q is for quandie

Good morning from the garden!

Are you ever plagued by indecision?  Afraid of making the wrong choice, or just unable to make up your mind?

Well, I’ve gone almost 6 years without being able to decide what tree to put in our front yard, or really even whether or not I wanted to plant a tree again.

Let’s recap.

When we moved into our house 35 years ago or so, there were two trees in the front yard.  A maple to the right, and a black walnut to the left.  My sister was visiting the summer that the maple came down.  We were sitting on the front enclosed porch watching a storm roll in when it came crashing down.  Lesson learned; when the warning sirens go off, take shelter in the basement or at least an interior room.

The tree missed our house, but it was a close one.

Back then we ended up also removing the black walnut (it was not a great tree, dropping those huge walnuts all over the yard) when we had the fallen maple cleaned up.

I replaced that maple with a 2nd maple, and the walnut with a flowering pear tree.  Here is a photo taken in autumn when the maple had its fall color.

I loved that tree.

Flash forward to 2019.  The maple was looking really good and finally serving its purpose of providing some shelter from both street noise and from the street light directly across from our bedroom windows.

Then another storm took out maple no. 2.

Ugh!

Once again, I chose to have the pear tree taken down when the maple got cleaned up.  It had gotten rather misshapen next to the maple and it didn’t look good on its own.  You can sort of see that it was mostly bare on the right side of it in the photo above.

Then came five years of being unable to decide what to do next.  I really wanted to plant a Princeton Gold Maple.

I love that bright lime green color.

But did I really want to put yet another maple in that spot?

I thought about doing a Honey Locust instead.  It has a similar golden color, plus the added benefit of tiny leaves that don’t really need to be raked up in the fall.  But I just couldn’t pull the trigger on it.

I finally decided that I would just take a chance on another maple, so I started looking around for the Princeton Gold.  I found one at Abrahamson’s Nursery two years ago, but the price tag was $250.  Yikes!  That seemed a bit much for a tree.

So once again, I put off making a decision.

However, the other day I headed over to Fleet Farm to see what they had in their plant section and lo and behold, there was my Princeton Gold Maple … and only $149.  I bought it on the spot, even though that meant putting the top down on my VW Bug convertible and very carefully driving home with a tree sticking up out of my car.

  Will it be three time’s the charm, or three strikes and you’re out?  I guess time will tell.  But at least I’ve made a choice!

In other garden news, I’ve started filling in the some of the bare spots in my garden that were the result of winter kill.

I lost three brunnera next to the potting shed, and I’ve replaced them with Heucherella ‘Pink Revolution’.

I lost my ‘Rozanne’ perennial geranium, or Cranesbill, under the ‘Limelight’ hydrangeas, and I liked those so much that I replaced them with more of the same.  Last year these bloomed all summer and up until the first freeze for me.

Then I addressed the large dead spot next to the front porch.  I started by replacing the ‘Sun King’ Japanese Spikenard.

Then I added three ‘White Diamonds’ fern leaf bleeding hearts.

They have a lovely blue green foliage and white flowers.  Fern leaf bleeding hearts like partial shade, and this spot is what I would consider full shade.  But I have another fern leaf bleeding heart in this area and it has done really well in this amount of shade.  It’s one of the first things to bloom in spring and then it keeps blooming all summer.

I’m hoping the white ones do as well.

I also added in some ‘Unique Ruby Red’ astilbe just behind the fern leaf bleeding heart.

Up until this year I had a white astilbe in this spot that was loving its life.  So hopefully this replacement will thrive, and hopefully we won’t have another killer winter for a few years.

Last up, I replaced the hostas that didn’t come back with some freebies from my neighbor nnK’s mom’s garden.  Judy was kind enough to tell me that I could divide any of her hostas and help myself to the divisions.

I started with this pretty little one with rounded leaves.

And I also chose this one that is a little bit larger and had pointed leaves and a bit more variegation.

So, how about some progression shots?

Here is how this space looked last summer.

So fab!

And then nearly every one of those plants died over the winter with the exception of the ‘Stiletto’ hosta that you can’t actually see in the photo above because it’s behind a larger hosta.

Here’s how this space looked a week or two ago.

So sad!

I just don’t know what happened here.  As I’ve mentioned before, I do have jumping worms in my garden.  So it’s possible this is jumping worm damage.  However, this spot wasn’t particularly loaded with the worms last summer.  I definitely had other spots in the garden that were worse, and they are doing fine this spring.  Thank god all of my gardens don’t look this bad!

And here is how it looks now.

By the way, all of those extra pops of pink are impatiens.  I decided to fill in with some annuals this year since the perennials are not going to fill out for at least a couple of years.

You may also have noticed that I am using cocoa bean shells as mulch here.  I read that there is anecdotal evidence that jumping worms don’t like them, so I’m giving them a try.  I’ll report back at the end of the summer with any results I notice.

In the meantime, today’s gardening lesson?  You have to be able to roll with the punches.  You just never know when Mother Nature is going to take you down.  You just have to dust yourself off and start over again sometimes, right?

Good morning from the garden!

As you may remember, last year’s gardening season ended on a bit of a low note.

First of all, I discovered that I had jumping worms, and secondly, my neighbor removed a huge, glorious shade tree and now my back garden feels like it’s baking in the sun (#stillnotoverit).

It probably hasn’t helped matters that I just returned from a trip to visit some of the most spectacular gardens in the U.S. (more on those visits in future Sunday posts) only to find that my own gardens are a hot mess.  Apparently we had a freak heat wave while I was gone that encouraged the weeds to completely take over while I wasn’t looking.

In addition to all of that, I seem to have lost quite a few plants over the winter.  It seems that little to no snow cover and sub-zero temps combined to create a winter that was quite hard on gardens.  According to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, the frost line was deeper in 2025 than any year since 2019.  Here in Minnesota we need that snow to protect our plants from the cold and we just didn’t get enough of it last winter.

All of these factors have contributed to what has been a rather disappointing spring in my garden.

Most of the perennials that I planted last year have bit the dust including a Lemon Meringue baptisia, a hosta Wu-La-La, a couple of azaleas, several Queen of Hearts brunnera, a Rozanne cranesbill, and some Japanese Forest Grass.  Although I have to point out that the azaleas and the forest grass were iffy propositions in our climate in a good year, so it’s not surprising that they didn’t make it.

But I also lost some things that had been in my garden for years.  One of the biggest losses was my lamium.

I had a lot of this ground cover in both my hosta garden and the front garden.  In the past it has been semi-evergreen, meaning it would retain some of it’s leaves through the winter.  As the snow would melt in the spring it would reveal mostly intact plants that were even still a bit green.

This spring there is little sign of it.  The arrow in the photo below is pointing to one tiny sprout that has managed to survive.

I’m not entirely sure if this loss is a result of the winter, or from the jumping worms, or maybe a combination of both.  However, my neighbor nnK belongs to a local Facebook garden group, and apparently many of the members are complaining about having lost ground covers in particular this past winter.  So I’m hoping it’s that.  Otherwise, I have little hope for replacements surviving in the future.

I’ve also lost a good bit of my ajuga, although it’s trying to come back.  Last year it was finally filling in …

And now it’s quite sparse and barely blooming.

I’ve also lost my gorgeous Aralia cordata, or ‘Sun King’ Golden Japanese Spikenard.

This would have been its 3rd year in my garden.  I may also have lost some of those hostas around it.  In fact, I’m quite baffled by this spot …

As you can see, it looks quite decimated.  I’m taking a wait and see approach for now, maybe those hostas are still going to come up?  Fingers crossed.

Either way, I’ve already purchased a replacement for the aralia, and FYI, I found it at Home Depot.  So this plant is definitely more readily available than it was when I first planted it.

Alright, enough of this dismal reporting on garden failures.  Let’s look on the bright side.

My Pagoda Dogwood looks great this spring.

I planted it back in 2022, so this will be its fourth season.  It’s finally tall enough to really see it above the tops of all of those ferns, so I’m very relieved that it came through the winter.

I’m also happy to see that my lilacs are full of blooms right now.

If you’ve followed me for long, you know that I’ve really struggled with this lilac hedge.

I started out planting all hybrids with gorgeous flowers, and they never took off.  I eventually had to replace all of them.  I replaced two of them with the Common Lilac, and those have grown like gangbusters.  They are over 15′ tall, and they are blooming like mad.  They had a bad case of leaf spot fungus at the end of last summer, so I wasn’t sure if that would affect the spring blooms but apparently it didn’t.

Unfortunately, their flowers are just a bit blah.  So I succumbed to temptation and added a few more hybrids on either end of the hedge a couple of years ago.  Just look at how much prettier the flowers are …

But the hybrids continue to look more straggly overall compared to the Common Lilac and I’m just not sure they are going to fill in enough to provide a screen from the unsightly neighbor’s fishing boat storage area behind us.

I’m incredibly relieved to find that all of the new Quick Fire Fab hydrangeas that I planted to create a hedge have survived.  Especially since I didn’t plant them until August of last year, so they didn’t have a lot of time to establish.  I also underplanted them with some muscari and daffodils, and they look great.

That is Muscari Valerie Finnis, isn’t it the loveliest pale blue color?

The daffodils are an all white variety called Trumpet Mount Hood.

I’m hoping that both of these naturalize (ie. multiply) and fill in all of the space under the hedge eventually.

This area is sunny enough now that the bulbs should do well from year to year.

I’m slowly starting to get over my dismay at the number of plants that didn’t make it this year.  On the bright side, this gives me an opportunity to get some new plants, right?

And as for the jumping worms, I’m going to have to learn what works and what doesn’t going forward.  Leaf mulch is definitely out, but I recently read that using cocoa bean mulch might be a good option.  I used to use cocoa bean mulch all the time, but it is difficult to find around here.  Also, FYI, it is highly toxic to dogs, so if you have a dog that likes to munch on stuff in the garden you definitely don’t want to try it.  Another study suggested that slug bait might work to help control the jumping worms.  Some of you might remember that I had to give up using slug bait because our cat liked to eat it, but now that she’s gone (#stillnotoverit) I can go back to using it.

How about you?  How has your spring been so far?  Did you have many plant losses over the winter?  Are you dealing with jumping worms?  Leave a comment and let me know!