A Garden to Remember

It's high summer in our gardens now. The perennials are strong and the annuals are at their peak. Everyone who has come to see the gardens and picked up a few things has said I want to remember that...and that...and that for next year. Mostly everyone is noticing the late blooming annuals, which are spectacular now, and late summer blooming perennials.

The problem, of course, is that in the spring all of these beautiful bloomers look like , well, not much. Yes, in Spring, they're just small insignificant plants, but just conjure up the memory of your late summer visit to Morningside...

 ...ah yes, that bog sage that is a heavenly blue color matching the summer sky...those globe amaranth in shocking colors of wild purple, deep pink, and strawberry rose...

And that's just the beginning. We have a new color of cockscomb that a friend of ours shared the seed from (It's my favorite, sunset colors of peach, yellow, and soft pink...delicious). Then there are the big sedum that are starting to show their late summer color: Matrona with it's dark pink leaves and stems and soft pink flowers,  and Sedums 'Autumn Joy' and 'Autumn Fire' with their pink and brighter pink flowers. Our asters are just starting to show all the purple, pink, white, and blue colors that say Fall is coming. Boltonia 'Snow Bank' and 'Pink Beauty' have just come out, too, with their tall waving wands of pink and white flowers dancing on the breeze. Our ever expanding mounds of 'Profusion' zinnias are a nice holdover from summer, too. We have them in peach, cream, fire orange, and double cherry which has shades of pink to cream on the same plant. I used them in containers for the first time this year and they look spectacular now. I definitely will remember that for next year.

The new gardens seem like they have been here for years even though it has only been six months. It doesn't take long for a new garden to take hold of your imagination Just take a look at these pictures. Sometimes I can't even believe it, but the camera doesn't lie. Here it is: already a garden to remember.

Mulch and How to Use It

Mulch…We here in the piedmont of Virginia have been having a rough go of it this summer in the rainfall department. Mulch has saved our bacon this season. We put in a huge display garden around our new retail space, mulch like superman saved the day. We would never have been able to keep it watered and looking as great as it does without mulch. It is just the thing for keeping the moisture where it belongs around the roots. It also helps suppress weeds, which tend to grow faster than the stuff we actually planted.  The kind of mulch we choose and the amount used differs depending on what and where. Our personal view is about one inch of mulch put on once or twice a year. Applying mulch like this still helps retain moisture in the soil and lets rain or your watering through. Too much mulch can make an impenetrable barrier to water, not to mention an ugly mound. We are also careful to pull the mulch away from the base of each plant so if we get too much moisture it doesn't sit next to the stem of the plant and help to rot it. As to what to mulch with, that is up to your personal taste. The field is now so varied, and personal taste so distinct that I won't comment much on this. I will tell you we use double shredded hard wood that looks very dark on the ground. We think it shows off the plants better and looks more natural.

A garden tip for this time of year that I am dealing with now.

Daylily

Edit your garden. This is a good time to remove plants that didn't work out. Maybe they took up too much space where you put them (my yarrow), or didn't perform well, or it isn't the look you want for that part of your garden. Dig them up and give them away or move them to another part of your garden or return them to the garden in the form of compost (which means throw them on the compost pile, ashes to ashes dust to dust). Don't keep something in your garden you don't like just because it is alive and healthy. It is your garden and when you look at it I want you to smile. Aren't gardens wonderfully recyclable?

Forever Revising

Our gardens have filled up and are reaching for the sky. Now is the time to see where there are bare spots and a lack of color in a certain area. Change is always good in a garden. So many of my perennials in the old retail garden are so big that it has taken the diversity of the garden away. It's time to rethink that garden...something we do every few years with our gardens.

Actually we are rethinking all of the gardens here. Spending time with serious weeding and re-evaluating the space as to changing taste and acquired plants: some great new annuals that George has done from seed and cuttings that are ready to be put in. Both we and the mosquitoes were out working almost until dark on our rethunk garden last night.

Golden Tansy

The summer evening is our time to just be gardeners. We put in masses of coleus that will look like a patchwork quilt in a few weeks. Then we moved on to profusion zinnias (double cherry and apricot), salvias of all kinds, and anything else we like and have here at the farm. Come visit us this Sunday for the plant swap (more info in the "news" section of our homepage) and take a look at some of our updated gardens. As always it is a work in progress, come visit often.

As to garden advice…do as we are doing: keep ahead of the weeding and mulch...it's dry, dry, dry. Happy gardening!

Garden Grow Time

New Gardens

Our new gardens are growing, and fast. I have no idea what is in that soil, but it seems like magic. The pergola over the main entrance is finished, and it's painted a lovely violet blue. It's satisfying to see a lot of hard work pay off in an inviting and beautiful garden retail space. Actually, looking at our display gardens to see what is blooming at that moment and how big it really gets in the garden is worth the trip over here. It's amazing how big plants in little 3 1/2" pots will get, isn't it?

Gardening Hats for Sale

It makes me want to run around visiting all the other nurseries within an hour or so just to see what their places look like and compare and get more inspiration. Going to a local nursery (like ours!) is such a great experience; it's so much better than getting plants through the mail or from a catalogue (or from Lowe's!). Also the fun of a plant road trip with like-minded friends could make your week. I find it very satisfying to come home with a carfull of plants from everywhere on the map.  It will also help the local economy...AND when you put your new purchases in the ground, you'll get a good workout in the most Zen way by getting in touch with nature at the same time. Maybe now that garden season is slowing down a little, it's time to jump in the gardenmobile.

Garden info:  It's the second week in June, so it's time to cut back mums and asters. I also cut back my tall summer phlox, boltonias, and some sedums. Cutting back these plants helps to stagger bloom time and keeps them shorter for a neater appearance. Stay tuned and we'll see you soon!

Hurry Up and Wait

New Retail Space

Though our new retail space amazes me, I get a twinge every time I pass our old space with its sad remnants of all the years of flowering glory. My old established garden that went with it is also not getting as much eye traffic this year. It's just waiting up the hill...still looking beautiful.


Our new garden space is huge. We are planting a small area at a time. It reminds me of my hill garden 5 years ago. For new gardens to mature it just takes time. You can rush it some with bigger plants, but they can only be so big. Gardeners have to be patient to see the results of a mature garden. Luckily, patience is in a gardener's nature. We went to a good friend's garden this week to drop off a few things and tour her garden. I have seen it over the years, but this year it has all come together. In the dusk, it was glorious. It's a big garden; a joy to walk through and around, many vistas and levels. New plants go in all of the time, but because the garden is mature you don't notice that they're smaller. All it took was time.

Hibiscus

Lord knows the three years you have to wait for Baptisa to bloom from seed is forever, and the year for a hollyhock or foxglove is only slightly less hard to bear. We have so many different kinds of perennials and biennials in 3 ½" pots. At that size they are easy to put and establish well. You can have a great garden with interesting plants and it won't cost you an arm or even a leg: It just takes time. The funny thing is...the years fly by and the garden grows. Plants that have gotten too big (how did that happen?) are moved or divided or shared. One-year blends into the next and ta-da!, you have a mature garden.

Some great plants that will test your patience but are worth it:

• Alyssum 'Ball of Gold'
• Aquilegia Canadensis 'Nora Barlow', and from seed we collect ourselves a 'Morningside Deep Blue'
• Baptisia Australis
• Digitalis Mertonensis, p. 'Pam's choice', p. 'Snow Thimble', p. 'Apricot' (blooming in my garden for the first time after putting it in last year)
• Campanula Glomerata 'Surperba', poscharskyana, pers. 'Telham Beauty'
• Our native Hibiscus coccineus (above)
• All the poppies we sell in the small pots: 'Allegro', 'Brilliant', 'Royal Wedding,' 'Victoria Louise"

Time to get back to the greenhouse. Thanks for reading!

Planting the New Garden

One of the new greenhouses

We have a new planting project here at Morningside Farm: our new huge display bed. It stretches on forever around the new retail area. The back side of the garden is going to be a rain garden, which will help with erosion and runoff problems into our new pond and on down the pond chain to the river system and the Chesapeake Bay. I am savoring the idea of planting this garden. Our friends Jeff and Bill came and tilled the whole garden bed. It's beautiful just as it is, but of course an empty garden to a gardener is a battle cry. We will all work on it. I like to imagine it will be the wonder of the neighborhood, and it will certainly be the wonder of our nursery. As children at Christmas with sugarplums dancing in their heads, our heads are full of dancing perennials and annuals, maybe a few small trees and shrubs, a few pieces of iron work maybe, beautiful blooming containers over-spilling with summer lushness. I am going to do the containers now so they will be ready to add to the garden after mother's day.

Crab Apple

I was thinking of a seasonal Spring, Summer, and Fall garden starting with Spring at the big blue house and continuing around. The whole garden would be of interest all the time, with an emphasis on a particular season in a particular area. I haven't broached this with the men yet; I'm trying to get it straight in my own mind first. I plan on making a list of all sun blooming Spring perennials, a list of Summer perennials, and a list of late Summer/Fall perennials. I'll start with a list and veer off entirely by the end.

I would also like to have bays of annuals in the garden that stay the same every year, kind of like annual islands in the perennial bed, with their own area they can be planned as a garden within the garden every year. That's the end of my garden musings for now.

A small, funny string of tips about old-fashioned clothespins (the ones with a coil of wire between the pieces of wood):

• Use an indelible ball point pen to write on them, snap it onto the rim of a flower pot to identify the plant
• Put on opened packages of seeds to keep tightly closed or to separate different packages
• Flank a partly broken stem with pieces of wood and hold in place with the clothespin
• Hold the pages of a book open to free both hands
• Hold covers in place to shade a plant.
• The last part of the tip..."Keep in your basket of tools at all times"

That's it for me this week. I will let you know about our garden progress, or better yet, come visit.

The Freeze that Wasn't and Working in the Rain

Magnolias

Nature, gardening, and life are fickle. My own thoughts on the freeze that wasn't were dire. I took pictures of all the beautiful flowers that were going to be toast in the next few days with the thought that I would have before and after pictures for this blog. Well, that didn't work out; nature gave us a double scoop of chocolate-chocolate chip ice cream instead (you see how my mind works). No hard freeze, no dead blooms, no happy perennials cut down to the ground in a black mass. Nature winked at us, fooled us mere mortals, laughed at our panic. I think I did more damage trying to cover up one of my favorites (tree peonies) than the cold did, and I would have to say, nature is whatever it's going to be and that's something we, as gardeners, will always have to work around. 

One of the new greenhouses

On to something more predictable: how our new greenhouse space is coming. The second greenhouse ribs are up and one of the end walls is up and painted its robins egg blue. I love it, and soon it will be as comfortable to me as our old space was. It has been a flurry of excitement here at Morningside: people and friends coming and going, energy flowing from plants and people, soft music playing, the sound of the nail gun and skill saw. We are all helping each other with whatever we are doing. Each to our own tasks, which are all very different. Travis is finishing up the carpentry work and painting on the greenhouses, George and Billy are madly potting up the huge plugs George has grown, and me trying to pull a retail area together out of the chaos. We're moving the plants outside the greenhouses so we can pot up more plants, and I wonder when we will have time to plant up our new huge garden space that, at the moment, looks like a giant pile of dirt with a very pleasing sweep around the garden center area. When we get that planted it's going to be spectacular.

Daffodils

A few thoughts on your garden:

After the daffodils have bloomed don't tie the leaves up. Leave them to die back just as they are. It may not look as tidy, but it's so much better for the bulbs.

Remember on these rainy and post-rainy days: Don't work clay soil when it is wet, as clumps will form that can take a whole year to break down. If you decide to work in your garden anyway, stepping or kneeling on a board or stepping stone keeps the soil from becoming compacted. I try to stay out of the my garden for a few days after a rain except around the edges. Well folks that's it for now. I can hear little plant voices calling, "Mama come watch us grow...."