Catching up…
I’ll share the few other pictures that I fixed for the ‘net. Obviously I am NO photographer.
Pictured are Scarlet Honeysuckle (a hardy climber), another view of Geranium ‘Splish Splash’, Blizzard Mock Orange (Philidelpha some-thing-or-other), Persicaria bistorta, and Tiarella ‘Chocolate Ruffles’.
This is a flower bed, mostly for shrubs and perennials, that I have struggled with for years. When I “installed” it, I dug deep, placed some sheet metal as a base, and then piled soil, spoiled hay and compost over that. It looked pristine at first; soon grasses, annual weeds and perennial weeds were thick. I blamed the hay for the problem, and I plucked and hoed and dug. Eventually I dug out the whole bed right down to the sheet metal and started over.
In the years since, my creation kept getting choked with quackgrass (the tenacious perennial grass which spreads by long roots). One of my gardening friends mentioned in a general discussion that, where she put plastic down over quackgrass on SAND, the grass died, and where she put plastic down on CLAY, the quackgrass survived and grew miles of roots. A light went on in my mind: the grass was THRIVING under the sheet metal, laid over top of clay soil.
Back to what I call my “sunset” garden (more about that in a moment)… I dug down and removed the sheet metal, which was obscuring, but obviously NOT killing… quackgrass roots! Ackkk, I dug out wheelbarrows full of the offending weed, and the roots looked like a barrow full of spaghetti. So, I have renovated the entire bed another time, and am trying hard not to let the weeds get ahead of me again.
The reason I call it my “sunset” bed is that, at one time, I was having trouble finding places for flowers that were carmine, scarlet, orange and yellow which didn’t jarringly clash with each other and cooler hues. I decided to build a flower garden which had the red, orange and yellow together on purpose. In the years since, I have decided that blue is also part of a sunset sky (delphinium and globe thistle), and I can’t avoid having green, obviously… so the plan is pretty much not a “plan” anymore. When I think of it, nearly any colour except, I suppose green, could be part of the sunset, including pink and purple.
I’m delighted to see that the lilies are blooming, finally. I took a large bouquet to my friend at the Beanery, to replace the peonies that I took last week. There is a phenomenum with the lilies that I haven’t been able to figure out: I have hundreds, and it seems that more and more are “reverting” to orange! I was given a few orange varieties of Asiatics, and I had the orange tiger lily, and I bought Orange Pixie Asiatic too, but I have orange lilies now where I planted PINK and other colours.
I keep trying to find information about this on the Internet, in forums and in Chat groups, and although some gardeners suggest that the lilies are “crossing”, I still don’t understand what’s going on. Most of the lilies are growing and increasing from the original bulbs, and not seeding themselves, so I don’t get how they could be crossing. If I had the dozens of varieties planted in the same place, I could understand how an orange lily might be stronger and overtake the others. But how, all over the yard, I’m getting the change in colour, I do not know. I resent it a little and it makes me feel a little “freakish”, but, at the end of the day, orange lilies are beautiful too.
Okay, enough about that… talk to you guys soon. ~ Ann
