Beds in the Sun II

In the continuing saga of my back garden beds, today's post details a few more of the beds:



Bed D is an Iris-only bed in terms of the perennial planted there (Okay, in truth there is a bunch of daffodils in the bed as well).  Bed E and another bed that I'll show later were mixed daylily and iris beds (about 60 irises and daylilies in each), but the daylilies there are slowly outcompeting the irises. Or else the irises are fading because they're in a flat area with too much clay and they don't like wet feet. Or perhaps the iris there don't like to live in a rundown daylily neighborhood.  Anyway, Bed E is now primarily daylilies, a few remaining struggling irises, and a Witch Hazel ('Jelena'), while the majority of the irises have been moved to their survival to Bed D, where I hope they get better drainage and where the fighting will stay within the family.

Bed F is a smaller mixed rose and ornamental grasses bed containing 14 smaller shrub and Old Garden Roses and 5 grasses.  One big mistake that I'm about to rectify was placing Panicum 'Prairie Sky' into the center of the bed, because it is flopping over all the roses and smothering them.  The two Calamagrostis in the bed, 'Overdam' and 'Avalanche', are tall and strong and much better behaved.  The roses really are a varied crew; 'Purple Pavement', 'Belinda's Dream', 'Salet', 'Duchess de Rohan', 'Duchess of Portland', the Griffith Buck rose 'Golden Princess', 'Westerland', and 'Austrian Copper', among others.  Right behind this bed (south) lies a small Scarlet Oak (Quercus coccinea), eight years old now and only four feet tall.  Talk about your slow-growing trees!

Bed G is my "Evergreen" bed, containing a small assortment of very common broad-leaved evergreens and conifers, of which the largest is a Wichita Blue Juniper (Juniperus scopulorum).  I also cheated in this bed and placed a volunteer red-flowering peach tree (Prunus rubra) that lights up the spring.

Beds H, I, and J are the newest beds, just started last Fall or this Spring.  "H" contains primarily my newest Griffith Buck roses, just planted this Spring and still continuing to be planted (I added 4 new roses to this bed just this weekend).  So if you've been enjoying my descriptions and pictures of  'Bright Melody', 'Iobelle', and 'Queen Bee', they are from this bed.  One side of the bed outside the roses are 6 divisions of Sedum telephinum 'Morchen', planted there in the spring, and the other side is a line of new daylily starts just planted.  Bed "I" is still under development.  I was thinking a big bed of annual cottage flowers, but now I'm thinking of a bed concentrating on ornamental grasses, particularly timely right now so that I can move all the grasses that are now elsewhere and currently smothering the adjacent roses, into this spot, so they can just lean against each other.  Bed J was started last Fall.  As a teaser for coming attractions, it is full of Paul Barden's creations, and so it is my "Barden" bed, and I'll describe it better next time.

Best Laid Daylily Plans

My, how often the best-laid plans of mice and gardeners succumb to the realities of life!  I really thought I had it set up perfectly this year, my latest attempt at the acquisition of cheap, perfect daylilies, but alas, I failed again miserably in the execution of said plan.

I always look forward to the first weekend of September, because it promises the Daylily Society sale at the local farmers market. Thus it appeals to my miserly gardening pocketbook.  But in the past, I've come to the sale completely unprepared, choosing daylilies because the name sounded nice or because the description of the color seemed promising, only to later find myself disappointed once again that "melon" was orange, and "peach" was orange from more than two feet away.

But this June, I made a special effort to visit the local indoor mall during the annual Daylily Display, an event at which the local Daylily nuts...err..uh...enthusiasts display their prettiest daylilies during the height of the season.  These people are pictured in the dictionary next to the term Addict Enablers, in this case the addiction in question being my incontrollable need to grow the newest daylily varieties.  Several of the evil Hemerocallis pushers are local breeders who also exhibit their latest creations at the Display.  Unlike my previous visits to the Display, however, I came prepared with pad and pen, writing down the names of what I considered to be the choice 15 to 20 varieties. 

When I got home, I even went one step further and typed up the list while my memory was fresh, in lieu of my usual policy of relying on my mostly illegible handwriting and failing memory come September.  I also purchased, for the bargain price of $10.00, an annual membership in the Flint Hills Daylily Society, which entitled me to attend a pitch-in dinner and have first choice at the daylilies for sale on the night before the big public September sale.  I couldn't miss this time.

Well, I did miss.  Work intervened and I didn't make it to the pitch-in daylily dinner, nor to the Extension Master Gardeners bimonthly meeting on the same night.  Desperate, I went first the thing Saturday morning to the sale, armed with my list of delicious names such as "String Theory", "Red Hot Mama" and "Bella Donna Starfish".  And they didn't have any of those varieties for sale.  Oh, some of them had been in the sale the night before, but they had all been snatched up by my fellow FHDS fiends.  So I resorted to looking at the pictures compiled by color of each variety, a time-consuming activity, and I missed several other beautiful cultivars while doing so.  There was even a special table of "expensive" daylilies, some divisions as high as $10, and I failed there as well, looking at the names and then looking at the pictures, and then finding the ones I wanted snatched up before I could decide about them.

But, I guess I did okay in the end.  I came away with 12 or 15 varieties (see the picture above), generous clumps for $5 to $7 dollars apiece that were actually often three small divisions in each clump, leaving me with 35 or 40 new daylily starts for $99.  And such pretty names and colors too. 'Apple Tart'.  'Butterfiles in Flight'.  I'm just sure that the highly touted melon and peach daylilies I purchased won't look orange this time.

September Thirteenth Tribulations

Welcome to the second monthly Thirteenth Tribulations!  As previous readers are aware, the 13th of each month, Garden Musings hosts a blog circus where you can link your blog telling about your personal gardening tribulation.  In other words, link to a blog entry (made within the last month) that describes your landscape design mistakes, your plant deaths, your battles with deer, or your horticultural mishaps, so everyone else can learn from them!  The LinkyThing opens at 8:00 p.m. tonight and will close at 8:00 a.m. on the morning of the 14th. I'll open up the linky thing by the 13th of every month and then close it at midnight on the 14th.

For my own blog on a garden misery this month, I'll just link to my attempt at poetic license previously on my August 23rd post titled  "Oh Woe, Oh Poe!".

I owe an apology also to Sarah and others who have been trying recently to look at August's Thirteenth Tribulations post.  I had started this monthly series under a free trial subscription to LinkyTools which expired, and so the links went away!  But, surprise(!) I paid the annual subscription and they're back up now so check them out at the link above!

Also, I owe a big thank you to Horticulture's blogging editor Meghan Shinn for putting in a plug for Thirteenth Tribulations!  As I commented on her blog post, "we all may not garden together, but we can commiserate together."  Hope we get a load of folks who look forward each month to participating!

Please link away for this month below!