Category: garden.

Good morning from the garden.

Well … I have to say, this gardening season is coming to a close on a less than stellar note.

It started out great.  Although the deer once again ate most of my tulips, I had some lovely daffodils and grape hyacinths in the spring.

My peonies were gorgeous, although short-lived as usual.

The alliums were lovely this year too.

I had great success with my clematis after fertilizing it in the spring for the first time.

We did end up getting a hail storm at the end of May which damaged a few of my hostas.

Then, things kind of started going downhill from there.  As I’ve mentioned way too many times, we had a really wet summer.  Lots of rain, and lots of wind.  We lost a good sized branch from our pear tree in one storm giving it a lopsided look.

So much scary wind led to my neighbor/handyman Ken having the beautiful maple tree in his backyard removed … leaving a rather sun scorched landscape where once there was a shady oasis.

Everything I have growing in that back perennial bed is looking really stressed now after going from partial shade to full sun.  I’m trying to look at the bright side though, no pun intended.  I was able to put in a row of Quick Fire Fab hydrangeas …

And I plan to re-work that entire “L” shaped perennial bed in the spring, pulling out the shade plants and replacing them with some sun loving things.

Because we’ve had so much wet weather this year, my lilacs have a bad case of leaf spot fungus which causes their leaves to turn brown and fall off.  This is happening all over our area, and many lilacs look far worse than mine.

The wet weather has also given us a massive crop of earwigs and slugs, and they’ve made mincemeat of my hostas.

A week or two ago I mentioned that at this point the panicle hydrangeas were the only thing still looking good in my garden.

I think it was the very next day that we had a torrential rainfall that practically flattened them.

The giant flowers were so heavy after being saturated with rain.  There was one large section that broke off completely, but I was hoping the rest would bounce back as they dried out.  Unfortunately, they weren’t able to stand back up again.

That being said, they are still gorgeous.  Just a little droopy.

And that brings me to my most recent discovery.  It appears that I have jumping worms.

If you remember, I posted about jumping worms back in May.  They are a non-native earthworm that strips the nutrients from top soil.  And according to Ramsey County they are an emerging problem in our area.  They can be introduced to your garden in mulch, compost and potted plants.

Little did I realize at the time that I would end up having a problem with them myself.

It was the beginning of August when I started to notice that I seemed to have far more worms in my garden than usual.  I thought it was just due to the wet weather.  But then I noticed that my soil was looking funny.  Sort of crumbly.

Then I realized that a patch of creeping sedum that I had was dying off.  I could pull it right out of the ground, it didn’t seem to have any roots left at all.  As I was pulling it, I noticed that the worms were in abundance in that area, and the soil that held the sedum just crumbled away.

Now, creeping sedum is shallow rooted by nature, and this particular patch was growing over flagstone.  So, it was extremely shallow rooted.

That being said, I’d had that patch of sedum for a couple of decades or more.  Here it is in happier days.

It grew right over that flagstone.  And now it’s completely dead.

I’ll also point out, as you can see, that the English ivy is still doing just fine.  It can literally grow without any soil at all, so apparently it’s a good choice if you have jumping worms.

So far the creeping sedum is the only obvious victim of the worms in my garden, but I don’t know what the future will hold for the rest of the plants.  Fortunately many of my hostas have been there for a long time and are really well rooted in.  Hopefully that will save them.

Also, I’ve read that the jumping worm population grows exponentially in a wet year v. a dry one.  So it’s possible that this isn’t the first year I’ve had them, but just the first year that they have been this bad.  This summer’s wet weather strikes again.

The problem is, so far there are no definitive solutions for eradicating jumping worms.  I’m not going to go into all of the details here, but if you are looking for more info on jumping worms and possible ways to deal with them you can check out this link.

I’m going to have to do some experimenting to try and mitigate their damage.  Also, I will no longer be sharing plants from my garden with others which is a bit of a bummer.  But better safe than sorry, right?

As as sidebar, if you grabbed one of my sedum cuttings at the Carriage House sale, don’t worry.

The cuttings were taken from the tops of a taller sedum (not a creeping variety), and potted up in new potting soil.  They would not have contained jumping worms or their eggs.

So at this point, I’m ready to throw in the towel on gardening.  I’ve always struggled with garden burnout around now, but this has been a rough one for sure.  I think I’ll be happy to button things up for a long winter’s nap.  I’m sure next spring I’ll be ready to face it all again.

How about you?  Are you ready to call it good for gardening season this year?  Leave a comment and let me know.

Good morning from the garden!

I have to admit, not much is looking great in my garden right now.  The hostas are full of holes from earwigs and/or slugs, the bee balm is dried up and sad looking, the ferns are on their last legs, the tips on all of the irises are brown, and I don’t even want to talk about the pseudocercospora leaf spot fungus on my lilacs (if you haven’t heard about this, it’s rampant in Minnesota this year due to the amount of wet weather we’ve had, for more info, check out this video from Kare11).

That being said, my Japanese Spikenard is still looking gorgeous.

And the panicle hydrangeas are looking absolutely stunning this week, they love all of the rain we’ve had!  This one is my Vanilla Strawberry …

And this one is Limelight …

Here’s a better photo to put the size of that Limelight in perspective.

It’s easily 11′ to 12′ tall.  I sure do hope my new Quick Fire Fab hydrangeas perform as well for me.  FYI, I did fertilize my hydrangeas in early spring with Espoma Rose-tone.  You don’t really need to fertilize panicle hydrangeas, but I’ve read that they will grow faster if you do.  So you can bet I’ll be out there with the Rose-tone again next spring to fire up those Quick Fire Fabs (pardon the very lame pun).

Since my own garden isn’t looking especially inspiring right now, I’m bringing this Sunday morning in the garden post to you from Green Barn Garden Center’s sunflower field in Isanti, MN.

My niece and I headed up there earlier this week to check it out.

Although it was a bit of a gloomy day (and yes, there was more rain!), the flowers were sunny enough to make up for it.

Being there on a cloudy weekday meant we nearly had the entire place to ourselves.

Sunflowers take about 60 days to bloom, and they bloom for about 7 to 10 days.  So Green Barn plants five crops in succession so that they have at least one section in full bloom throughout the month of August.

They provide a bunch of fun photo spots, like this one with a piano …

or this one with an old fire truck.

There were numerous tractors that one could pose on too.

But my niece and I are of the same mind when it comes to photos of ourselves.  We don’t like them.  I did convince her to pose for just one though.

It started to drizzle about halfway through our wander around the field, so we wrapped things up after checking out a few more of the photo props like these fun bikes.

We paused at the end for one quick selfie, which both of us hated …

but we did it anyway.

If any of you locals are looking for some fun photo ops, Green Barn Garden Center should have sunflowers in bloom through Labor Day weekend.  They charge $7 admission, but you can pose for as many photos as you like (or not, in our case).  Here’s a link so you can check out all of the details.

Good morning from the garden!

Over the past week I’ve been working hard on embracing change.  I fully admit, I’ve never been a fan.  Especially when the change is not by choice.

Ironically, just last week I wrote a blog post from the garden about having patience, and changes in the garden that take years to come to fruition.  But sometimes the opposite happens and a very drastic change takes place in the garden overnight.

Recently my neighbor/handyman Ken decided to have the enormous shade tree in his back yard cut down.

Ken and his wife planted this tree as a small sapling when they moved into their house back in the late 70’s.

After nearly 50 years of growth, it was huge.  Not only did it shade Ken’s entire backyard, it also shaded a good bit of our backyard and also our house.

But lately Ken had been worried about the the age of the tree.  As I’ve mentioned so many times lately, we’ve had a lot of rain this summer and much of it has been accompanied by high winds.  A tree had come down on a house a few blocks away from us and Ken became convinced that the same could happen with his tree.

He had a local ‘landscape & tree’ company come out, and they agreed with him that there was a possibility the tree could come down in a storm (um, isn’t that pretty much true of all trees?).

So he decided to have it taken down (although I practically begged him to reconsider).  Since the pine tree that sits on the property line between our two houses was pretty lopsided after being overwhelmed by the giant tree and would surely look awful with that tree gone, he decided to have that one removed as well.

Last Monday the tree removal crew arrived with a giant crane.  They set it up in Ken’s front yard, and then lifted just one guy and his chain saw up and over the house and into the tree canopy.

He attached ropes to each huge limb before he cut it, and then the crane lifted it up and away.

Little did I realize that they were actually going to swing those giant limbs over our house!

I have to say, it was a bit unnerving to see limbs the size of full trees dangling in the air above our roof.

They then lowered them onto the street.

That’s just one limb!  There were probably about six or seven limbs that size that came off the tree.

There was a crew in the street that then cut them up and loaded them into a huge truck.

It was quite the production.

Once the dust cleared, I was horrified by the destruction.  OK, horrified is a strong word.  How about devasted?  Or maybe heart-broken?  Really, I was just simply sad.

Sad because that beautiful tree was no more.

It really didn’t help that it was a brilliantly sunny afternoon, and suddenly my once gloriously shaded backyard was blisteringly hot.  In addition, all of the more unsightly details, like the utility poles and the far neighbor’s giant pole barn were much more noticeable.

Although that tree was nearly 50 years old, maples can live from 100 to 300 years.  And as it turned out, it was perfectly healthy inside.  I suspect that tree would have easily outlived not only Ken, but Mr. Q and me as well.

On the bright side (pardon the pun), I now have a section of garden that will qualify as ‘full sun’.  I’m trying to see this as an opportunity to grow some of those flowering plants that have eluded me in my mostly shady garden.  I plan to re-work that flower bed next spring by adding some sun-loving plants.

I also decided to put in a hydrangea hedge along the property line where the pine tree was.  It will go from the end of my existing garden to meet up with the lilac hedge along the back.  I purchased six Quick Fire Fab hydrangeas to fill it.

Aren’t they gorgeous?  They have a similar growing habit to the Limelight hydrangeas that I love so much, but they bloom about a month earlier and the flowers start out white then turn a lovely blush pink, followed by a deeper pink by fall.

It will take several years before they get to their full height of 6′ to 8′ tall, but when they do get there I think they will be stunning.  Let’s hope I have better luck with this hedge than I did with those lilacs!

Before planting, I prepared the bed by adding some cow manure and tilling it into the top 6″ or so of soil.  OK, well, by “I” I really mean the super hardworking high school student that I hired to help me with the heavy lifting.  We then added some Espoma Bio-tone Starter to each hole as we planted the hydrangeas (this product is supposed to help the plant develop a strong root system to get established more quickly).  Once the shrubs were all in the ground, we mulched the bed with some black wood mulch.  I don’t like to use wood mulch on perennial beds, but I do like to use it under shrubs.  It reduces weeding, helps retain moisture, and that black color really makes the plants pop.

The sight of that row of gorgeous hydrangeas has cheered me up a little, but I have to admit that the loss of that shade tree has really thrown me.  I know, it was just a tree.  There are so many more important things in life.  I’m trying hard to embrace the change, but I’m really going to miss that tree.

Good morning from the garden!

This morning I thought I would update you on a few of the garden projects that I’ve shared in the past.  These are mostly projects that have taken 3 or more (in one case, many more) years to come to fruition.

As Audrey Hepburn supposedly said, to plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.  Gardening is rarely an instant gratification sort of endeavor, that’s for sure.

If you’ve been following me for a few years you may remember that I attempted to plant a lilac hedge back in 2011.  OMG, that means it was 13 years ago.  So yeah, this one has required A LOT of patience.

I initially planted a row of the fancy hybrid type lilacs and after 5 years it looked like this …

Wow, that’s embarassing, isn’t it?  What a straggly mess.

The flowers were gorgeous.

But the hedge wasn’t providing any sort of privacy along our back property line, and it certainly didn’t look good, even when in full flower.

Over the next several years I pulled out those fancy lilacs one or two at a time and replaced them.  At first I replaced a couple of them with common lilacs.

The common lilacs have performed beautifully and are now at least 12′ tall and doing the job they were meant to do.

We can no longer see our neighbor’s son’s fishing boat from our back dining room window.

But the flowers on the common lilac just aren’t terribly exciting.

So over the past two years I have gone back to putting in the fancy hybrids (because I never learn).  This time around I gave them a little winter protection from the rabbits though, and that seemed to help quite a bit.

And Mr. Q has been really careful not to spray them with weed killer, instead we are hand pulling the creeping charlie that keeps threatening to take over from the neighbor’s yard (I don’t blame her for not tackling them on her side, she is elderly and has a bad hip, she used to have beautiful gardens and lawn but she has had to let them go).

So far so good with the two newest lilacs, although they need to put on quite a bit more height before the hedge looks more uniform.

However, I’m once again having mixed results with the the hybrids at the other end of the hedge.  They started out looking great this year, but currently a couple of them look a bit sickly.

I’m going to try a couple of things, and then wait and see how they look next year.  However, in the end I may have to pull out a couple more and replace them with those boring common lilacs.

In the meantime, I’ve begun another experiment with this hedge.  I planted three clematis at the base of the lilacs.  They should wind their way up the branches and eventually provide some additional interest after the lilacs themselves bloom early in the season.

Once again, we’ll have to wait and see if that works out.

My goal with this hedge was to provide a natural barrier, but not add a lot of extra maintenance.  So I wasn’t going for a neatly trimmed hedge.  The proper way to prune a lilac is to remove approximately 1/3 of the stems all the way to the ground.  In other words, you’re not supposed to just shear the top off to create a uniform height throughout like you would with a more formal hedge.  If you want that sort of look, I wouldn’t choose lilacs.

My next experiment in the garden was planting a Golden Shadows Pagoda Dogwood in the fern bed in 2022.

The Pagoda Dogwood is an understory tree that will grow in partial shade.  Mine, however, is planted in nearly full shade.  For that reason I really wasn’t sure if it would thrive in this spot.

But it is looking really good this year, and I can finally see it peeking out above the ferns.

I suspect it will be another several years at least before it starts to look like I want it to, so I’ll just have to continue to be patient on that one.

Next up is another experiment, this time with planting a shrub in the shade garden.  I planted a Morden Golden Glow Elderberry in 2021.

This is another one that will grow in partial shade, but I planted it in what would probably be considered full shade.  It does get some late evening sun though.

It is growing somewhat slowly, I’m guessing that’s due to the shade.  The full height range for this plant is 4′ to 5′, but I’d rather it stay on the smaller end.

So far, so good.

Last up I thought I’d share a plant that hasn’t required much patience.  You may remember that last summer I went on the St. Anthony Park garden tour and discovered a trendy plant that everyone seemed to be growing.

This plant has a lot of names.  You can call it Aralia cordata, or ‘Sun King’ Golden Japanese Spikenard.  I just call mine Spike.

Spike is loving life in this nearly full shade spot.  In fact, he’s crowding out a couple of neighboring plants that I’m going to have to now move elsewhere.  But that’s OK, I think this plant is gorgeous and worth the space.

Now, how about you?  Do you have any long-term planting projects like my lilac hedge?  Or maybe a favorite trendy new plant that looks great in year one?  Leave a comment and let me know.

Good morning from the garden!

This morning I thought I would share a mid-summer update on my container plantings.

I can’t remember if I mentioned this in an earlier post or not, but this year I chose to focus on plants with interesting foliage, like these absolutely gorgeous rex begonias, rather than plants grown for showy flowers.

The main reason for this is that I just don’t have enough full-sun locations in my garden to get good results with most flowering annuals like petunias, geraniums, lantana, etc.

That’s why I planted up my rusty urns with some dwarf alberta spruce spirals underplanted with some simple variegated ivy.

I’m quite happy with the results so far.  The spirals are starting to get a little shaggy, so I’m going to have to bite the bullet and prune them soon (I’m a little nervous about getting the shape right).  The ivy has filled in beautifully as well.

Other than that eventual pruning, these have required little to no maintenance all summer.  We’ve gotten so much rain that I have barely even needed to water them.

I also chose to rely on colorful foliage in both of my galvanized boiler window boxes (there is one on the carriage house and one on the potting shed).

The one on the carriage house is mainly taken up by two very vigorous annuals, Lemon Coral sedum and Blackie potato vine.  I did originally have a Lime Marmalade heuchera behind that potato vine, but it was totally being smothered.  So I pulled it out and planted it in the ground.

The other boiler window box contains a Charmed Wine oxalis, a ColorBlaze Mini Me Chartreuse coleus, another Lemon Coral sedum and a burgundy colored rex begonia that I don’t know the name of …

and that colorful plant shooting out of the left side is Autumnale fuschia.

Technically this fuschia is supposed to produce blooms, but it is really grown for its foliage rather than its flowers.  I’m fairly sure that mine has not bloomed even once.  Possibly because I’m not really fertilizing these containers like I would for blooming plants.

My bed frame planter is situated in nearly full shade.  It gets a very brief hit of sun in the early morning hours and that’s about it.  I kept it simple this year with a couple of huge ferns that I purchased at Home Depot, a bunch of caladium, and another Blackie potato vine.

If you look at the potato vine, you can see that I have a lot of insect damage.  I’ve had a massive infestation of earwigs this year, I suspect because it has been so wet.  They’ve done a ton of damage, especially to my hostas, coleus, brunnera and potato vines.

Fortunately they don’t seem to enjoy caladium.

Speaking of which, it has only been recently that the caladium has really taken off.  Caladium like hot, humid weather and we’ve just not had enough heat for it to thrive up until now.

I purchased this caladium at Home Depot in mid-June.  As you’ll read in a moment, I have other caladium that I purchased earlier in the spring, and spent a bit more money on, that is not doing nearly as well as this one.

I didn’t strictly stick to non-flowering plants this year.  I have a trio of rusty urns that I filled with Rockapulco Appleblossom impatiens …

and a pretty pale pink and white upright fuschia (sorry, I didn’t make a note of the name of that one).

But they also include a fair amount of non-flowering stuff like the Creeping Jenny, a Plum Pudding heuchera and another caladium.

As you can see, the caladium is looking less than stellar in these pots.  That’s the caladium that I planted much earlier in the season.  I think our cool spring weather really knocks it back a bit.  Caladium is happier spending a little more time in a greenhouse before being planted out in Minnesota.

I’ve definitely saved the best for last today.  I am really happy with the results in my front window box this year.  You may remember that I considered last year’s front window box a bit of a fail.   So this year I went in a different direction.

When I planted this one up I called it a ‘black and white’ combination.

For the ‘white’ elements, I used white New Guinea impatiens and Proven Winner’s Superbena Whiteout.

Considering that this window box faces northwest and thus gets mostly shade with a couple of hours of evening sun, that verbena is performing quite nicely I think.

I also included the Proven Winner’s Diamond Snow euphorbia.

The Diamond Snow is supposed to be more compact than the Diamond Frost variety, and I can verify that is true (as you can see for yourself above left).

You can also see my non-flowering white element (above right), a white caladium.  The white New Guinea impatiens (above center) are not performing as well as I would like them to, but I just gave them a shot of fertilizer so hopefully they will put on some more blooms soon.

For the ‘black’ elements in my window box I used plants with a deep, dark purple color like the Blackie potato vine, and the Charmed Wine oxalis.

I also included a ‘black’ coleus, but I’m not precisely sure what variety it is.  Possibly Black Coral.

But the real stars of the show in the front window box this year are those gorgeous rex begonias.

I really wasn’t sure how well these would perform for me.  To be honest, I’ve never done well with begonias in the past.  I tend to overwater them causing the crown of the plant to rot.  In fact, I also planted some tuberous begonias this year and they did in fact rot.

But the begonias in this front window box are stunning.

Despite our super rainy weather.  I don’t think I’ve watered this box more than once or twice so far.

My plan is to try to overwinter these begonias this year, and I may try some propagation experiments with them as well.  I’d love to have even more of them next year!

Overall I’m very happy with my decision to focus more on interesting foliage rather than flowers in my containers this year.  But how about you?  Do you prefer to have an abundance of blooming annuals instead?  Leave a comment and let me know.

Good morning from the garden!

Once again, this morning’s post doesn’t come from my own garden.  If you read my recent post about our road trip to La Crosse, Wisconsin, you may remember that I promised I’d share the surprise from behind the lovely hotel we stayed in, Hatchery.

When we booked our room, I had no idea that the Riverside International Friendship Gardens surrounded the side and back of our hotel.

Had I known, I would have booked even faster!

Apparently La Crosse has seven sister cities.  For those of you who might not have heard of sister cities, here is the definition from Wikipedia:  A sister city or a twin town relationship is a form of legal or social agreement between two geographically and politically distinct localities for the purpose of promoting cultural and commercial ties.

For La Crosse those seven sisters are located in China, Germany, France, Norway, Russia, Ireland and Cameroon.  There are 7 sections to the International Friendship Garden, each meant to represent one of the sister cities.

Let’s start in the Chinese Garden.

You enter this garden through a dragon gate to find a lovely koi pond.

La Crosse’s sister city in China is Luoyang and the garden brochure calls it the ‘city of peonies’, but unfortunately July isn’t peony season.

But the garden was still beautiful.

Next up was the French Garden.  The sister city of Épinal, France was the inspiration for this formal garden with its knot garden and formally trimmed shrubbery.

This was definitely my favorite section, I just love a formal garden with urns and fountains.

There was even a mini hedge maze.

La Crosse’s sister city in Norway is Førde, and it is located in the waterfall region.  The Norway section of the garden has not just one, but two waterfalls.

Here is the second …

The Norwegian garden also features seven ‘hidden’ trolls, although they weren’t terribly hidden.

La Crosse’s German sister city is Friedberg.  This section of the garden contains a lovely pergola with a climbing hydrangea, unfortunately not in bloom while we were visiting.

I loved this bench with its winged lions for support.

The Russian garden has this beautiful pavilion, or besedka.

It is a replica of one on the banks of the Volga River in Dubna, the sister city in Russia.

We just happened to catch it in the most beautiful evening light as it was nearing sunset.

Three rivers come together in La Crosse, the Mississippi, the Black and the La Crosse, so I’m not precisely sure which river is directly behind that besedka.  I just had to grab a photo showing how high the water is this year.

We’ve gotten so much rain.

The mill wheel in the Irish Garden was copied from one in Bantry, the Irish sister city.

It totally reminded me of one we saw in Prague.

Lastly, we have the Cameroon Garden.  Kumbo is the sister city in Cameroon.  This garden contains the Mami Wata, an Africian water spirit, fountain.

I was so impressed by the Riverside International Friendship Gardens.  They were beautifully designed and maintained.  Each section felt very different, and totally reminded me of the country being represented.

I mentioned that the French Garden, with its formality, was my favorite.  Which garden would you pick as a favorite?  Leave a comment and let me know.

And if you ever happen to be in La Crosse, Wisconsin be sure to check out this gem of spot.  It is located at the north end of Riverside Park.

Good morning from the garden!

Remember the antique newspaper roller that I turned into a succulent planter last year?

It did really well out on my deck over that summer.

I brought it inside to overwinter it, but by spring it was starting to look a bit rough.

The succulents had all gotten either quite leggy or too big for the container.

Initially thought I would just pull everything out and start over.

So I picked up some fast-draining potting mix and a few new succulents.  But just as I was about to pull out the leggy succulents I thought, gee, this is a waste.  I really should try reviving some of them.

Now, I’m definitely no expert, so if you’re looking for the best advice on this process you may want to look further.  But I thought I’d go ahead and share the results of my efforts here anyway.

After a bit of online research, I discovered that succulents are theoretically really easy to propagate.  There are different methods, but I went with what looked the easiest to me.  That was simply cutting them off and then setting the cuttings aside for a few days to let the cut ends dry out.

That felt entirely bizarre to me.  Who would think that you can let a cutting just sit there for days without water or soil?  But after three days, they still looked perfect fine.

So I filled up some small plastic pots with the soil I’d purchased and simply pushed the cuttings into the soil.

I’m not sure where I went wrong with this process, but ultimately those two big succulents were the only ones that survived this method.  All of the smaller ones ended up with rotted stems.  It’s likely that was the result of too much water.  As I’ve mentioned (ad nauseum), we’ve had a lot of rain so far this summer and I had left these outside.

As a sidebar, I also planted five Amstel Netja Dark begonias this spring and every single one of them ended up rotting at the base as well.  That was despite zero watering on my part and pots with good drainage.  We just had so much rain!

Anyway, back to the succulents.  Although those cuttings didn’t make it, I did leave some of the cut off stems in the container.  And lo and behold, some of those sent out new plants.

I also left the bright lime green drapey succulent (sorry, I don’t know the name of this one) in place, even though it was looking a bit shabby, and it has bounced back beautifully.

I also added a few new succulents to the mix including this funky one …

I also wanted to add something dark to balance out that bright lime green.

And I had to add these next two just because I thought they were so sculptural.

In the end, I guess I was following that rule I talked about a couple of weeks ago of having each of the four colors of green, yellow, blue and red represented.

I really love how this succulent planter has turned out again this year, but I can’t seem to find the perfect spot for it in my garden.

For that reason, I put a price tag on it at my recent occasional sale.  It didn’t sell though.  Perhaps because I marked it $40 (after all I have at least that much into it, if not more).

So, I still have it.  In fact, I just pulled it inside because as I’m writing this post on Saturday there is a big thunderstorm rolling in.  More rain.  I’m trying not to drown this bunch of succulents.

I’ll keep carrying it around my garden looking for a spot that is worthy of it, but in the meantime I’m also listing on it on my ‘available for local sale‘ page just in case one of you locals has the perfect spot for an antique newspaper roller turned succulent planter.

Now, how about you?  Have you had luck propagating succulents?  What was your method?  Leave a comment and let me know.

Good morning from the garden!

We’re not in my garden this morning, instead I’m sharing the Munsinger and Clemens Gardens in St. Cloud, MN.

These are two distinctly separate gardens that are across the street from one another.

The Munsinger Gardens are shady, informal gardens located right on the bank of the Mississippi River.

These gardens are filled with some lovely examples of things you can grow in the shade like hostas, coleus, begonias …

and that trendy favorite from last year, Sun King Aralia (or Golden Japanese Spikenard).

They also have a fairy garden in a wheelbarrow (sounds familiar!).

The Munsinger Gardens were created in the 1930’s using labor from the WPA.

As you may have already noticed by these photos, it was raining the day my sister, niece and I drove up to St. Cloud.

It was also super buggy.  All of the rain we’ve been having has meant bumper crops of mosquitoes.

Fortunately we were armed with umbrellas (after a quick stop at Target because I forgot mine) and bug spray.  Plus, I happen to think that most gardens look prettier in the rain than they do in blinding sunshine (lucky thing since we also visited de Hortus in Amsterdam in the rain!).

Across the street from the Munsinger Gardens are the Clemens Gardens.

These gardens were developed in the 1990’s by Bill Clemens in honor of his wife, Virginia.

They are much more formal and include some really beautiful fountains like the Renaissance Fountain with Cranes …

and the Windsor Court Fountain.

There are also some gorgeous examples of ironwork including some lovely benches …

and a beautiful arbor.

The quadrants surrounding the arbor are each devoted to a monochromatic scheme.

There is a yellow garden.

Although I’ve never been a big fan of yellow flowers, I defer back to my motto, never say never.  Lately I’ve been really enjoying the yellow in my garden starting with yellow daffodils in spring, then my yellow bearded iris, followed by evening primrose.  I even added a yellow Baptisia this year.

But that being said, I’m still not sure I like a monochromatic yellow garden.  To me it just looks a little bit sickly.

The red garden was full of Astilbe while we were visiting.

Unfortunately I somehow managed to miss getting photos of the blue and the purple quadrants, aside from this photo of the gorgeous variegated foliage on what I am guessing is an iris.

There is also a formal rose garden, and all of the roses are labeled.

  So if you’re into roses, you can pick out some that you want to try in your own garden.

If I grew roses, I’d be tempted by this one called Pop Art.

But the Japanese beetles in our area make a mess of roses, so I’ve mostly quit growing them.  I have one shrub rose left and that’s it.

I do prefer the look of a slightly wild, less formal shrub rose in the garden also.

Unfortunately, aside from the roses, I didn’t see many other plants with identification tags.  So I can’t tell you what variety of clematis this is …

but it sure was pretty.

As were the delphiniums that were in full bloom.

It may have been rainy, but it was still fun to visit both of these gardens.

Do you have any fabulous gardens near you that are worth a visit?  If so, leave a comment and let me know.  I’d love to hear about them.

Good morning from the lush, and very wet, garden!

Today I thought I would share the advice that Laura on Garden Answer gives about foliage color.  She says that to create interest in a garden bed you should include something in green, something in yellow, something in blue and something in red.  Unless, of course, you are going for a monochromatic look, such as with an all white moon garden.

You might initially think that would be easy with flowering plants, but impossible to do with plants grown strictly for their foliage.  Aren’t they all just green?

Well, not in garden terminology.  Obviously there aren’t any plants with truly ‘blue’ foliage. But in plant lingo, ‘blue’ means something like this …

And ‘yellow’ refers to a brighter chartreuse-y green, like the color on this Sun Power hosta.

And red foliage can be found in lots of heuchera.

As for ‘green’, well, that one’s easy.

It’s just green.

Ever since the first time I heard Laura give this piece of advice, I’ve been trying to put it into practice.  I started with my front garden.

And I really love the results.

I think it packs a lot of punch, even when nothing is blooming which is the case right now.

The ‘yellow’ is provided by the varigated sedum, as well as the Lemon Frost lamium.

The ‘green’ is provided by the large swath of astilbe in the back.

Quick sidebar on that astilbe, I divided it early last year and it had a very mediocre season with just a few blooms last summer.  But this year it has more than doubled in size and is loaded with buds right now.  One bonus of delaying my sale is that it just may be blooming by Thursday, if we ever get any sunshine.

I don’t have a lot of blue in this garden, just three large Krossa Regal hostas anchoring the corners.

Well, I guess I can also include the blue that is in the June hosta as well.

In fact, that one can count as both ‘blue’ and ‘yellow’.  Well, and even just a touch of plain old green.  It’s one of my favorite hostas, isn’t it pretty?

And finally, the ‘red’.  For that element I’ve got a Northern Exposure Black heuchera, along with a Palace Purple heuchera.

It’s only been within the last couple of years that I began to appreciate the impact of adding dark foliage to contrast with the brighter colors.  I had planted a May hosta beside a Palace Purple heuchera and it was ended up being a lovely combo.

When I divided those astilbe that I mentioned a minute ago, I also removed some white flowering astilbe from that spot and replaced them with one of the newer astilbes from Proven Winners called Dark Side of the Moon.

They are looking pretty small so far, this being only their second year (plus, I rather tortured them by moving them three times last summer before I decided on this spot).  But hopefully next year they will ‘leap’ and fill out that space a bit better.

I’ve been so happy with the results in this front garden that I’m planning to systematically apply this approach to my other garden beds as well, starting with the shade garden.

I’m doing pretty good with the blue, yellow and green, but I need a bit more red.  So far I just have a few Black Taffeta heuchera (front right corner of photo).

So earlier this week I pulled out the Boston Fern that I had planted in front of my statue, Cossetta, on a whim many years ago (just to see if it would overwinter, and spoiler alert, it did).  I replaced it with some more of that Dark Side of the Moon astilbe (and FYI, I purchased them at Home Depot).

It feels a bit scandalous having revealed Cossetta’s ankles.  Now I have to wait for the astilbe to sleep, creep and then leap.  Gardening definitely requires some patience.

By the way, if any of you locals are planning to come to my sale, please feel free to take a wander around the garden while you’re here.  I won’t mind.

And maybe, just maybe, things will have dried out a little bit by then!

Now, how about you?  Do you try to add all four of these foliage colors to your gardens?  Do you have any favorite plants with blue, yellow or red foliage?

Leave a comment and let me know!