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You're invited regularly visit my site to see our changing garden. Every time I take a walk through our families' garden, even if it is the second or third time on the same day, I notice something different. It might be a happy accident of nature or a newly blooming flower, a beautiful combination, a great fragrance. Walking through the garden and stopping to look is always an adventure full of surprises.
Visitors find it hard to believe we don't use chemical fertilizers, or pesticides. I do add compost to most gardens yearly, as nature intended.
August 8, 2009
In August the cutting garden is overflowing with flowers. I can’t pick them fast enough.
The containers too are at their best.
It is easy to see how fast the containers have grown when I compare how the one planted on the garden house looked in May and how it looks now. Two months of growth makes a huge difference.
The flowers borders and rose gardens are showing wear from the hot and humid weather but that is to be expected. The heat and humidity affect me as well. I am moving slower and getting less done. The family of rabbits that moved last winter isn’t fazed at all. They hop in and out of the borders in their fur coats. They are too quick for my dog.
August 3, 2009
I've always looked up to flowers but lately it is getting ridiculous. My "Stargazer" lily is over 6 feet tall. Didn't it read the description in the catalog? I is to stay at 3 feet.
July 24, 2009
Summer Garden Tour
Clematis are Mother Nature's embroidery thread. I love how they pick their way up, over and through shrubs. One of the lovely bell clematis, 'Duchess of Albany' is perfectly paired with a lace cap hydrangea.
June 22, 2009
Heavy rains do spurt growth. The rose bushes are larger than
ever with more flowers. Yet, the
record rain in June, almost ten inches when we usually average just shy of
four, has caused the roses to rot on their canes within days of opening. Their
petals don’t shatter and fall. They meld together like dirty Kleenex and hang
on the bush until I clip them off.
But, late blooming climbers such as ‘New Dawn’, ‘Aloha’, ‘Bobby James’
and ‘American Pillar’ are only beginning to open. So I do have some new
unspoiled flowers to gloat over.
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| The blooms on many shrub roses are rotting before they
shatter. |
Clematis 'Jackamanii' blooms as it weaves through
'Bonica' roses on the shrub bank. |
A mixture of climbers including 'Aloha', 'American
Pillar', 'Fourth of July' bloom on the arbor at the back of the vegetable
garden. |
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| The weeds are growing so robustly in the rain they
are growing up through the garden seat. |
It's
not lack of pruning but a style I call "romantic abandon." |
A white, once-blooming, rambling rose climbs the
locust tree. |
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| A Japanese yellow lilac tree has never had so many
blooms. It's perfume whiffs throughout the garden. |
Roses are the main attraction in the formal
garden. |
Rosa "New Dawn' dwarfs the arbor into the
vegetable garden. |
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The guest cottage is set in the middle of a
garden. |
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