Moody Skies Make for Good Pictures

If there's one tidbit I've picked up from all of my hubby's tech-speak on the subject of photography, taking photos with overcast skies results in even lighting and no harsh shadows.  If you're taking photos of people, they don't squint, and if taking photos of flowers, the color is even more bright and wonderful.

It's a hot Monday afternoon, but the temperature is dropping slightly, and the skies are darkening.  A thunderstorm is eminent.  The daylilies have started to bloom.  Tonight's dinner, ribeyes grilling on The Big Green Egg, waft across the yard.  It's kind of an ideal sensory situation all around.  Also a perfect night for some pics and a post.



We lost 3 crape myrtles this winter.  The loss was also a gain -- in gardening space, that is.  It's now primarily a tomato bed.  But part of this is Tyler's garden.  He wanted the orange Zinnia and pink petunias.



I asked Tyler to pose next to the yarrow so you could get a sense for how tall it is.  It's huge and wonderful.  A Mauna Loa daylily is blooming in the foreground; pink shrub roses in the background.



Tyler is enjoying a close-up of daylily Atlanta Full House.  At his feet, the purple flowers are cousins of Lamb's Ears, a low-growing perennial that I can't remember the name of... I could dig up the tag I guess.  All I remember is that I saw them at Missouri Botanical Gardens last Spring, found them at Lowe's a month later, and immediately snapped them up.  I recall they were pricey, but the long-lasting bloom more than makes up for it.  I'm loving the rock path that I installed at the end of last summer, with rocks we found on our property.

Atlanta Full House daylily

White Swan coneflowers.  I am anxiously awaiting the day that this fills in.



Moody Skies



Shade garden in front.  Still looking crisp and nice... nothing is burned up... yet.

What's Blooming - June 17th

It's been a busy few months here.  Now that the temperature is really heating up (90 today), it's time to start sitting back, stop the mass planting, and get into maintenance and watering mode.  We had a great week of rain and everything still looks pretty fresh, but I don't expect that to last.  So, I snapped a few pics to remind me how beautiful things look in the middle of June.

The front garden still looks nice. Hostas and hydrangeas are starting to bloom, while Iris Pallida Variegata is winding down.

So, I had really good intentions here.  For those of you who like to do those puzzles where you stare at the page and see the hidden element, see if you can guess what's here.  It's our family monogram "S".  Note to self: Pick a new flower combination for next year, maybe something perennial, like a low growing herb.  Yellow finches thoroughly enjoy plucking the yellow petals off the zinnias, thus the reason you can hardly see the shape!!!

Incrediball hydrangea 1/3 starting to bloom.

Orange Marmalade hosta

The pink flowers are rose campion, the white is White Swan coneflower.

Sedum blooming

A type of sedum that I can't recall the name of... but stunning.

Brag picture... check out the view, and that is only a slice :-)

All plants I got from the distressed plant section at Lowe's. They don't look too stressed to me!

That's basil growing tall on the left side.

Coneflowers Cherokee Spirit (?)... the package says different color flowers on the same plant. I still say that's impossible and that it's just a mix of flower colors all put in the same pot.

Happy Mother's Day... To Me!

Most of the time, gardening requires a lot of patience, but not without reward.  A few years ago, yes, years, I purchased a Japanese tree peony from a wholesale mail order place I purchase from frequently.  It was very expensive.  The reason being that true tree peonies are grafted off wood from the Emperor's garden.  So, there are not a lot of them floating around, and the ones that are here, are quite expensive. 

You can imagine how I babied the little stick that arrived on my doorstep.  It was not any taller than 8".  I potted it, not sure where I was going to plant it, and also thinking I didn't want it to put down permanent root yet, since we had been talking about moving, when we lived at our old house. 

When we moved, I brought it with me, of course, and was thankful I had left it in a pot.  I quickly found a suitable home for it and it flourished.  This is the first year it has bloomed!  I only got one, but I'll take it.  It has been so long since I ordered it, that I even forgot what color I ordered.

If you have ever been to the botanical gardens this time of year, you may have seen these in the Japanese garden.  It completely opened this morning.  What a great Mother's Day present...

What's Blooming: April 30th

For this post, let's keep it simple.  I post a camera roll of pics with a caption. You ooh and aah from afar, and I pretend I can hear you :-)

Pansies!  This is a survivor (1 of 3, from a flat) from last fall's planting.  Not a great success rate, but in their defense, we had a rough winter.

This is Tahiti, a variety of daffodil I have been stalking for several years.  I finally saw it offered by the wholesaler I deal with and I jumped on the chance to get them. They were not all that expensive (wholesale is generally a better option), and the color is amazing.  It's hard to tell scale from the picture, but they are at 3-4" across.  I love the double petals and bright orange center.  I've had a photograph of these daffodils hanging in my house for several years, one that I made Eric take at MOBOT. For those of you locally, take a spin by Lake St. Louis Meadows and you will see literally thousands of these mass planted around the West entrance.

Lowe's never fails to have a good deal.  I got three large containers of these pure white pansies for $1.00 each.  Great early spring color that can stand up to these dipping temperatures and hold me over until I can get some warm-weather annuals.

Brunnera

The bird!  He came with me from the old house.  I gave him a fresh coat of spray paint -- Rustoleum's oil rubbed bronze finish.  As good as new.  I love the contrast of his dark bronze with the chartreuse creeping jenny.

Another daffodil I got from my wholesaler connection. I will have to look up the name of this variety, it escapes me at the moment.  Each stem produces 6-8 flowers and they are just about the size of a nickel.  The foliage is very thin and stringy like grape hyacinths, and I actually thought these were malnourished when they started emerging from the soil a few weeks ago.  Tiny foliage, tiny flower.

Baptisia -- this one is yellow.  I'm excited to see it come back after the hard first summer it endured.  It had no leaves on it by the end of August due to some insects eating them all.  I was sure it was a goner.

Coral bells

Angelina sedum.  Love how it turns a reddish color in winter and emerges with bright chartreuse foliage that will stay like that all summer.  I'm learning to focus on foliage color and texture, it makes for a MUCH more interesting garden composition.

Another bargain bin find at Lowe's.  2.5-gallon creeping phlox for 99 cents.  I got 12 for me, 6 for my friend Diane, 6 for my mom, and 6 for the neighbor.  At such a great price, I couldn't leave them.  This photo was taken last week and they are still going strong.

More Lowe's bargains... $2.00 per pot... except some nasty wild animal got a hold of these.  It's so odd to me that it would eat the foliage and leave the berries.  Hmm... I am wondering if this nasty beast was a weed eater...

Redbud trees are a little behind at my property because we sit low, where all of the cool air drops and hangs out.



Wild Sweet Williams, blooming throughout the woods. 

Wild Trillium, also all over the place.

Blueberries.  Great deal on these... I got 6 of these, 3 thornless blackberries, and 2 red raspberries.  All $2.00 each, normally $11/each.

Chives!  I have to figure out a way to show scale in these pics.  These are the tallest, healthiest chives I've ever grown.

Spring Comes in with a Bobcat...

You've heard the expression, "Spring came in with a bang"... well, in my case, it all started with a Bobcat.  That is, our neighbor Jerry's Bobcat. 

If you recall, Eric and I decided to create a new driveway, one that is level, one that wouldn't leave us stranded in snow, and one that wouldn't leave our friends and family members without four-wheel drive stranded in even good weather.  The old driveway is still there, and connected to the new.  It's a convenient way for the UPS and FedEx delivery trucks that visit us almost daily to come in and circle out with ease.  They both used to struggle leaving, shooting gravel at our house as they peeled out up the steep incline. 

To keep our new driveway functioning and looking great, we decided it would be best to add a retaining wall to stop erosion.  When installing the driveway, Jerry had already repurposed part of the stacked boulders that had surrounded the 2-car parking pad that we tore out to make way for the new drive.  So, we decided it would be nice to continue the theme and make everything look cohesive.  Many of the boulders were starting to crumble and crack though, so while we liked the idea of rock, we were sure we'd need to choose a different type.

We headed to a local rock yard and picked out our rocks, 5 palettes to be exact.  Realizing a delivery fee was inevitable, and how much we had already gotten ourselves into, expense-wise, we also threw in a load of topsoil and an enormous granite boulder covered in lichen that I discovered on our way down to the weigh station.  Let me just say rocks are really expensive.

Jerry and Eric made short work of the palettes and the resulting retaining wall looks great.



All I see when I look at this is major rock garden potential!

The delivery guy was kind enough to place my granite boulder at the entrance to the new drive.  It looks wonderful, but just as I suspected, it looks a fair bit smaller than it did in the rock yard.  That's okay.  I still love it.  My mom and I have joked for years when we've been out in some great park or in the woods that "we'll take that rock over there".  It's always the most ginormous rock in the whole place -- think Elephant Rocks big.  I've got the small chip that fell off one of those.



I should have had Tyler pose with it to give you a sense of size... perhaps in a future post.

And so it begins...

My gardening calendar starts at the first sign of weeds.  If it's warm enough for them to be popping up, Spring is here.  I took advantage of this unseasonably warm day to do some weeding.  When I got home, I quickly changed into some grubby clothes, grabbed my gear, and headed out the door. 

With Tyler at my side, we made quick work of some weeds that had taken hold along the sidewalk leading from the back door to the pool entrance.  He quickly discovered that if he poked the trowel into the dirt at a 45 degree angle and then slammed the handle down, he could create a dirt explosion.  I banished him from garden work and sent him off to explore the field.  He took the trowel with him.

Luckily for me, I had found my weed digger, and didn't need the trowel. I'm sure there is a technical name for the tool, but it's a long, skinny piece of metal with a fork on the end, that you shove into the ground and use to uproot weeds, yet minimally disturb plants.

I had just covered the bottom of the bucket with weeds when Eric got home.  He came out on the deck and commented that I sure work fast when it's something I want to do.  I smiled, accepted the jab, and declined to get defensive about it.  I thought about it later, and I came to the conclusion -- what's wrong with that?  Who doesn't jump right into projects they're passionate about?  I don't know such a person.

I moved my way into the gated area surrounding the pool and found a large patch of cool weather weeds.  When I was little, I was very fond of this particular weed. I have no idea what it's called, but it branches out these long, green, wand-like stems and then dark purple flowers emerge all over the wands.  It reminds me of a tame sage or a lobelia, with its tubular flowers. The lesson here is -- be careful what you wish for. As a kid, I picked handfuls of these and just loved them... and now they are the primary weed I'm battling in this particular part of the garden.

It's interesting how weeds have seasons, like perennials.  It's also interesting that I have different weed problems in different areas of the garden, it's almost as though the micro-climates in each area dictate what is going to be a problem there, much as it dictates what I can and can't grow.

Not long into the weeding process, I felt and heard stillness.  It actually went completely silent outside for just a minute.  There were no cars going down the road, no birds chirping, and no wind blowing.  It was extremely eerie.  Dark clouds gathered overhead.  The forecast calls for snow and high 30's tomorrow, but it was 80 degrees.  Seems impossible, but that is one of the mysteries of Spring.

I finished my work and gave Spring a proper welcome by dumping out a tightly packed 5-gallon bucket of weeds.

Giving Thanks with Pinecones

Here's a little story on how I used two large bags of pinecones, from my friend Diane, for my Thanksgiving décor.

The table turned out beautiful.  I think it's the first time since Tyler has been born that he hasn't been sick at Thanksgiving.  It's also the first time since his birth where I've felt like I've had it together enough to plan my table setting in advance.  I always had elaborate setups prior to being a mom.  I tucked a few handfuls of pinecones into the garland to help fill it out.

My mom donated a roll of burlap for the project, which is the backdrop for the centerpiece.  The three lanterns in the middle are a score from my spring trip to Ikea.  The florals are a garland from The White Hare in St. Peters that I looped around the lanterns in a large S pattern and then fluffed out to make it look like each one was completely encircled.

Extra pinecones ended up in three areas.

The wire basket by my front entry is all decked out for the rest of the season!

A lovely sunflower bowl on my living room side table is a keeper of pinecones as well.  Also wanted to point out my lamp and turkey combo.  The lamp is a semi-recent purchase from Target.  It has a hollow bottom.  My turkey was already sitting on the table, and I thought it would be interesting to put it inside the lamp.  The illumination in the evening is very pretty.

Not shown, I took whatever was left and edged the potted mums flanking the entry stairs.  Every last one was put to good use.