| My Garden I find it as hard to name a favorite garden season as it is choose a favorite flower: I want a little of everything in my 60 by 125 foot suburban yard. Mostly, the idea is to find plants that thrive on a minimum of maintenance and combine them in sometimes unpredictable ways to emphasize their architecture, foliage textures and colors.
Late spring usually is a mix of elation and frustration. My most dependable perennials bloom then, but they're also the most fragile. After an agonizing wait for everything to pop, it all does -- only to be cooked on the first 90-degree day of June or knocked down in an afternoon thunderstorm.
With apologies to Georgia O'Keeffe
June 2005
Radler's Rose, June 2002
My favorite iris is a soft peach with a tangerine beard, my least favorite a bicolor with purplish-grey standards and red-violet falls. Both came with the house 28 years ago, and they seem to work well together. A mauve columbine, probably the variety 'Nora Barlow,' came through the fence from a neighbor's yard. It's a vigorous self-seeder and grows where it wants to. So does the lavender dame's rocket -- Hesperis matronalis. Many people mistakenly identify it as wild phlox, and you see a lot of it along Wisconsin roadsides in late spring. You'd see a lot more in my garden, too, if I didn't keep after it.
I decided to let the weigela go after it bloomed last summer, and sprawl it did. The white irises are a hybrid named 'Mount Rushmore,' and viewed up close are the icy grey color of the granite monument. I must either resume whacking back the shrub or pull the irises forward so they don't have to lean for sun.
Hot colors take over here later in the summer -- the scarlet oriental poppy gives you a hint. There will be yellow, orange and red daylilies, burgundy phlox, purple coneflowers and asters, yellow achilla and helenium and a red climbing rose. Stay tuned.
Matching up the right old favorites makes for great counterpoint, especially in late spring.
Fresh lavender and acid green: plain old chives, and plain old lady's mantle (Alchemilla mollis) spiral through my oversized take on a knot garden. The lady's mantle flower clusters are long lasting, and its graceful leaves catch raindrops and sparkle for hours after every spring shower.
Clematis jackmanii needs no companion. Though it seems a hopeless tangle of unpromising stems at winter's end, leave it alone and it will soon cover itself with deep purple blossoms that fade to a softer lilac in the strong June sun and cool a corner on the back fence.
Tenacious survivors harmonize in the shade of the Colorado blue spruce I planted in front of the house 25 years ago, knowing full well that it would one day tower over everything. The hosta row looks good until the slugs eat holes in it. In the railroad tie bed, cranesbill (Geranium 'Johnson's Blue') and a white heuchera sprawl at the feet of crowded spireas and barberries that were supposed to be dwarfs.
When the front yard ninebark leafs out in spring, neighbors think it's a forsythia. But all that yellow is its leaves, and they provide a show every year, not just now and then, as forsythias do here. The ninebark variety is 'Dart's Gold,' and its white flowers appear in early June. The bees love them.
Peonies are forever, and 'Festiva Maxima,' says White Flower Farm, has been a great peony for generations and the nursery's best seller for almost 50 years. Mine came with the house. I moved it almost 25 years ago from a shady corner in the back yard to a sunny spot out front, where it has flourished ever since. All I do is confine it with a peony ring as the shoots emerge, pinch off the side buds to encourage larger blossoms, cut off the flower stalks after the blooms fade, and chop down everything in the fall. You've got to savor 'Festiva Maxima' when it blossoms, though. Once the buds open, it won't be a week before the glorious sight turns to a pile of white petals on the grass below.
On a more modest scale, these little English daisies seemed just the thing for the red-and-pink scheme that this year's annuals are intended to bring to the knot garden. The garden book says the daisies will give up in the midsummer heat. Perhaps the red celosia, mango-hued verbena and 'Profusion Cherry' zinnies now just getting going will have taken over.
Then there are the thugs! I planted the well mannered blue veronica years ago, but have since been neglecting this part of the garden. The artemesia -- I think it's 'Silver King' -- and the little buttercups, Ranunculus 'Flore Pleno,' are only a mite less invasive than the bane of my garden, Campanulus rapunculoides.
Still, these three make for a handsome, prairie-style tangle when they bloom together, even though none is a native.
Jan. 22, 2005
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