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.

Dog Days of ... June?

It has been just scorchingly hot here for the last few weeks, as if I needed another hurdle to get out and garden! On the plus side, I have my new bed installed! Yay! Hoping that the plants I got from Plant Delights nursery turn out ok... it can be really hit and miss there, but I've had some real winners, and they do have a great selection of hard to find beauties. I planted a few tropical plants that i'm hoping will do well... Perennial Hidden Cone Ginger, 'Jack's Giant' Elephant Ear and what I think is an alocasia, but I can't seem to find the name, and my memory is failing me. Whoops! There's also some gladiolus, some calla lilies (wishful thinking there, no doubt), cannas and a flowering quince. And since I had no place else to put em, I planted my tomatoes and basil in the bed.



I'm finally getting blooms on this hydrangea and I just couldn't be more pleased. I lost the blooms off this plant for 2 years in a row, the first year, it was just not doing too well after I saved it from the clearance rack, I think I paid 2 dollars for it. Second year, the lawn crew weed whacked the one stem with buds on it!! This year, it is rewarding my patience with beautiful pearly buds that turn to a soft blue and open lovely magenta blooms. I just absolutely am over the moon about them!



My coneflowers are doing so much better than last year, when I got almost all yucky mutant flowers.



Lastly, I'm loving this combination of the geraniums, zebra grass and artemsia in 2 pots on my deck. I love these geranium colors, they are so bright and perky.

checklist!

So, it is a very, very dangerous thing to go to Lowes for a carpentry project on a spectacularly warm spring day. First of all, it will trick you into buying plants you know you are going to have to babysit constantly through the frosts for the next month or so. Second of all, you will wind up spending roughly 10 times what you were planning on, because of all the bulbs that mysteriously fall into your cart.

On the plus side, I have accomplished several things on my checklist! Yay me! I planted my MAC roses (yayyyyyyyy) AND the Miss Kim Lilacs I bought, oh, about a year ago. Haha. In fact, one has blooms on it already, just little buds. I have agonized for months on where to put these plants, but today I just had enough and plopped them down in a couple of spots in the yard. If I hate it, I can always move them, and now they are in the ground and getting healthy and bigger. Off the list, I also planted some new plants I picked up at the Lowes. A Nelly Moser Clematis, which I planted by the deck, some SUPER charming Amaryllis that is a candy pink with white stripes, which is going in the cottage garden. Sowed some Cosmos over there as well.

I bought Peegee Hydrangea which is super tiny, like 6 inches high, and I planted it by the garden shed. I'm worried it won't make it there.... in fact now that I'm typing this, I'm thinking maybe I should go move it to a better place. I want to put some shrubs and other plants in that area, because right now its just a bunch of pine trees. Any recommendations for some plants for the area are welcome! I bought some Christmas fern .. bulbs? They aren't bulbs, but I don't know what to call them. They can't be corms or anything else... rhizomes? Anyways those are also for near the garden shed, but they aren't in the ground yet.. which brings me to my next train of thought...

2 steps forward, 6 steps back, as I bought quite a few bulbs/corms/whathaveyou that need to be planted. Cannas, Caladiums, the aforementioned Christmas ferns. In addition to that, I foolishly bought some geraniums. Why did I do that?! I have a baby to ... well... baby! I can't be babying plants too! Oh well, We'll see how they do. They are quite pretty, I just couldn't resist.