Each Little World

Says who?

I bought one plant of Heuchera x villosa 'Brownies' in 2008. It grew so well for me that I began to divide it and spread it around. It never frost-heaved, had pests or seemed to need any additional moisture. Eventually I created a couple of large sweeps of 'Brownies' in spots where I needed a no-maintenance ground cover that didn't really call attention to itself. 

I went online the other day to confirm its identify and discovered my experience with 'Brownies' is not the same as that observed at the Mt. Cuba Trial Garden. 

"Unfortunately, the floral display was unimpressive due to the floppiness of the tall, white inflorescences," was their opinion on their website. They felt its strength was all in its foliage. i love the very tall wands of white flowers 'Brownies' produces right now when many Heucheras are winding down flower production. They are among the longest flower stems of any Heuchera I grow; easily two feet long.

Recently it rained for six hours; mostly nice and gentle with only a couple of strong downpours. The last couple of days it's been very windy and gusty. All of which is to say the long flower wands on my 'Brownies' are still upright, despite our weather and the experience of Mt. Cuba. Plants clearly don't pay attention to experts or the written word.

IVOM: Flowers for Rich

I put together these two bouquets last week for a memorial celebration. Since they were for someone who was a big fan of Piet Oudolf and the Lurie Garden, that made it easy for me to know what kind of display would have appealed to him. I went to the Lurie Garden website to see their summer plant list and discovered I am growing a huge number of things on their list. 

This first vase was suggested by an image one of my sister-in-laws texted me and is more contemporary than I often do. I really like the simplicity of it and have to remember the less is more concept in the future. This has Alliums 'Millennium' and 'Summer Beauty', Seslaria 'Autumnalis' (autumn moor grass) and foliage of Heuchera 'Palace Purple'. I used the foliage of Byzantine Gladiolus for some dramatic contrast. The vase is quite tall and is by Midwestern potter Dolorus Fortuna.

This antique Chinese vase is short and squat and made a nice unmatched pair with the other one. More Alliums, Calamintha nepeta ssp. nepeta, Thalictrum buds, a few stems of flowers from Heuchera and Hosta 'Halcyon', a large branch of Astilbe 'Chocolate Shogun' foliage and a dark Begonia leaf.

This list of blooms pretty much comprises what is in flower for August GBBD, other than some Agastaches and Phlox.

Still perfect

It seems like everywhere I look in my garden I see unfinished areas. It's been so hot that I haven't been able to make myself deal with most of them. Instead, I am luxuriating in the one area of my garden that is picture and pollinator perfect.

It took a number of years and a lot of loss and learning but I finally came up with plants that can take sun, poor soil, snow, winter road salt, massive summer road construction and never slow down.

Geranium wallichianum 'Crystal Lake' is a sprawler that needs companions to thread itself through. Beautiful markings and a color that is bright without overwhelming everyone else. 

'Crystal Lake' is growing with Alliums and Calamintha and hasn't overtaken either plant. 

This little bed has clumps of Penstemon 'Dark Towers'  at the back corners and blue Hostas (probably 'Halcyon') at the front corners. In between are three clumps of Allium 'Millennium' which is much pinker than A. 'Summer Beauty' which is also in bloom elsewhere in the garden. Calamintha nepeta ssp. nepeta fills the rest of the space. This garden always looks like a slight breeze is blowing but it's the movement of all the bees that create that impression. 

We're not losing our gutter here, so the big machines never get too close. They have never even broken a stem in this plot. 

They still do get close. Here they're digging trenches for storm sewer pipes and moving the dirt into the nearby dump truck. Note the workman down in the hole. (Double click the photo to enlarge it.)

You get a sense of the size of the bucket with Jake, one of the crew who's about 6'3" tall, standing next to it. Jake is covered with tattoos that he's had done by artists around the world. A very friendly guy. 

IVOM

Sometimes one flower is enough. Though I usually steer clear of big fancy daylilies, I couldn't resist 'NIght Embers.'

Success

I won this Eucomis last summer as a door prize at a garden event. At the end of the season I put it in our unheated garage and ignored it. It looked so sad in the spring I didn't really think it was alive. But I removed the flower stalk and foliage, watered it and put it outside where it immediately started to send up beautiful new foliage. I underplanted it with a native Carex and set it in a heavy ceramic pot to raise it about critter height. Alas some big critter came along and knocked it over more than once. 

You can see its damaged leaves. I finally moved it to a new location where no one has bothered it. It also had some damage from a being outside on a couple of nights that were colder than predicted. But it just kept going.

I think this may be the variety 'Sparkling Burgundy' based on the initial foliage color and the flowers. I don't really care what variety it is. I'm just happy it survived and is blooming. This is one plant that is definitely easy enough to overwinter that I will keep doing it. 

IVOM: Ashes, ashes

Mark goes out multiple times a day to photograph the project on our road. Usually he's just checking to see if they're doing something interesting or something he hasn't seen before. Recently he and a neighbor were watching the excavator when it exposed this stash of old glass containers; possibly an old ash pit. 

Lots of them were broken . . .

but some were still intact. 

When the crew realized the guys were interested in the find, they gave Mark and our neighbor a few of the bottles. 

Mark cleaned them up a bit and left them on the deck where I discovered them.

I cleaned them up some more; mostly just removing dirt. There's a lot of marks that may never come off and we decided to enjoy the patina. 

The greenish bottle in the back left in the photo below had a cork in its neck when it was dug out of the road. The bottle in the center back says "Valleyview Dairy /JJ Collins" while the one on the right says "Lavoris" in raised letters on the shoulder of the bottle. The bottle in the front left is a pint milk container from the old Kennedy Dairy, whose building still stands on West Washington Ave. in Madison. The other two small bottles have no markings. 

It seemed obvious to me from the moment I saw them that these old bottles were perfect Monday vases.

I thought about putting them on the limestone steps outdoors or sitting on a silver tray on the gray pebble paths. Then I remembered this chrome bar cart. 

I liked the contrast between the old and new glass. The flowers include large 'Summer Drummer' Alliums, small 'Millennium' Alliums and an unknown Hosta flower. 

Van Engelen bulbs says Allium 'Summer Drummer' is the tallest and also the latest blooming of the large Alliums. In my garden the paper covering started to come away from the flower heads on July 4th. This is what they currently look like. Very atypical flowers but in a group in the garden they present a light and attractive effect given their size and height. 

Latest garden attack

The last part of our road project that involves damage to our plantings was done last week. The fire hydrant is being moved across the street but that won't be a big messy job like all the new water and sewer pipes being laid and then hooked up to the houses. 

The workman who was using this excavator scooped out a clump of my Geranium macrorrhizum and attempted to relocate them before they started the big dig. I was thrilled with his thoughtfulness.

Our neighbors' pipes were being done at the same time as ours. The crew tends to do the same jobs in a row starting at one or the other end of the street. 

Mark was standing in our garden to take this shot. 

There is a fair amount of hand work that's done around new and old pipes in the dig location. 

These guys are so skilled at operating these big machines. 

The orange fencing goes around holes in the street where the work was not finished in one day.

Our hole is all marked as the other excavator uses his machine to make the road passable for residents. 

The yellow ribbon marks the oak tree at the end of our driveway. All this equipment is parked along our property for the night.

I went out to see what it looked like once the crew stopped work for the day at 7 p.m.

This is the view through the front garden towards the street. 

Looking toward our garden as the guys work to move our water service from the old water main to the new one. Note the yellow gas line which was the first utility to be replaced.

The new copper water piping . . .

is hooked up to our house. 

Clearing the new section of copper pipe before connecting it to the existing line to our house. The pipe had to be extended because the new main was installed on the far side of the right of way from us. We were only without water for a very short time.

GBBD: 7.15.2023

The mini Hostas are starting to bloom. You can see from the hose that I watered at the beginning of the week, not believing we'd get any of the rain that was predicted.

I was wrong. From lunchtime Wednesday until early this morning we got almost two inches. Heavenly. 

Allium 'Summer Drummer' is the latest to bloom. Its papery covering started peeling off July 5th, but these lovely buds still have not yet opened as much as I expected. 

Hemerocallis 'Petite Sioux' is a small-flowered daylily from my first garden. I got it at a Wisconsin Daylily Society sale in the early 1990s and have never seen it to buy again. One of my absolute favorites for color, bloom size and bud count. The flowers are not quite fully opened in this image.

H. 'Lady Inora' is another small flowered variety but larger than 'Petite Sioux.' Great bud count on this one as well. The buds on this one all opened in time to get beaten up by the rain. 

H. 'Little Rainbow'

I love the Ligularia varieties with tall flower spikes like 'The Rocket'. I added another similar-flowered one this year named 'Eva Heimann.' 

Though I am less fond of the flowers of Ligularia 'Chinese Dragon,' the buds are wonderfully curious and the foliage is among the largest and most dramatic in my garden.

Asclepias incarnata 'Ice Ballet' has fragrant white flowers that are a nice change from the more typical pinks and oranges of most milkweed flowers. Then again, given the number of orange/peach/reddish Asiatic lilies and daylilies I have in the garden, perhaps adding an Asclepius tuberose might make sense. 

Since I haven't posted anything since last Monday, I am rushing Bloom Day a bit and posting today. 

Ferns

I love ferns. Large or small, native or not, I can't get enough of them.

This is Cheilanthes lanosa 'Mighty Tidy' aka Hairy Lip fern. Eventually it's supposed to spread into a foot-wide clump. But that is going to take so long that I am not worried that these two are planted too close together. They're in my so-called rock garden which gets sun and great drainage as these ferns require. Almost every plant in this bed is a quirky dwarf and I need the tags to id them.

I have had terrific success with our native maidenhair ferns as well as the Himalayan variety. So I decided to try Adiantum aleuticum imbricaturm, the dwarf western maidenhair fern, which is also found in Wisconsin. The fern in the center left is a no id variety. What I really love is this mix of ferns with Carex morrow var. temnolepsis 'Silk Tassel.' This Carex is at the top of my "must get more" list.

The autumn fern, Dryopteris erythrosora 'Brilliance,' emerges latest of all the ferns I grow. I always leave last year's fronds in place so I know something is actually planted in that bare spot. 

When they are most autumnal looking I can see them in this view from inside the house. The yellow flag marks a newly planted shrub that needs watering. 

I just realized that the spores on the back of the fronds of the nearby Christmas ferns (Polystichum acrostichoides) are the same warm cinnamon color as the autumn ferns. A happy accident rather than planned planting. 

Now I'm thinking perhaps I should add a couple of these Digitalisferruginea into the mix.

Or perhaps the Digitalis should go by the Tea House where they'd nicely echo the 'Mrs. R.O. Backhouse' martagon lilies. 

June blooms

The garden is full of lilies; Martagons in full bloom and others just on the verge of flowering. The current high temps should push the late ones open as it shortens the bloom span of the early ones. Here's a sampling. 

This unknown white variety popped up amongst my red ones a few years ago.

Martagon 'Mrs. R.O. Backhouse'. I love the way the lily buds echo the color of the foxgloves.

Martagon 'Claude Shride'

The bud count on these is amazing.

Penstemon 'Dark Tower' with Allium 'Summer Drummer', a very tall and very late bloomer. Also quite small compared to many Alliums.