It's still February and I am slowly sliding into a decline: Too much white everywhere I look. I need a shot of color. So I started a Pinterest board devoted to color: Subtle, shimmering, and screamingly bright!
Mark and I have not done any interior painting since our last big remodel which was in 2010. We've been talking about making some big changes — at least colorwise — in the house this spring. None of our rooms are white; then again, nothing is quite this colorful either. Hmmmm . . .
We all have certain flowers that we love; the ones we never tire of and can't have enough of in our gardens. Among my loves are Erythroniums, Fritillarias, Primulas and Hellebores. So I was thrilled when Gardens Illustrated magazine took its subscribers on a digital visit to Bosvigo, Wendy Perry's garden in Cornwall. I'd come across her garden before and fallen completely in love with it because we're clearly fans of many of the same plants. I printed out the pictures of the garden from this digital tour on 8 and 1/2 x 11 inch paper so I could study all the details. (Frits, Erythroniums and Aenmones in Bosvigo below).
Looking at these pictures of her woodland garden made me think about what I am growing in the garden where the Tiger Eye Sumac came down last summer. That area in my garden has all four of my favorite plants but they're not knitted together nearly as well as the ones in Wendy's garden. The appeal here lies in both the related colors and the spread of the plant clumps.
So, of course after drooling over these pictures, I went online and added a few more things to my previous order from Klehm's Song Sparrow Nursery. Two mostly yellow Hellebores ('Sandy Shores' and 'Spanish Flare'), another dark one ('New York Night') and Epimedium x youngianum 'Royal Flush' (below). I first saw this Epimedium on the website of the Elizabeth C. Miller Botanical Garden in Seattle and have been on the lookout for it ever since.
There are already Erythroniums, Galanthus and Primulas growing in this area that should be ready for diving this spring. The Hellbore and Epimedium foliage will help to cover the bare spots left by the ephemerals. Wendy has wonderful dashes of blue in her garden from Corydalis (below) which I will swap out for the blue of Brunnera or Jacob's ladder (Polemonium) which I am already growing successfully,
Wendy's garden is two acres so she can grow more plants and larger swaths of them than me. But these views offer inspiration and ideas for smaller gardens based on color, texture, foliage and understory trees. It's a perfect classroom image for a spring garden! Here are the plants from Klehm that I will add to the area in the photos at the bottom.
Hellebore 'New York Night' (above) and H. 'Spanish Flare' (below)
Here are Primulas, Epimedium and a Hellebore already growing in the area where I will add these new plants.
You can see I've already got the yellow, pink and purple color combo started.
At the far edges of this bed are two different pink Peonies and Dicentra spectabilis 'Gold Heart' with its pink flowers and yellow foliage, so I think my new plant purchases will work well here. I don't think I will ever miss the Sumac that I took out since its given me all this lovely space for new plants.
I found these red garden clogs during a break from my packed schedule while attending the National Conference of Editorial Writers in Denver in 1999 or maybe the one in Seattle the following year. The date doesn't really matter. What matters is that I've been wearing these reliable red clogs for the best part of twenty years. When I noticed they were getting worn down, I went online and discovered the company was still in business and still made the clogs.
I bought a replacement pair in 2016. But I always reach for the red ones first. The color makes them easy to find but they also fit me perfectly, mostly likely because I was able to try them on before I bought them. The pair I ordered online are slightly wider with a little bit different footbed. I have to wear them with the heaviest socks I own; the ones I save to wear with my Wellies. I always feel like they are not the safest footgear to wear for a walk around the garden after a rain. Which makes them rather useless as a replacement for my red clogs, to say nothing of the fact that I live in those red clogs indoors. Now the aged red rubber has suddenly split open and they are definitely done for. I wouldn't mind kissing the red clogs goodbye so much if I knew what I am going to wear indoors and out for the next twenty years!
I planted this Ilex verticillata 'Berry Poppins' in the spring of 2017 and this is my first crop of berries. This is a smaller scale winterberry but I am more than happy with these results. Eventually it should reach 3-4 feet in height and that will make quite a show if this is any indication.
You need to plant "Mr. Poppins' as a pollinator to get berries. According to Proven Winners website, one male plant will pollinate up to 5 female plants. The plants must be within 50' of one another to assure good pollination. But that means I can probably add at least one more plant close enough to 'Mr. P.' to get berries. Much easier than having to find room to always plant a pair.
The first photo was taken in late October and the one directly above two months later.
November and December have brought us snow and rain and freezing rain and cold, gray days until our recent burst of warmer, sunny weather. But no matter what you throw at them, Carexes are a great plant to provide a serious jolt of color to the winter garden in our climate. The three varieties pictured below all are growing adjacent to the driveway so I am able to enjoy their foliage as I come and go.
Carex plantaginea (seersucker sedge)
Carex platyphylla. This one has beautiful blue foliage and though it is a shade plant, it gets quite a lot of sun and reflected heat from the driveway. But it seems to do just fine. It self-seeds just enough to be able to make a nice ground cover without being problematic.
Carex morrow variegata, probably 'Ice Dance.' This one had some dieback after last winter but filled out nicely during the growing season. I like the look of this as individual clumps but it sends out a fair number of babies. At this point I'm just letting them grow on until I get the number of big plants I need to create the effect I'm after.
I grow a lot of different Carexes and the only two that have self-seeded or run to the point of invasiveness in my garden are C. laxiculmis 'Hobb' aka 'Bunny Blue' and C. glauca. Other than those two, I've rarely seen a Carex I haven't liked from the get-go.
Back in the 1960s my paternal grandparents had an aluminum Christmas tree with a gizmo that bathed it in changing colors. All of us grandkids were struck with the shock of the new, though I never really warmed to it. But last year in December, after my tree was up and decorated, I stumbled across my equally glitzy dream tree.
If you asked me, I never would have said I was searching for a pink tree made of twisted metallic paper (as near as I can tell). But at only about 4 feet tall, it was the right size to put on the drop leaf table in the red room.
It is way too intrusive a color and material to be at home in any other room in the house. The red walls in this room, however, are the perfect backdrop and actually seem to tone the color down a bit.
I store all my Christmas ornaments in two big cardboard boxes that each have three trays divided into many small sections to keep all these precious pieces of glass from rolling around and knocking into each other. One bin has all the green/blue/silver objects and the other holds red/pink/purple/gold colored decorations. So it was easy to match my ornaments to the color of my new tree.
Among my early personal splurges is the Christopher Radko quirky, slightly creepy face on the left above. I love Radko's early ornaments which were strange and unusual compared to his much larger, later pieces that focused more on traditional Christmas motifs.
I've always gravitated to pink and red ornaments so it was no problem to decorate this tree, though I did add a few new things like the cherry red pine cone or the pink sphere with blue daisies. I can't believe how much I am enjoying this silly pink tree. And Mark loves the fact that it is not out in the living room staring him in the face!
The driveway still has a lot of color: red from the Epimedium rubrum and the leaves on the Korean maple tree and yellows from the clumps Japanese forest grass. The clump in the foreground is Hakonechloa macra, the plain green variety, while the rear clump is Hakonechloa macra 'All Gold.'
Now that it has lost its leaves my fall-blooming common witch hazel, Hamamelis virginiana, is clearly visible and looking lovely. Since witch hazel is an understory plant, I put it under an old silver maple tree where it has been very happy.
In retrospect, I should have planted it with a dark background to show off the yellow flowers. But that's a concept that I didn't really think about twenty years ago when I planted it. It's rare that I can manage to take a photo of it with this many flowers visible.
I posted photos of some of these same plants on November first and they were still looking great this weekend. That's after a lot of cold daytime weather, with highs often ten degrees below normal and overnight lows down in the teens. We even had a little snow. But a couple of days that hit 40 degrees F. perked anything right back up that had been starting to languish.
Rosemary at the top of the wall on the north side of the house.
This Rhododendron yakushimanum 'Yaku Angel' is loaded with buds, the most this shrub has ever had so I am pretty excited.
This Helleborus niger typically blooms at Thanksgiving, but I think it is too cold for these flowers to actually open up this year.
The entry for November 25th in my "Year in the Garden" calendar, said that this fern — Dryopteris erythorsora — is a "wintergreen Japanese shield fern." Here it is known as an autumn fern. The idea that there are summergreen and wintergreen ferns is a new one to me. I am guessing that is not the case in Wisconsin, though apparently that is how ferns are regarded in the U.K.
Arum italicum "Ghost' is always looking its best just before snow arrives. It amazes me to see this come up as the weather cools but then it lasts and lasts. A rare treat for a gardener in my climate and zone.