the last two years. It was surrounded by various grasses and it looked so interesting that I didn't realize that the center tree was dead until late July one year. I was encouraged that they left it up all last summer as well, but unfortunately they "fixed" the "eyesore" this spring.

This lion could easily kick my lions' butts. (And I bet he's cranky enough to do it, too--I would be if I had to balance my hulking frame on such a relatively small pedestal.) I love how he's licking he's paw, and I'm glad they planted him a riot of petunias to admire. I think he needs some savannah grasses, too, though.

Beware of Dick helping Jane cross the street with their attache cases in hand?

This is my new favorite landscaping on the block. What perfect landscaping to have in front of a bungalow... and they are obviously foliage fanatics with all of the coleus, purple heart, and window boxes of fancy caladiums. In the winter, the most adorable clumps of snowdrops pop up in random spots within the stone border.

Very neat, very clean, very all-American. I like the simplicity of this, but last year they used salmon pink geraniums and that looked nicer with the tan brick and light green upper story siding IMHO.

The shrubs that started my August impulse buying... tree peonies on the Western side of an old house on the walk route! There are 4 of these monsters here (the fourth is on the back corner, out of camera range) and they have to be amazingly old. I have admired their gnarled, knobby branches during the winter months and their handsome foliage since I moved here, but I never quite knew what they were until I saw smaller specimens at the Cleveland Botanical Garden. The owners cut them back each spring, unfortunately, so I never have seen them bloom.

This is the front bed of the same house... I think of it as the Prairie House because of this planting and the dark-wheat color of the siding. The three tall plants in this bed all bloom at different times: Yarrow first, then Monarda, and now some sort of perennial sunflower.

"Why do you always stop and smile over this self-sown alyssum? Simple fence, simple flowers... no tomatoes or beans to steal or lemongrass to chew. Move it along, woman--it's hot! Time to get back to the house and share a frozen fruit bar!"

Blackswampgirl's house, as seen from the corner of the nearest cross street. Bob would not approve of that messy edge, but then my humble foursquare is nowhere near to estate status so I suppose I'm okay. (And if I get up the gumption, the rest of that grass could be gone by the fall anyway... but more on that later.)

Hope you all enjoyed the mini tour. It's nowhere near as entertaining as chuck b.'s, I'm afraid, but this is the first ever walking tour post so you'll have to cut me some slack. I have a few other neighborhoods to show you, too, so I'll see if I can't step it up for those!

Pre-Labor Observations

I have big plans for this Labor Day--big garden plans, that is. The remaining mulch pile needs to be spread around the plants that never got it when they should have in the late spring, for one thing. And the little girls next door, who are adorable but who impede my "me time" in the garden like you wouldn't believe, just got into the truck with their Mom and drove away with many bags of food and picnic items tucked around them... so I hope that means they plan a long day of fun away from the house.

Taking a preliminary walk around the garden this morning, I found a few things to be content about. Not only are my 'Ozark' strawberries continuing to provide sweet red berries, but they are covered with flowers that promise an extended harvest. Even better, the gifted 'Party Dress' Japanese anemone has decided to open its first bloom! The flowers are amazingly beautiful, and now that I know they are prone to flopping, I will be better prepared to give them a little lift next year.

It seems that I finally found the right place for my small ornamental onion, allium senescens glaucum. Its previous companions either dwarfed it entirely or simply did nothing to show off its fun, twisty foliage.

I moved it to what I think of as the "dry garden," where (except for an amended area where an espalier apple grows) the soil is sandy and barren. It's really nice combined there with 'Caradonna' salvia, 'Arthur Branch' sedum, 'Newe Ya'ar' culinary sage, 'Vodoo' sedum, and various flat, rusty-colored fieldstones. They form a little textural tapestry that you have to look over when you reach the end of the garden path, in order to view the Japanese rock garden.

(And I can't say enough about that 'Caradonna' salvia, by the way. I gave away my last 'May Night' in order to make room for more 'Caradonnas' because their flower stems are a dark purple color that deepen the blue flowers. It gives them so much more presence IMHO.)

The 'Diablo' purple ninebark seems to be adjusting to its new home without a peep of complaint. I picked up three 'Frosted Curls' carex grasses in the annuals clearance section of our local garden center, and placed the pots underneath the ninebark branches to see if I would like this combo as much as I thought I would. (I do!)

This carex was listed as hardy to zone 7 on the tag, but I successfully overwintered three of them last year after buying them from another source where they were listed as hardy to zone 6. We did have good groundcover in the form of lots of snow this winter, though, so I'm going to hedge my bets and mulch over them in December.

My other big job for the day will be to plant the variegated iris and lamium that I "stole" yesterday from my grandma's and mom's house, respectively. I say "stole" in quotation marks because they both have allowed me to take divisions of these plants before and I knew neither one would care if I did so again. But technically, I didn't ask before picking up the shovel... and I have a good reason for that, I promise.

The lamium seems to transplant with no problem, but grandma's variegated iris are the only ones that I can't get to take here. (Siberians, various tall bearded types... they all grow like crazy.) Since one garden superstition says that stolen plants tend to thrive--ostensibly to increase the guilt of the thief--I'm banking on that to happen for me in this case! Maybe that in combination with the "Third time's the charm" rule will mean that I get to enjoy a nice patch of variegated iris next year? I hope.