Our prolonged cold and snowy weather meant that I've been spending a lot of time paging through the latest print garden catalogs that came in the mail as well as trolling for plants on-line. I kept making lists of plants to order and crossing them out; constantly adding and subtracting.
My garden, for example, has a beautiful Glaucidium palmatum (below) and I finally found a source for a white-flowed version that I've lusted after. But what I could not find were any photos of what my garden looked like at the end of the season to figure out if I have room for another big shrubby perennial — no matter how long I've longed for it!
In the spring, I am out in the garden on my hands and knees working or wandering around with a camera — noticing and capturing every little thing as this shot from May shows.
By mid-summer the garden gets more and more full of plants and my digital files get equally full of photos.
Then came the massive rains and flooding of late August which put paid to this 'Tiger Eye' Sumac. I dug it out rather than try to get it back in the ground, propped up who knows how long. Once I'd done that chore, I loved the open look of the bed. It inspired me to start dividing and moving crowded plants as well as adding a few new things.
But now here I sit with no good photos of what things looked like as I reconfigured this bed and the one across the path from it. All I photographed were images that show how the big leaves from the stripe-bark maples cover this area when they fall. I had to rake them up before I could put down the mulch of chopped leaves we'd created to help insulate these new plantings in case we had a winter like last year's.
There are snowdrops and Erythroniums and Primulas and all the other old and new plants growing here that were dormant or cut back when I took this photo. I do have id cards on what I planted in the fall and where, as well as notes in my journal. But I can't get over the fact that I did not think to take some pictures to jog my memory. Once the snow covers this area, it is fairly inaccessible until spring. I will just have to restrain myself from ordering anything for this area or only order bulbs and ephemerals which can always be shoe-horned in.
