13,520 Garden Web Discussions | Perennials
yes I do...but mainly during those gloomy times of year when a handful of primroses in a jam-jar...or a couple of auriculas perk up my glum spirits...same when the heps and berries start to appear. I am a plonker and not an arranger and generally a jug of lavender or a few nasturtiums is all that's required - I have never gone down that Constance Spry route although I did have a couple of friends who embraced that whole Japanese thing (forgotten the name) which always seemed to involve oasis, wire and stiff twisty stems in a gravity-defying spectacle.
Catkin, as sandyslopes says, you can start wintersowing on the solstice, although I think many people do this more for a symbolic gesture, and you certainly neither HAVE to start on the solstice nor do ALL your sowing at once on the solstice. Believe it or not, weather (i.e. snowfall or not!) permitting, I'm often still working outside at that point - either putting down leaf mulch (which I put down after the ground freezes), or, sometimes still cleaning up my zillions of leaves to begin with. And even if there is snow, I'm too busy with the holidays to start wintersowing. I usually start near the end of January to mid-February, and I do about 6-10 containers at a time, a day or two a week, and take my time with it, sowing all the way through April. IMO, this is absolutely, hands-down, the best way to start seeds, and the most fun - nothing like the smell of potting soil in January! I'm so excited for you and hope you have a great time with it - I know you'll have success!
Camp, sometimes those little spring bouquets are the best! Nothing like a few cut snowdrops or muscari or mini-daffs in a jelly jar on the counter to get one excited about spring, and one of my very favorites a bit later is a little bouquet of lily-of-the-valley to perfume a room - a little bit of heaven!
Ken, they tend to get 'tired' in the South after a time...usually mine are blooming by mid June. They get a good seed set and then devote energy to that..then pick up again in August or early September...then rapidly downhill as things cool down in fall.
If anything, they're almost too successful and weedy here...though I love them for that.
Here's a photo from a few years back:
Hi, planted black eyed Susan last year. Loved them. But they never came back this year. After reading the comments here, I think I might have a couple of small ones coming back. I'm in Scotland, would the climate be why they're not coming back? Appreciate any help.
My Mums name was Susan. I was delighted at how beautiful they were.
I think there's valid points on both sides here. Gardenweb is by far the most civil and informational forum I have personally encountered on the internet, and if it had gone away had Houzz not picked it up earlier this year then I think that would have been a tremendous loss. That said, there were some changes that occurred which possibly devalued GW as a source of information exchange a bit. If this was a forum about computers and newbies were constantly asking questions that omitted some very basic piece of information like, say, the type of operating system they have or something, I can see how that would be irritating for the computer experts, especially if until very recently it hadn't been an issue. Houzz could include a sticky "Please read before posting" thread at the top of the page that had some helpful tips newbies could consider. Not everyone would read it, but many would and it might be a win/win for those who do and those who respond to them.
As far as warm welcomes go, I did have negative experience when I first started posting last year when I asked a question about the mature size of a plant I just acquired and the first response I got from an established poster was literally, "You know...there is this thing called a search engine where you can probably find lots of information...this was the first result I found, and as it's St Louis Botanical Garden, should be a good reference." Which I thought was a wee bit sarcastic and uncalled for. The link that poster provided was also unhelpful as my question clearly had to do with conflicting information on the plant tag and what I had already found researching online. I chalked it up to the responder writing me off just because I was a newbie and I did thankfully get some very helpful responses from others who did have direct experience with the plant in question. I'm glad that the polite and helpful responses on here seem to outnumber the others by a large margin.
I go to the home forums a lot, and it helps to know a state or zone there too. People ask questions about building codes, real estate related things, etc. They say "In MY state," blah blah. Well, what state are you in? These are not new people to the forums. Long time posters. I had to change to Houzz, but I did put my state and zone into my screen name line. It just helps others help you.
Not everybody gets the bullseye rash when they have Lyme Disease. It is a very misleading fact about LD. That is one reason why it took so long for my gf to get a proper diagnosis. The doctor wasn't aware of this fact, so since there was no bullseye rash, she didn't have LD. Thankfully she dropped him, and found a doctor that was better informed about this disease. But by then, more than a year had passed since she got it, a year with no treatment. It has messed her up!
Here are some of the large patches left to kill (half dead already anyway...)
The last picture is a detail crop of the 2nd to last, showing the growth on the B.E.S. (Taken w phone rather than good camera, so they don't give such a vivid impression of the virulence)
Yes, it is common for 'Summer Nights' to produce variegated offspring and I expect that a good deal of the next generation will also be variegated ... hopefully, I've understood your question correctly. Anyways, I'll at times select seedlings with improved foliage color and less tendency toward greening out and cupping.
If you can get your hands on a copy of Native Plants of the Northeast by Donald Leopold, you''ll find two pages of ferns and fernlike plants, grasses and grasslike plants, wildflowers, vines, shrubs and trees that tolerate shade.
Some of my shrubs are:
Shrubs: calycanthus, leucothoe (which is evergreen, tiny cream flowers in early spring), lindera benzoin (spicebush - obligate host for spicebush swallowtail butterfly), sambucus (elderberry), rhododendron & azalea.
If you want to fill out with perennials/groundcovers, some of my favorites are wild ginger, cimicifuga (the 4-5' tall flower racemes glow in the slanting rays of late afternoon sun coming through the tree canopy), dicentra eximia and d. cucullaria (fern-leaf bleeding heart and Dutchman's breeches, respectively), crested iris, tiarella.
Not mentioned in Leopld's list (most of these are not native), but among my favorites are heuchera (coral bells - all kinds of foliage colors!), aucuba ('Gold Dust' has evergreen leaves flecked with gold), variegated Solomon's Seal (it does spread, but it easy to pull out), sarcocca (sweet box - small broad-leaved evergreen with tiny but very fragrant flowers in late winter), epimedium (check variety - some are clump-forming, others are runners), and pulmonaria.
Maybe so, it looked like a grass.
I don't know, I just keep planting them too close together after thinking there was plenty of space when I put them in the ground. They seem to grow so much the second year & I sure have moved my share of grasses due to this and hey, like I said, I thought I had plenty of space. The little rhyme goes like this:
1st year they sleep
2nd year they creep
3rd year they leap
More rain will make them bigger too. With all that May/June rain we got its like grasses on steroids this year so maybe next year they won't seem too close.
I'm psyching myself up to move a huge one coming up and will do some more editing later on. Now I have 3 new grasses I just got yesterday from SRG and I'm taking the yardstick out with me to plant them and adding a few inches. If that's not enough to worry about, I read 2 different mature sizes online so I am using the larger size to determine centers when I plant them.
Maybe so, it looked like a grass.
Here it is now with those grass like daylilies now moved elsewhere (right now in a bucket till I figure where to put them in the ground).
(And next year the border of annuals will be planted as close as possible to the stone edging providing a bit more space to these grasses)
I don't know, I just keep planting them too close together after thinking there was plenty of space when I put them in the ground.
Yup. Me too and most everyone else in this forum. ;)
I am smitten, but too late to add to my soon to be former gardens.
'Fire Light' is reported to be one of the toughest of all paniculata types, being completely hardy in zone 3 and developing into a large specimen ... oh, and it flowers earlier than most all others .... okay, I want three of them!