Plant Talk

Flower Fireworks in Red and Blue for the Holiday

The  garden is blooming red and blue for the 4th of July. Between towering spires of delpinium in blues from pale Delft to deepest indigo, lacy love-in-a-mist seeding all over the place in washy shades of azure, and hydrangea heads coloring up, blue is covered. Red, too, in nasturtiums just coming on, especially 'Empress of India' with its deep red flowers and blue-tinged foliage, begonias, and poppies...now if the brightest red flower imaginable, Crocosmia 'Lucifer', would just bloom a little early, we'd have a full-spectrum color palette at ground level to rival the fireworks overhead...

Blue, blue delphinium are the stars of the early July garden...usually they flower too early for the 4th of July, but this cool spring slowed them down to coincide with the holiday.

Begonia boliviensis is a red/orange stunner that blooms until frost....

Nigella damascena, or love-in-a-mist, is an self-seeding annual in shades of true blue, not a hint of purple. Plant it once, and you'll have it forever - it seeds itself in my gravel garden, but its easy to pull out any you don't want...

Old-fashioned Oriental poppies bloom brilliant red...

And don't forget to keep your dogs safe from all the noise and confusion over the holiday.....

 

 

Sun Drunk

A gardening friend asked if you could get drunk on the sun? It sure feels like it the last couple of days, when the temperatures soared to over 70 degrees. What a fine  excuse for a gardening marathon, the first hard-core stint of the year.

Here's my springtime sequence of tasks, which I try to do in order, but always get pulled off track , usually by a transplanting chore. With interruptions for nursery runs or writing down ideas and plans, here's the drill:

First I clean up, cut back, and do the early pruning, like roses, clematis, hydrangeas and evergreen ferns. I cut back woody heucheras to just a little stub, tidy up leaves, evergreen grasses, and this year, unfortunately, dug up a number of corpses of dead plants, like lorapetalum and hebes, lost in the big December freeze.

Next I work on the soil, adding more to raised beds with "shrinkage" over the winter, piling compost on all the beds, and scratching in a balanced, organic fertilizer around heavy feeders like hosta, clematis, hydrangeas, roses, sweet peas. Water thoroughly.

I check all the drip hoses in the raised beds, and replace or re-route soaker hoses if need be. This must be my least favorite chore of the year...

Now is the time to transplant anything that needs more space or a different situation. It's also time to divide overgrown or congested perennials, like crocosmia. I dug up all my strawberries this year, dividing up the mother plant, re-planting the more mature babies.

Plant! Seeds, starts, fresh baby perennials - over the last couple of days I've planted a trio of Helenium 'Mardi Gras' (above) a few 'Carmen' oriental poppies (below), rows of lettuces, broccoli, cauliflower. Artichokes, sedum, swathes of coppery little carexes..and I haven't gotten to containers, yet, or trimming out any of the beds, annuals or any warm-weather vegetables, but I'm trying to remember to leave space for sunflowers, nasturtiums, pumpkins, carrots, and beans....let alone dahlias!

Water, and add a top dressing of rich, dark well-composted manure mulch so the plants are well fed and the beds look tidy and fresh.....                                                                                          

 

Enjoy the look of bare soil between plants, because it won't last long....

Q&A - Sweet Peas, Poppies, and Raised Bed Construction

No posts over the weekend because I spent both days at a yoga seminar taught by a rock star of the yoga world.  I've never seen anything like it - it was  Houston-based, Anusara yoga founder John Friend road show come to Seattle, with live music, chanting, and two hundred enthusiastic students.  John is a joyous, charismatic teacher who manages to make even eight hours of yoga fun and inspiring. But now my muscles are so sore about all I can do is sit at my desk and try to get caught up on a few questions from readers:

Q: Hello Valerie, 
I enjoyed your article in the Seattle Times this morning and am inspired to put in some sweet peas.  Here is my question.  Do you think they would climb and find support if I plant them at the base of a row of arborvitae?  They would have morning sun.
Sally

A: Dear Sally,
I urge you to find a more hospitable location for sweet peas, for they need more than morning sun as well as better scaffolding than a row of trees. The curly little climbing tendrils on sweet peas are surprisingly strong and persistent for how delicate they look, but you'd need to run a series of strings up into your trees to get the sweet peas to climb them. Sweet peas, however, need more water, sun and nutrition than they'd receive planted at the base of your trees. You'll be more successful growing sweet peas up a trellis, chain link fence, or even  a tall wigwam of lattice or bamboo stakes in the middle of a sunny garden bed. Maybe if you dug in plenty of compost and provided some trellising, you could convince a clematis to climb your arborvitae.

This photo is of 'Black Knight' sweet peas growing up a hog wire screen in my garden.

 Hello Valerie,
Now you've gone and done it! I was doing so well at limiting myself to one package of Renee's sweet pea seeds this year (Jewels of Albion), since I am also a person who always plants too many sweet peas. The suitable growing area in my yard is quite small, so this was a practical decision. But now I can hear the siren song of 'Zinfandel' calling me, though I'd never heard of Zinfandel before I read your column in Pacific NW today. So, as I've done in past years, I'll begin scheming once again for ways to squeeze more space for sweet peas into my little plot. My great-grandfather, of whom I was very fond, claimed sweet peas as his favorite flower. They reward me with rich sensual pleasure, and I feel closer to him at the same time. Thank you for writing about this incomparable flower. I grew Renee's "April in Paris" last year--you are in for a treat! And they bloomed until late October.
Ramona

Valerie:  Your article last week in the Times about poppies reminded me of last season when I noticed some color I had not seen before in a garden that gets little or no care situated behind some Asian Pear trees.  I walked over there and found this wonderful surprise.  These poppies seem to have minds of their own. Thanks for all of your articles.  They are light and good news in dark times.
Nancy

Q. Ms. Easton, 
I kept the article you wrote about your masonry planter boxes  at your Whidbey home. Did you install simple concrete footings under the blocks or just use crushed gravel?  Thanks for responding to  this email.  I love your yard and it is exactly what we want to do in our sunny south facing yard in Fremont.

Thanks, Kirk

A. Hi Kirk,
I'd already forgotten the construction details, but my husband reminds me we used  concrete footings to keep the cement blocks (the beds are built of CMU - 4 " thick concrete masonry units) from shifting over time. The beds are four years old, and have stayed straight and sturdy. We used a combination of these rectangular constructed beds, each four feet across,  and round galvanized feed troughs drilled with drainage holes.(See below)