13,520 Garden Web Discussions | Perennials
Me, too! Your post reminded me that this was the year I wanted to clear the hill and plant climbing hydrangea on our chain link to hide the neighbor's spite fence. :)
Sigh, my yard will never be as lovely as yours, so keep the photos coming! I will live vicariously!
Thanks for the kind words! :-). The 'green garden' is our favorite part of the garden too. The front garden is the showy 'public' face of the garden. The backyard is the 'real' garden that speaks to my heart and soothes my soul (to be a bit poetic about it...!)
With azaleas, I think of an all-one-color planting as a formal one & a mix of colors as informal, more playful. The single color is always safe & uniform, but can be rather boring to me, too, unless the color sings to me. Picking a single or mixed colorway, always helpful to imagine how it will play with other colors in visual range, repeating the color or contrast with other elements. Also consider the strength of the color in various lighting. White shows up in any light, as do those shades of pink & lavender. Red can "disappear" in evening or moonlight, but the cherry & salmon reds often sidestep that issue. When I'm unsure how colors will act, I'm apt to buy the plants in bloom, arrange them & eye them from various vantage points & light exposure until I find what I like best. I'd buy two of each of the colors you're considering from a merchant with a good return policy, explaining why, and give them a tryout in their pots in my yard, returning those unwanted within a day or two. Might buy a few more to land in mixed beds for repetition to knit the garden together.
Also, looks like the size of each is different. Double Pink grows 42-54" high by 36-48" wide, as does Lavender (which you didn't mention). Red grows 36-48" high & wide, so 6" less in height with the same width as the first two. White is the smallest at 30-36" high & wide. so you need to know how much garden space you have & plan on how many of each would mature to that area, whether you want them to touch or stand apart. http://tinyurl.com/ojff984
Various sizes & colors of azaleas planted 20 years ago by the original owner here. There's a long double white hedge along the drive balanced by a triple planting of the same on the opposite corner of the house. Several low-growing reds in a similar shade to the one you're considering were planted along the porch with other low evergreens. We removed & redid that bed years back & carefully relocated some of those azaleas below a clump of mature maples halfway between the trunks & the canopy. They didn't thrive there & were later moved to another location. Keep in mind these had huge rootballs when transplanted, and when removed again two years later, tree roots hadn't grown into their root space. Would think younger plants would grow more easily in a similar situation, since other perennials planted within the roots of the maple clump have done well for years. There was one area where the individual tree roots overlapped & I couldn't find space to plant anything but bulbs (which have flourished & colonized). Planting between major roots has worked fine. If I were thinking about what you're considering, I'd first explore between the roots by digging to find out if planting there would work. When planting in those rootzones, I didn't chop off any roots, anchor or fibrous. Instead dug around them to expose them & held them to the side, putting them back in place as I planted. Knowing wherever you prune a root, more will grow, took this tack. Another mixed perennial bed skirts a large oak & the same strategy was used creating that bed & planting its roses & companions years back.
In my experience, white azalea blooms age the least gracefully, often browning & hanging on - the dirty kleenex effect - and often need to be removed for appearances sake, especially in wet weather. Colored spent blooms are barely noticeable & can be plucked or left for the petals to fall on their own. My favorite azalea planting here is a large mixed bed of reds & pinks & whites around an old apple tree. It's an entire symphony in bloom. Depending on the weather, I often need to deadhead the whites, but they do highlight the other colors & shapes beautifully. If you go with the pink, red & white mix, might place the white in the center for its smaller stature & plant the pink & red at an angle on the sides to fill in with their larger branches. If you want plants of a similar growth habit, you could center the red between the lavender & pink or bookend it with the pinks. If you prefer uniformity, you can always prune the larger ones to shape, but I rather prefer the natural look. If you can swing it, choose several of each in bloom to audition placement till they please you. You could also opt for heavily insulated individual pots or urns to bypass the planting & tree roots issue. Let us know what you decide...
How can you not want to feed this beauty?
And look this little birdie has to hang out with the metal ones. When you give them a feeder they can socialize with real birds. LOL
I do get it about the fruit though. We are lucky enough to have lots of hawthorn and choke cherry for the birds. They don't currently seem to clean out our fruit trees, but if they become a problem I'll just get bird netting.
My god, some of you guys not only BUY stuff for them, you actually prepare (cook?) things for them (and I am not thinking of suet balls here but far nastier things lurking in basements). I was persuaded to try this ruse at the allotment, as a kind of lure away from my fruit - but the buggers just increased in number and still ate everything. I had 6 consecutive pea sowings one year before I managed to raise a tiny crop of uneaten peas (although tbf, it wasn't just the birds that ate them).
Yep, mine grows up, then arches over. If I do prune, then it is a not very careful hackabout with shears - it is very suited to squeeze between taller shrubs and fountain over the tops of perennials. I would never really consider it as a lone specimen planting. I only ever tip the long ends (anytime over winter) and don't do any thinning or faffing. I have seen it growing on and over fences where it looks wonderful - mine tends to be a bit bare-leggedy so it is a rose to grow with many companions.
I was wondering what had defoliated most of my columbine this year, now I know. Never seen this problem before. The miners yes, those are a given. Glad to know the plants will grow new leaves. They look silly blooming with no leaves, just green twigs.
Karen
I was out in the garden yesterday and found lots of new growth on my columbines. Hopefully a combination of heavy rains and the end of Saw fly season. I planted yet another batch of wintersown columbine seedlings, in various places around my garden. Maybe someday they'll really take off. Columbine are one of the only native plants I can find that bloom in May. Oh, except Trillium. But they take forever to spread and multiply. Oh, and Jacob's Ladder and Virginia Bluebells. I guess I'm not doing so badly. I just need to keep collecting seeds and growing more plants. Spring takes too long to get going around here, for my taste.
Martha
Thanks. The insects may indeed have been Carpenter Bees - they were flying between me and the sun so were just silhouettes to me without any details visible....! I guess we'd better keep our eyes open for suspicious holes in wood things! Post a picture of your wisteria arch....? Are you going for the look of the wisteria arches in some of the famous Japanese wisteria gardens? It took both my wisterias five years to bloom in the spring, although the Chinese one started putting out summer flowers at recent pruning sites by the second summer. My Japanese one has never produced any summer flowers. How old is yours and what kind is it?
After seeing these clematis photos I kind of regret passing on some I saw on sale last week! I know I will never work our a proper support, so maybe it's for the best!
The wisteria are putting on a great show, glad the winter didn't freeze off all the flower buds. Mine lost about half but there were still plenty to put on a show.
I just skimmed past the pic, assuming the ID was correct and went right to addressing whether or not it was a weed. Some of the leaves look like they could be O. laciniata, but the flower doesn't.
You could narrow down the search for a Ludwigia by looking at those known to be present in your state:
http://plants.usda.gov/checklist.html
Thanks, everyone, for all your input! It has been a big help.
Tiffany, yeah, the flower picture that you first see for O. laciniata at the USDA site doesn't look the same as mine, but they have some additional pictures of it on their website that do look similar to mine (although I thought the leaves were a bit too regular in shape). But I came across this wildflower article about a little yellow flower found in Bethel Acres, Oklahoma, which mystified the writer at first. Its eventual conclusion was that it was an Oenothera laciniata. Link is here: https://npsot.org/wp/wilco/2013/04/29/stalking-the-wild-lyf/
MK thanks and yes it is very cold! A 30 degree drop is shocking to the body...luckily it is going to warm up soon.
# 5 is a tiger eye sumac. It's actually in a large pot. I planted two in the ground, and later found out that they sucker terribly. So I dug them up and threw them in my burn pile. A few days later I decided to pot them up and then try to overwinter in my garage. I read that they wouldn't survive....but to my surprise they did! Tough little trees.
#7 is a coreopsis Zagreb, soon to bloom.
Cat...mulch does wonders ;0)
Scents are very changeable in atmospheric conditions - when the humidity and stillness are absolutely right, scent will be at its most pervasive - hence one of the virtues of a small enclosed garden. Moreover, blooms are predisposed to produce scent at specific times of day - evening, for example for those night-time pollinators such as moths, while others will be at their best in the first hours of dawn - again, it is often dependent on the required pollinators...which does lead me to think you are on to something, Pamela, since a plant has its moments of optimum fertility (as will any organism capable of sexual reproduction)...and it is entirely feasible that a plant will over-produce a lure (scent, colours, opening petals, guidelines only visible to insect eyes) at the time of peak success (for spreading the genetic load).
Finally, scent is utterly subjective specific molecules of perfume must fit into the exact receptors in our nasal passages...and, like a lock and key, this varies from individual to individual.
CMK, you're welcome! =)
(Warning for any super sensitive readers -- I think science as much as pretty and Disney. A few months ago, some hypersensitive soul got rattled of my very blurred phone photo of a hawk and its prey -- no detail observed. So it you share that sort of anxiety about real life, pass up reading this and maybe all of my posts. But I do understand -- I often do not want to watch when those PBS nature programs show a crocodile or cheetah doing what they do; I sometimes just flip the channel -- seen it before....)
Oh, boy! Can I relate to TICKS TICKS TICKS. When outside w tuck out long trousers into our socks, spray with DEET and Sawyer's (only on clothing for the latter). That helps a lot, but isn't much fun in hot weather. They deer ticks (Ixodes scapularis) hitchhike in on the dog. He's small and white and I do checks on him, but the ticks sometimes don't make themselves apparent for 20 minute or more when I spot them on his nose.
We have stone walls and that means lots of hiding places for white footed mice and chipmunks. We're in a clearing in the woods, but I even have ticks in the grass. I've tested +ve for the Lyme antibody and the doxycycline (oral, short term) seemed to keep me from getting the disease.
Roxanna, do you know what the tree company used? I don't want to harm the bees or good crawlies, but I am about ready to drop a "warhead" on these dreadful things. They can carry other disease organisms in addition to the spirochete causing Lyme disease. There is now a viral pathogen that is in the deer tick population (positive testing in New England, including MA).
You'd think some creative genius would come up with a birth control agent for this horrid little pest. Are deer ticks really "needed" for anything?
What to spray? Or should I pave the whole area. I will experiment with some home-made tick tubes (you can stuff the material into stone walls, wood piles (we heat with wood), or use doubled toilet tissue tubes (on inside the other) coated with paraffin.
I've had them attach to me in January. I've spotted them seeking on l high canes and brush. I've woken up to spot one on my pillow or the sheets. Thanks, pup-dawg. These critter exceed in detecting a suitable host (they run towards CO2, ammonia, lactic acid and other pheromone like chemicals we and other hosts give off (if in combination, the better). One way researches trap deer ticks (Ixodes scapularis) is to use dry ice (CO2) in a perforated Styrofoam box. You have to hand it to these ticks, very well evolved to do what they do. Each stage, larval, nymph, and adult, "know" just how high they need to go to get the best opportunities to attach to a host.
If you can stand it, play around with some of them--engorged ones move slower, but still move at a good clip. I took some video of an engorged one last year. It consistently walked away from the desk lamp (light). Watch how they turn themselves over or switch direction -- they apparently have some sort of air bladders that they use to alter their center of gravity.
As I was taking my phone video, I appreciated that few others would be "nuts" enough to spend an hour watching a fat tick ambulate. However, I was happy to see that some kindred spirit already has a YouTube video of her engorged deer tick in motion. Check it out.