Procrastination, Garden-Style

Did you ever notice that the best time to finish a relatively non-essential task is when you really should be doing something else? Specifically, something that has a much more urgent deadline? I have been putting off cleaning the house for reasons that I don't want to go into fully at the moment... but they may involve me being a fairly stubborn girl who feels that she receives an overall lack of assistance from a certain someone else who tends to get my house just as messy as I do.

So instead of cleaning the house--which I should have been doing all day since my brother and sister-in-law (the Apartment Dwellers, not the Overachievers) are coming to stay at my place tomorrow night--I decided it was time to go outside for a good long session of garden therapy.


All of the gardens could use lots of work, but I started in the front yard, as you might have guessed from the picture above. My yard is on a bit of a slope, and I like the way the front garden looks from the sidewalk, particularly when the morning sun backlights the 'Golden Sword' yucca in the front corner.

The huge stand of bronze fennel absolutely glows in the morning light, too:


The bronze fennel amazes me. It somehow grows in a 1ft by 6ft strip of dirt between the porch and the driveway, without the benefit of water. The roof overhang prevents it from getting much more than a little mist of moisture when it rains, and the gardener is too stingy to water it when it looks this good without her help. I do cut it back occasionally, however, which I did shortly after taking its photo today. (No big loss in cutting it back hard. The butterflies have ignored it for the past few years anyway... *sigh*)

Another garden feature that I love to see in the morning light is my urn planting:


A lot of people--bloggers, magazines and media alike--have been talking about container recipes and plans this year. I would love to have an elegant, zen-like look to my container plantings, and that's always my original goal, but somehow I always end up with the "everything but the kitchen sink" planting scheme instead. I think my problem is that I just can't pass up fun textures, like these:


I want to pet this fuzzy-leaf plectranthus argenteus whenever I see it, but it looks really adorable mixing with the silver lotus vine under the blades of red cordyline. In the shadows at the back of this picture you can see part of the 'Golden Delicious' pineapple sage... I overwintered everything you see here except for the lotus vine, so it was a fairly cheap container to put together.

But more on that later. A couple of other things in the garden proper caught my eye today, including a new bloom:


This is one of three echinops ritro, aka globe thistle, that I bought from Bluestone Perennials this spring. I didn't really expect any of them to bloom for me yet this year, as Bluestone plants are usually very healthy but very small, but I've been loving the foliage--it reminds me of cardoons. Seeing this little flower, which looks to me like the horticultural version of the mace, really made my day.

And then I had to take a picture to show just how nicely the golden marjoram, origanum vulgare 'Aureum,' mixes in with its neighbors:


It's almost at its mingling limit with the purple heucheras, so I gave the heuchera (and a nearby purple sage, and some hellebores) some breathing room this afternoon by pulling and cutting enough clumps of oregano out from their perimeter. I just love using this as a groundcover, though, both where the dog tends to pounce on the garden and where it only has to look good.

Speaking of looking good, it's now past midnight so I can now officially freak myself out by saying that Craig and Jen are going to be arriving at my house later today. Yikes! Time to go clean the kitchen before heading to bed...

Non-Gardening Weekend

As I'm sure I mentioned before, there are tons of weeds and lots of projects to get done in the garden. It was a beautiful weekend, and yet, I didn't work on ANY of those projects.

On Saturday, a group of my friends went to a Renaissance Faire because that is what Meagan wanted to do for her bachelorette party. I confess that I didn't quite know what to expect, and in fact anticipated that I would not enjoy myself. But my favorite parts of the day involved learning archery and getting to throw axes, ninja stars and throwing knives at chunks of wood mounted on the wall.

Today, which was probably the nicest day of the weekend, I did this:


That is a terrible picture, by the way. The sky was blue the entire time we played, and the sun was shining... but I didn't think to take any pics of the actual courts until later in the day, when the afternoon sun made the sky look a hazy shade of grey. There was enough wind to make the games challenging--and to power sailboats across the waters of Lake Erie, as you can see in the background of the photo above.

This volleyball extravaganza, which began for us at 9am and ended at 6:50pm (LONG day!) was held at Whiskey Island--er, now known as Wendy Park. I spend an awful lot of time here each summer (women's 2's on Mondays, and co-ed 4's on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, right now) and I have a soft spot for this little hidden jewel that seems to become better known to the non-boating and -volleyball crowds each year.

I started playing sand volleyball here a few years after I moved to Cleveland, back when it was just a marina, a marina bar with great views and lots of picnic tables, volleyball courts, and a huge chunk of overgrown forest. In fact, the woods were so thick that you didn't have these views of river bridges and city skyscrapers that we enjoy now:


Nor could you see much of the old Coast Guard station, which the city now owns. They are renovating the access road to the old CG station, so people will eventually be able to walk out to it (and enjoy a few observation areas on the way.) Right now, though, it still looks a bit solitary:


To the west, along the lakeshore, you see the "Edgewater" and "Gold Coast" neighborhoods of Cleveland and Lakewood, respectively. The Gold Coast is full of pricey high rises and mansions (of the real, not the Mc variety) and feels like another world compared to the humble houses in my neighborhood. It looks like big time when viewed across the water, too:

The mansions and other large houses on the Gold Coast were built long ago, and it's fun to walk through those areas. You can see wonderful examples of everything from Tudors to Italianate "palaces." I was lucky enough to be invited to a party inside one lakeside manse a few years ago, and it had all of the honest, craftsmanlike splendor you would expect from a huge house built in the early 1900s.

But I digress... and I sorely need to shower, and get my tired body to bed, if I plan to get up in time for work in the morning. I really just wanted to share a little bit of my beloved Whiskey Island on my blog... and give a small glimpse of my non-gardening life on a non-gardening weekend.

Reseeders and Other July Surprises

There are some reseeders that I count on seeing in my garden each year. For example, I love the smokey purple color of ruby mountain spinach, atriplex hortensis var. rubra, as well as the deep purple-green leaves and red flowers of 'Hopi Red Dye' amaranth, seen here:


Some plants are known to be reseeders, but are hit-or-miss when it comes to making repeat appearances in my garden. For example, last year I found NO extra lyreleaf sage plants in the spring, but this year I have found a half-dozen seedlings of the salvia lyrata:


Last year, I had 4 or 5 volunteer sea kale, crambe maritima. This year, I only found one telltale set of light blue leaves coming up in an unexpected place. And as you can see, this baby sea kale did not choose a good site. It sprouted under the leaves of a Spanish foxglove, so I pulled it out after taking this picture:


Another plant whose volunteers don't always pick the best spots is Russian sage. I probably have, oh, a dozen Russian sage babies popping up around the garden... but since the plants get upwards of 3ft tall and are pretty bushy, too, they never have room to grow where they plant themselves. For example, this little seedling had to be removed from its bed of ajuga, before it started to crowd the nearby peach tree:


In previous years, I've had a few snapdragons flat out overwinter in my garden, and I've also had some good reseeding. The only problem with snaps reseeding is that you can end up with a few different colors. For example, last year I planted snapdragons that stayed very short and were almost completely bright red. This seedling looks a lot like last year's snapdragons but with a yellow throat and almost painterly touches of gold:


But how to explain this pure white beauty? She looks nothing like last year's snapdragons!


Now we get to confession time: I confess that I am horrendously behind in regards to weeding and mulching my garden. There is way more bare earth than I'd like to see--and what isn't bare earth is unfortunately pretty weedy. With working two jobs and having to paint the fence I have fallen behind on a few things... but am working my way toward catching up. On the flip side, I'm betting that if I had mulched on time, I would probably not have been gifted with this pretty coleus seedling:


That's it (for now) for the reseeders... but I do have a couple of other surprises in my garden today. Last summer, I was gifted with some short (less than 3ft tall) oriental lily hybrids from a display garden that was being disassembled. They have all the fragrance of the Stargazers they resemble--it wafts up to my 2nd floor bedroom window at night--but stay short and need no staking.

One of the three clumps had a small, thin, weak-looking stalk come up at the edge. I thought it was probably just another, younger "bulblet," (Elizabeth and all you other lily experts out there--is that the right term?) but today it bloomed in a very different color:


It's pretty, with wavy petals that are recurved, but it is not particularly fragrant. If it had a great scent, I'd be asking how to move and "save" it, but as it is I think that I will just leave it be... if it comes back again next year, that will be fun. But if not, it won't be any great loss.

To end on a good note, the last surprise is a very welcome one. Last year, I grew three different gladiolus (gladioli?)... a beautiful deep red one, the horrendously ostentatious orange-and-yellow one, and a green one that was promptly pulled out before any pictures could record its sickly color. I forgot to dig up the bulbs of 'Espresso,' the red glad, so I was very excited to see a few of them come back and bloom again this year, albeit horizontally because I forgot to stake them:


Maybe this will be the year that I finally remember to dig up and overwinter the glads? Probably not... but IMHO gardeners are optimists, and one can always hope, right?! :)

The Weedy Orchid

All spring, I have been pulling a weed out of my shady perennial bed that looks a little bit like Soloman's Seal... but not quite. I knew it was a weed because I didn't plant it there, and there was nothing in that area but grass and the usual lawn weeds before I made it into a garden bed. Today, I found one of these weeds that had escaped me and made it to the bloom stage. Imagine my surprise when I examined the flower stalk a bit more closely and saw this:


They look an awful lot like little orchids, don't they? The above is a pretty accurate representation of the flower color, but check out how small the individual flowers are as compared to my thumb in the darker picture below:


Needless to say, I was intrigued. I came inside to do some Google searching, starting with "native orchid" (yes, I'm an optimist!) and then "small white flowered orchid"... finally, when I typed in "orchid weed" on the third try, I made a plant match. This is indeed a weedy, non-native orchid, epipactis helleborine, which has been naturalized here in the U.S. since the late 1800s.

It is now sitting in a vase, safely inside my kitchen, but I'm sure that its creeping rhizomes are still hanging out in my garden... waiting to send up another set of shoots next spring. I'm not about to let it continue to "naturalize" in my garden, but I couldn't resist showing it here. As much trouble as some orchids are to grow, it just kind of makes me smile to know that there are a few types that "grow like a weed" as well!

Jungle Garden Details

I have been feeling a little bit guilty about something. In my July Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day post, I am afraid that I made it sound that I was completely dismayed by my backyard jungle garden. In reality, I am equally dismayed and delighted by this bed. Some things are a bit overgrown and weedy, but other things are shaping up almost as I had envisioned.

And the mix of textures and leaf colors are really pleasing my eye. Especially here, where the spikey little bluestem grass leads your eye up to the brown carex and upright zebra grass... and then the round lilypad-like leaves of ligularia ground the whole composition. They reel you in and send your eye swirling back around the garden again:


When you look closer at this combination, the leaf color really takes on more prominence. The bluestem, brown carex and 'Plum Pudding' heuchera brighten up the plain green of the portulaca, whose red-orange flowers complement their surroundings and tie in the orange of the chimney tile at the same time:


The portulaca was a particularly good choice for this chimney tile, it turns out, because it's more than fine with the relative dryness there, and it cascades down the sides of the tile even better than I had hoped. This primitive wildness makes a nice contrast with the upright formality of the grasses:


The portulaca flower colors also echo the native honeysuckle, lonicera sempervirens, that is planted nearby against the fence. After admiring this vine in Annie's beautiful garden, I planted one last year in my own. I love the bright flowers and the glaucous leaves against the brown-stained fence:


As I was photographing the honeysuckle, a little burst of purple caught my eye. I had planted some succulents in this birdbath bowl after it cracked last year. It winters over in a sunny area at the top of my stairs, as some of the succulents that reside here are not winter hardy even in the ground. I like the mixture of leaf colors here, too, and I never really expected to see one of the nonhardy succulents offer up this lovely flower as well:


So, to be fair to my little jungle garden, I wanted to show you a few of the details in it that I particularly enjoy. And maybe once the eggplants start to really fill out, and the gardener gets around to weeding it... maybe there will be a few more highlights to show!