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...