Category Archives: front bed

Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day – November 2016

annuals, backyard bed, bloom day, front bed, perennials, southwest bed, the Lot

November on the Lot is always rather quiet so there is not much to post for Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day. Today was quite cold and soggy while earlier this week it was warmer. It will be a matter of days before we get our first hard frost which will finish off the dwindling annuals.

This first set of blooms is the alyssum planted from seed between the two vegetable beds. Mom G. has this annual in her garden and it has resown itself every year.

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The next bloom is from an ice plant just obtained from an end-of-summer sale and placed in the main backyard bed.

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Most of the purple coneflowers have gone black and died, which was perfect decor for Halloween! However, this last bloom is hanging on.

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The jupiters beard begins blooming in spring and keeps at it until the snow covers it, as evidence by the bloom below.

111916_jupitersbeard

Also still  blooming are the lamium and lavender. More blooms can be spotted over at May Dreams Gardens, the wonderful hostess of Bloom Day.

Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day – October 2016

backyard bed, bloom day, fence bed, front bed, loki bed, native plants, perennials, sidewalk bed, southwest bed

October Bloom Day is here! By this time each season the garden seems to have gone wild and the amount of daylight required to maintain control is dwindling . (The gardener is also tired and beginning to eye her knitting needles.) Looking back last year, we had some warmer-than-normal weather in October. So far this year we’ve had a ton of rain in September after a hot, dry August. The lankier plants have been beat down by the heavy rains. The days are cooler and rainy, but there are still some “blooms” to be enjoyed on the Lot.

We can always count on the toad lily (Trycyrtis hirta) to bring some delicate speckles of color to the Lot in the Autumn. I’d like to find another fall-blooming plant to accompany this shade-loving perennial in the east bed near the foundation of the house.

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In the expanded bit of Loki’s bed, the swamp milkweed (Asclepias incarnata) is becoming streaked with color because of the cooler nights. The lavender it shares its bed with is still blooming and is way larger than the gardener had planned. Rats.

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The new anemone is still carrying on its show from last month. I like the backdrop of the blue blooms of the plumbago. The silver foliage of the sage is pretty as well.

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This joe pye weed (Eupatorium rugosum) is in its second year on the Lot. The white blooms look great with the darker stems of the plant. Apparently this cultivar grows to a max of 4 feet tall. I found this out just now as I looked up the latin name to post here. This must be why the plant is not  growing to the 6 feet I expected. Oy with reading the plant tags! You’d think I’ve learned to do so by now!

101416_joepyeweed

This is more than likely the last, frazzled bloom of Echinacea purpurea ‘Butterfly Kisses,’ a dwarf coneflower.

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Here’s a droopy aster I rescued from beneath the mum when we expanded the backyard bed this past Spring. I’m looking forward to seeing how it likes the new digs next season.

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And here is another batch of aster currently peeking from beneath the foliage of a false indigo.

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Here is the monster mum in the backyard bed. It has not been divided since it was planted. I was going to do so this Fall, but read the Spring is the best time to do so. Therefore, the task has been shifted to the Spring list.

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The next few shots aren’t necessarily blooms, but still some fun colors in the garden. The yew in the front South bed is covered in small red berries.

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This year the rose at the southwest corner of the Lot was not pruned back, but allowed to form rose hips.

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There are some other perennials still blooming on the Lot, including the various sedum and some coreopsis. Just fading are the snakeroot, heuchera, and the tall phlox.

Be sure to visit May Dreams Gardens to view all the other lovely blooms for this month!

Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day – September 2016

backyard bed, bloom day, containers, fence bed, front bed, gate bed, loki bed, perennials

As I review last year’s Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day, I notice the Lot’s blooms are a bit behind the point they were in September of 2015 or 2013. I snuck out earlier this morning before logging on for work to catch some pictures in the morning light. The weather has been absolutely beautiful since this past weekend; it is sunny and tops out in the mid seventies degree Fahrenheit with no humidity. Woo-hoo! Here are some of the blooms currently rocking the Lot.

In the South bed, the plumbago and rudbeckia have been showing their colors for a few weeks now. The sedum is beginning to get its cotton candy-colored blooms.

091516_sedumbes

The shrubby cinquefoil is still going strong since Spring. I really love this little shrub for the small, sunny space next to a rose in the South bed. Collapsing onto it are some echinacea. Unfortunately there was some overcrowding in the coneflowers this year, so they battled a bit of disease. If the weather stays cooler, I think I’ll be thinning them out.

091516_cinqufoilcone

The Route 66 coreopsis has been blooming all summer in front of the echinacea.

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Here is the crazy mess of color blooming in front of the smoke bush. I think some of the coreopsis cultivars are reverting back into the solid yellow, so I may pull them. It is also possible the plant reseeded from the right side of the South bed.

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Here is a more macro view of the left side of the South bed.

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There are splashes of rudbeckia all around the backyard. I’d recently thinned these so they’re a bit floppy still from shock. This patch is between the “Grandma Rose” I received from Mrs. J. and the winter savory. Nestled at its base is Josefine, a little garden charm I brought home from our trip to Germany.

091516_josefine

Here is the anemone I saw last season on a garden tour, and had to have for this season! It adds some flower power to a month the Lot had seemed limited in bloom variety. I found it during our annual Spring Nursery crawl. It is doing quite well in the backyard bed.

091516_anenome

Here is a macro view of the right side of the backyard bed. This is one of the beds the Other Half and I extended this season.

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These are some asters I had forgotten about! I was trying to wrangle a false indigo into a rope girdle and found the aster blooms beneath the larger, floppy plant.

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These are some double-style snapdragons which recently sprung back with the cooling of the weather. While I was working in the garden on Memorial Day weekend, it was humorous to watch a large bumblebee try to get into this flower.

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This is the full planter. My gardening gal friend Miss A. created the arrangement of snapdragons, lantana, and cosmos.

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On the left side of the backyard bed, more rudbeckia and a new yarrow have been blooming. The mum is working on opening up.

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This is the portion of Loki’s bed I expanded last year. The little plug of lavender really took off! The heuchera are all blooming.

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Currently nestled in a hanging planter above Loki’s bed is a new clematis, the prize of this Spring’s Nursery Crawl. I learned of Clematis ‘Rooguchi’ during March’s Smart Gardening conference. This small-bloomed, rambling clematis plays well with other garden plants and blooms all season long. It is a “Type 3” clematis and can be pruned back to the ground in the Spring since all flowers are on new wood.

091516_ragochiclematis

And then there’s the rowdy cousin. Clematis terniflora (known as sweet autumn clematis) is now well established on the Lot and grew like a plant possessed this season. Last year I learned my lesson concerning its rampant growth behavior, so this season I took time to train it and am much more happy with the results. Overall, I feel this worked well as a choice for a climber on the pergola.

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Here is a snapshot of the fragrant, little flowers.

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And here is an overall shot of how it appears on the pergola.

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Other blooms present but beginning to wane on the Lot this month are the jupiter’s beard (Centranthus ruber), butterfly bush (Buddleia), cup plant (Silphium perfoliatum), great blue lobelia (Lobelia siphilitica), rose campion (Silene coronaria), hyssop (Hyssopus officinalis) and tall garden phlox (Phlox paniculata).

To see what else is blooming in gardens around the world, visit May Dreams Gardens, the hostess of this meme.