Warm day for winter sowing

It was a wonderful warm day here in D-town, and I found myself with a spare thirty minutes, can you believe it?  What to do with this glorious excess of freedom?  Get dirty!  I went out  and tried my hand at winter sowing, again.  I have had no luck yet with anything.  This year, I tried Flax and Hungarian Blue California Poppies, in the tropical bed near the elephant ears, Bluebonnets by the rose arbor and Foxgloves in my cottage bed by the butterfly bush.  We'll see if anything turns up...

Duke gardens

We took a trip to the Sarah P. Duke Gardens today, and about halfway through, I realized I could take some pictures and phone in an easy blog post.  Haha, not really, but I took these pictures for myself, to remember some evergreen plants I could use.

This picture is a little hard to read, but its Eucomis "Tugela Jade" according to the tag, but that does NOT look like the picture at Plant Delights.  I'm thinking it must be something else, or mislabeled.

This one is definitely not mislabeled, because they left the actual plant tag on it!  In my mind, they must have just picked it up at Lowes, haha.  Its Pinus thunbergii 'Thunderhead' and I just love how it looks!  Might have to pick this one up...

Darn it if we don't have another misidentified plant.  Maybe they pulled the Mullein, put these new plants in? There were quite a few of them in their beds leading down to the terraced garden.  Mysterious plant, what is your name?! I like your big showy leaves, and you are still alive after our recent frosts.

Update! Erica Glasener happened to post a picture  of this plant in her garden, its a Farfugium japonicum 'Giganteum.'

Well, I don't have to worry about mis-identification here: that's a red bridge. You're welcome, America!

Such a beautiful afternoon for a trip to these gardens, we are so lucky to have them in our town.

Passalong plants!

Yesterday I received my first passalong plants... YAY for gardening friends! Thanks Loretta and Don! I visited their amazing garden.  No pictures though.  I dropped the ball!  Next time I visit I will be sure to take more pictures.  They were kind enough to share two plants in their garden: Canna Glauca 'Panache' and Agave salmiana 'Green Goblet'.  Can't wait to see if they transplanted ok, the Canna was actually a plant on my 'to buy' list. I also found a PERFECT evergreen plant for my tropical bed: Fatsia japonica 'Green' -- so tropical looking with interesting flowers in the fall.  I have to go get this one in the bed asap in the spring!  Can I just say that going to their garden was so bad.  I've let my passion for gardening go into dormancy a little, just because my hands are pretty full keeping up with the beds I have now.  Going to visit their garden made me start coming up with a thousand new ideas for my garden.  They have really done a spectacular job.  I know this is a total tease, because I don't have any pictures.  You'll just have to take my word for it until I get there next time.

Also, I was browsing through my archives to try and remember the name of my roses, and I realized I never wrote them down properly, oops.  So I have 2 Madame Alfred Carriere on my arbor, 2 Sombreuil pillared, and I HAD 2 Graham Thomas, but I got the dreaded rose rosette virus on one.  I've since pulled it and I'm crossing my fingers all my roses aren't infected.  My two climbers have been good performers for me, despite the utter neglect they've faced, the Sombreuil in particular has been a nice, healthy good looking rose with very little pruning needed, just as Phillip Oliver said it would in his description.

Some more garden pictures

Well, it's hot, and I have a new baby, born July 20th, so I haven't had much gardening time, but my elephant ear is getting huge, so I thought I'd share some pictures. My annuals were kinda hit or miss. Narrow leaf zinnias did great, no surprise. Red salvia took off after a slow start and has been looking nice. The celosia did TERRIBLE. Never grew. Might have been hurt by the rabbits eating it, but it literally never grew past the little 3 inch pot size I bought it at. The bronze fennel also didn't do much, and all my basil barely grew as well. However, I didn't do much supplemental watering, maybe that was it? Which reminds me, the petunias melted in that bed. Guess its too sunny out there for them.

succulents for the front yard

In an ongoing effort to never, ever, ever have anything high maitenence in my front yard, I finally put together a few large pots of succulents, which I had gotten at my previous trip to Big Bloomers.  I'll get some pictures, but its nothing too amazing looking right now, and sadly, I didn't think to make sure that all the plants had tags in their pots, so I'm not sure some of the names of some of the plants I bought.  Oops. I was told that the Whale's Tongue Agave 'Frosty Blue' is hardy to z5, and needs 0 moisture during the winter, so I'm going to be bringing it up on the covered porch during the winter to keep it nice and dry, now that's my kind of plant, one I can ignore during the winter, haha.  I hope they make it ok, because I have long admired Pam Penick's plant over at Digging. The other succulents that supposedly will be able to overwinter in the pot that I have labels for are; Hens and Chicks Sempervivum 'Black', Sedum Rupestre 'Aurea' and Delosperma Aohtonii  'Hardy Ice Plant.'  Lets hope this works out, and that I finally start working my way into gardening in the front yard.

edit: here are some pictures I finally got around to taking on May 29th.

whew

I managed to get the whole large bed planted with a few perennials and lots of annuals over the weekend. My sister and I went to Big Bloomers, in Sanford, which is one of my absolute favorite nurseries and definitely worth the drive. Huge selection of plants, super cute decorative accents, lots of friendly staff, I love that place. I mostly got tiny little annuals, so the garden looks pretty rinky dink right now, but here are some pictures anyways!

Also, I wanted to put a dump of all the plants I got, so I could keep it in mind for next year. Sorry for the pretty boring wall of text to my 3 or 4 blog readers! But if you have grown any of these and have any feedback, I'd love to hear it.

Salvia 'Lady in Red'

Purple Salvia

Cosmic red Cosmos

Black Velvet Petunia

Celosia 'New Look'

Asiatic Lily 'Matrix'

Gomphrena 'Fireworks'

Bearded Iris 'Cat's Eye'

Supertunia 'Pretty Much Picasso'

Surfinia 'Patio Yellow'

Iris 'Saturday Night Live'

Iris 'Superstition'

Star White Zinnia

Bronze Fennel

Dusty Miller

I was inspired by my plant selection by The Bold and Brilliant Garden, which I think is the way to go with southern gardening, even though it is written by (I believe) an English author, so there has to be some plant selection adjustment for a lot of her ideas. Despite that,

I think her color and textural choices are amazing, and while I love pastel color palettes, I feel like they get washed out in the south. I went with a lot of reds, blacks, and some oranges and magentas.

Here are some photos of what is blooming in my garden right now. I'm loving my clematis, they are loaded with buds, with a couple of earlybirds poking their sweet faces out to say hi.

This picture below really came out nice, all of these pictures are on my iphone so they aren't great quality, but it made the uploading process a lot easier, so I might keep doing it, at least until my garden has something a little more photogenic to show. Anyways, I think these colors are very close to what I see in person, which is rare for me with photos!

If anyone could help me ID this, I would love it, I got it ages ago and didn't write down what it was. It survived my failed first attempt at a bed, and once I moved it the next year, perked up nicely, along with another plant next to it that managed to survive in the 'deathbed.' This year it rewarded me with a gorgeous clump of airy little flowers. The other plant is about to bloom as well, and I've never seen blooms from either, very excited! If I had to guess, I'd say anemone, but who knows...

quick impression of me, EVERY SPRING

"Are those larkspur seedlings, or weeds?"

"Wait, did I even sow anything this year?"

*repeat the rest of my life*

teeny little update

All the daffodils I planted are peeking up through the soil. Hooray! Making a blog post so I have a record of this to compare to next year.

winter blooms!

Finally, after way too long, made the decision to pick up some winter blooming plants. Crimson Candles Camellia (2 pots) and a Prunus Mume 'Josephine'. Both are plants that I've been wanting to get forever, but I keep debating because there's so many choices for Camellias, and I wanted to pick something out in bloom. I went to Camellia Forest which is a local nursery to browse their selection, and this was a cultivar recommended for me. A terrific worker at Cam Forest helped me choose, and I asked for a plant with a longer bloom time, lots of blooms so I could see it well from the back of the yard, and not too fussy. Supposedly, these blooms will open right around Valentines Day, and have a beautiful shade of hot pink to go with it. This isn't my picture, but I borrowed it from this garden's website, which has a ton of eye candy. I was a little nervous about whether I made the right decision, the plants there aren't cheap, but, I felt a lot better when I googled it and saw a picture of it in the Grumpy Gardener's yard. I'm going to plant this by my garden shed ,to hide it a little, because even though its not a particularly ugly shed, my husband hates it. He's crazy like that!

The Prunus Mume.... I'm totally stumped on where to put it. Its a little whip of a stick, but I've wanted one since we moved away from the condo we used to live in, which had one planted nearby, and I love the blooms. Its going to get pretty big, maybe 20 feet, so I need a good place for it. Its chilly today, I wish I had gotten this planting done yesterday, but they need to get in the ground asap! I better go get digging now!

update: Finished planting my shrubs and tree, I hope they fill in nicely. I noticed a little tag on my Prunus that had the date it was propagated. How cool is that? My tree has a birthday ;) May 21st, 2010.

daffodils

Nothing much to show or report, but I wanted to record that I planted 'Ice Follies' and 'Barrett Browning' daffodils in my beds. Hopefully I'll see some blooms this year, I know I am very late on the planting.