New Flora

As a counterpart to my last post and as a way to make my posts not unbearably long, I will now talk about the plants that have been coming back to life in my garden.

Last week I decided I was fed up with the way my tiny bit of cultivated front yard was looking and added another barberry and a new daylily and salvia, taking out my ailing Dietes. It has a clear hole in the middle showing me that it needs dividing (even though it's tiny!). I was also greatly motivated by the wilting of my Daylily. My husband bought it for me as a Christmas present (actually, he let me go to a huge out of town nursery to buy $100 in plants, great Christmas present). I've been keeping my potted plants watered during the dryspells over the past few months best I can, but last week even my daylily finally wilted once. A quick watering solved that but now it's in the ground so it will never happen again.


The only other part of my front yard that I've had the time and patience to work on is the tiny square for the street tree. Last year, when I first put the plants (all started from seed) around the little tree it looked like this:


Now the plot is well filled in.


I've said before I don't like the Gazanias (the ones with the flower buds) so soon I'll be taking those out but it won't take long at all for the lambs ears to fill the open spot. I might also stick another plant in their place, something that will flower.

But the care I gave to the soil in this little plot and the water I started giving it late last summer once we'd bought the house has really paid off. The street tree, a small crape myrtle, has leafed out beautifully and very early. The other crape myrtle across the street is probably a year older than mine and still has no leaves even a month after mine started.



And taking these pictures, I thought it's been such a long time since I've taken a picture of the house and I've never really captured the correct color of the new paint job so here is a new one, very true to life:


Clearly we're not very into taking care of the lawn, if one can call it that. Our intent has always been to take it out, so we don't waste time on it except to pull out some of the suddenly appearing 3 foot high grass seed stalks, like the ones I found two weeks ago. And though it is a small victory, see my nicely grass free sidewalk, I spent ages out there with my small pick scraping it all out (don't look at the grass in the driveway!)

Now onto the backyard, where I've put in a bit more time. The irises that I divided and moved to the back of the garden last year finally have buds! I was worried that I didn't divide them properly and wouldn't get any flowers until next year but I must have done it right after all. I can't wait to find out what color they are.


When I did that dividing, there were a couple small tubers that had no leaves or didn't look so healthy, so I threw them into one of the big paper bags we were using in removing all the extra debris that wouldn't fit in our green bin. Well, a couple of those bags never got thrown away and sat decomposing in the back corner of the yard. And last weekend, I noticed this:


This really shows how much you don't need to baby this type of iris. There should actually be one more, taller iris in this picture, but feeling bad for the tough little baby, I had already tucked it into the earth behind my other irises when I took the picture.

Flowers are also opening up now for my Geum. This Geum started out as a tiny little Annie's Annuals purchase just over a year ago. But it not only survived being planted at my dad's for a short while but lived through the flooding that the lavenders next to it did not (I rescued them and put them into pots but I'm starting to think I was too late). Now it has over a dozen flower stalks and multiple buds on each.


The rose behind my Geum is also starting to flower. It looks so much better than when I first saw it, with dark green leaves and tons of buds. I do wish that I had cut it back a bit more though because I can't see my baby Ceanothus on the mound behind it.


Then there are the potted Hostas that died away last fall and I kept, hoping against hope that they would sleep through the winter and come back. I've never had Hostas before so while I knew that they die away during the winter, I didn't know if I did anything bad to them at the same time. But their pretty little leaves have come back and are still growing. I bought these last year before I had the house and split the one plant into these two. Once I get a nice shady spot cleared to put them, I'll get them in the ground...