Month: May 2013
End of Month View: May 2013
It’s been a very long day so I am just going to post some photos of various parts of the garden at the end of May. These pictures were actually taken on Sunday, but close enough. First, the driveway raised bed. The foundation bed at the front of the house. View from behind the sidewalk bed. …
Violets: Love Them Or Hate Them?
It is the season when the Common Violets (Viola sororia Willd.) are blooming. People have a complicated relationship with wild violets. We see them as charming and petite wildflowers, but also as voracious invasive weeds. Personally, I think that violets are fine in their place, which is anywhere other than my flower beds. I welcome …
Weekend Garden Notes: Tuteur, Iris, Allium
Voila, Le Tuteur! Today is lovely, sunny and cool, which makes up partly for yesterday, which was cloudy and cold. It didn’t rain though, so at the conclusion of this weekend I feel almost caught up with staking, cutting back, weeding, etc. Close enough to caught up, anyhow, to prevent total panic. One accomplishment was …
Columbine Are Like Candy
So we all agree that wild columbine (Aquilegia canadensis), also called red columbine, is the most beautiful perennial flower for shade, right? Exactly. A friend of mine likes to say that columbine are like candy, you can never have enough. Certainly A. canadensis, native to North America east of the Rockies, is a sweet wildflower. …
Wildflower Wednesday: Starry Solomon’s Plume
Starry Solomon’s Plume is more properly known as Starry False Solomon’s Seal, but the people who write plant catalogues don’t like common names with “false”, it must drive down sales, so they came up with something with a more positive ring. I think they did right, because the other name implies that the plant is …
Blossoms Are Fleeting, Love Is Eternal
I’ve written before about the glorious display of crabapple blossoms at the Chicago Botanic Garden every spring. But getting to the garden at the right time to see the display is rather challenging. It is at its height for just a few days, a period that can be cut short or eliminated altogether by a …
May’s Garden Madness
There is the notion that working in the garden brings the gardener a sense of tranquility and calm. Ha! Certainly not in the month of May. Gardening in May is a race against time, against weeds, against the grass, against the weather, against your own plants as they undergo growth spurts like lanky teenagers. And …
Last Of The Container Tulips And A New Planting
As I may have mentioned, starting last week and for the remainder of May I have to be out-of-town Monday through Friday. This is what we used to call a major bummer, especially given all that is happening in the garden. Yesterday I arrived home to find that the late season container tulips were blooming. …
Foliage Follow-Up: May 2013
May is a time for fresh green foliage, before heat and drought and little critters give us leaves looking tired and tattered. To begin with, there is wild ginger (Asarum canadense). Not really ginger, but the root does have a strong ginger smell. A nice groundcover native to eastern and central North America. Then there …
Garden Blogger Bloom Day: May 2013
Carol of May Dreams Gardens hosts Garden Bloggers Bloom Day on the 15th of every month, giving gardeners around the world an opportunity to show what’s in bloom on their home ground. So let’s get to it! May has been a good month for color in my garden. The lily flowering tulip ‘West Point’ is now …
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