No pics due to darkness

Quite a bit of progress was made this weekend on the ugly bed. DH and I installed the two fence panels. Boy, are they heavy!! And we did this with stiff winds blowing all day Saturday. Fun, fun, fun. The panel hiding the pot area was trickier than we  (I) calculated. Perhaps didn't calculate would be more accurate. I got the posts set (no cement here - my native ground is very much like cement when compacted) and then glanced up to see that the leaning tree would probably touch (hopefully, only touch) the top of the fence. Sure enough, it just made it with no room to spare - not a centimeter. Then I went looking for the old stain we used when DH built our fence. Hmm, about 3/4 of a can. Do you think I had a drop left? No. Work finished at dark on Saturday. No pictures.

Sunday I knew I would not only be planting the ugly bed, but also saying farewell to a couple of poorly performing roses. So it was "ta ta" to naked 'Archduke Charles' (China) and 'Jeri Jennings' (Hybrid Musk) who was beginning to be beset by black spot - again. So, yellow or no yellow, she had to go.

She's a beauty, but more often than not in my garden she was quite naked.

The Walters viburnum from the ugly bed moved to the Archduke's sunnier spot, and the huge fuschia went into the ground (minus the pot - I like living dangerously) where Jeri had been.

The ugly bed received three variegated liriopes along the fence and down by the shed, a big 'Evergreen Giant' liriope that had been duking it out with my second 'Le Vesuve' in a nearby bed, three 'Super Blue' liriopes, a couple of caladium bulbs unearthed in the bed preparation and finally 'Penny Mac' hydrangea. Poor 'Penny Mac' didn't even get planted before the squirrels chewed half of her to shreds. (AAARGH!!! I hate squirrels.) After blowing the oak leaves (the last of them, hopefully) into the beds it was dark. No pictures.

Had to go to Lowe's after work today for more micro sprinkler parts. I was all prepared on Sunday to replace the male and female connectors at the hose bib and the valve to the timer until I cut the 1/2" poly while extracting 'Evergreen Giant' from under 'Le Vesuve'. Woe is me, I'll never learn to stop digging when I meet resistance. My father always said my motto should be "get a bigger hammer". How true. I didn't have a straight connector so no point in doing the other repair yesterday. Today I did the two repairs, wrapping the male  and female connectors with hardware cloth. (Chew on that, squirrels!!) Turned it on for a test run...no pressure. Ran to one end then back to the other, found the problem. It was that darn shovel again. But since I had bought extra straight connectors (how did I know?), I was prepared! Fix done. System works. Night had fallen. No pictures.

Tomorrow I only have to plant the pale lavender pink impatiens and the deep pink moss roses (portulaca) which shouldn't take long. I promise. There will be pictures tomorrow.

&%#$$% Squirrels! ARRGGHH!

"Why the heck is part of this bed dry?", I wondered, "and why is the wet area only 6' in diameter instead of 12'."  Doubting that I can figure out the problem, I turned on the system to manual to watch it run and try to find the reason for less water pressure. Then... Whoa! Three geysers right next to me, and I saw THIS.

He chewed everywhere and broke through in three places. I wish the first hole had taken his head off, but I guess it didn't. I cut out the damaged tee-joint and installed a new joint this evening, buried it and put a dirt-filled pot on it. The plant died a while back - too much water, oddly enough.

Garden work

As usual, I didn't get done what I thought I wanted to do, but I did get stuff done. I put out the epsom salts in the back and side gardens and some of the front before I ran out. I will have to run out tomorrow and get some more. I have found that Walgreens has the best price. I paid $2.99 on sale for a 6 lb bag of very fine crystals that are easier to apply than the kind from the garden stores. I also put out sulfur on my lime-y back garden. I went to Seminole Feed to get it today and there decided to buy the wettable sulfur (very fine powder) in a 25 lb bag for $20.99 (cheaper than 4 lb of large granules for $8.99) since I've read that the finer it is the faster it lowers the pH. Just be careful not to breathe it. I did the front garden a few weeks ago with the large granule soil sulfur, so we'll see if I can see any difference. Oh, I also got a 50 lb bag of alfalfa pellets. Good stuff!!

I also moved 'Madame Scipion Cochet' out of her pot and into the ground. I should have taken a photo of this Hybrid Perpetual rose bush. She is leafless (well, there was one yellow one which I removed), but she has lots of swollen budeyes. I'm very curious about how this rose is going to grow. Her canes go out and around, or that's the way it seems so far. I also moved 'Martha Gonzales' from a 3-gallon nursery pot into a nice heavy ceramic pot that's taller and wider. This means I have only one rose in a pot that needs to be in the ground...er, at least until next weekend. That's when three new roses are coming home with me. 'Lilian Austin', 'Cl Clotilde Soupert' and 'Souv de St Anne's'. Hopefully, I'll get them in the ground the same day but maybe not.

While I was out today, I went to a nursery to get some Evergreen Giant Liriope, but instead I did a risky thing. I bought an azalea for the spot - a $9.99 azalea to be exact. Thankfully, azaleas have shallow root systems, and hopefully, the roots of this bush won't go much farther than the 16" or so that I dug down, removing the powdery fine, light gray sand that I know is bad for azaleas. The spot is right at the base of an oak tree, so I had to dig around the roots with my glove-covered fingers to get out as much bad stuff as I could. Then I sprinkled some sulfur around, added peat moss (unfortunately already pH adjusted up) and composted manure to the bottom, then filled the rest with newly amended, old amended soil that I had removed from the hole and, of course, put the azalea in the middle. This azalea is a 'Duc de Rohan'. A few weeks back I had scribbled its name on a stickie note by my computer after reading good things about it. It's a salmon pink flower, and the tag says it blooms from November to February in Florida. Maybe that's why I wanted it. I can't remember now. It's a long bloom time for an azalea. The plant I bought had spent blooms on it as well as open flowers and buds, so maybe I can believe the tag.

This area of the garden needed an evergreen bush, because there are four hydrangeas in this bed which are bare for an awfully long time. I will say though that I am starting to admire their silvery grayish branches that practically glisten when the light is right, especially the 'Limelight' hydrangea paniculata.

Oh, and I replaced the leaky hose that ran from the hose bib to the timer with 1/2" poly and two hose-end adapters. So now that section of the garden can be watered automatically again instead of using the hose and 10x more water! Of course, how much easier it would have been to have done it this way to begin with, but, alas, I didn't know what hose-end adapters were for. What can I say?

Saying Goodbye to 2010

I think it's fair to say that 2010 was an excellent year in my garden mainly because most everything was gaining some maturity. In other words the garden no longer looked like it should have been stamped 'Under Construction' (well, most of it anyway). 

The year started out with outrageous hard freezes and is ending the same way. January's freezes gave me several 50-cent flats of dianthus and pots of plumbago courtesy of Lowe's clearance racks, and I think the freezes may be the ones I need to thank for almost no thrips last spring.  This sad view from January 26th shows burned out liriope and barely visible rose bushes still fitting into their 2009-size clothes.

February and March brought my micro irrigation system which, if nothing else, taught me that even the most frustrating and painful experiences can be godsends. I lost my temper so many times while trying to punch holes in that 1/2" poly tubing. Arrrgh! But this year I have "a tool" that should make it easier to do the planned improvements to the system which absolutely made my roses happier with daily morning watering. Here's a photo of the front garden on March 15th. You can see the old soaker hoses waiting for the trash man and a few of the new sprinklers. You can also see the garden just waking up, having been fed, composted and mulched, but it seemed like last spring would never arrive!

 

On May 1st I had my first Open Garden, taking a week's vacation to get the garden meticulously prepared and as perfect as it had ever been. Very gratifying and very exhausting. During the week before absolutely everything was in bloom, on April 30th less was blooming, and on May 1st the temperature shot up over 90 - so much for a cool spring stroll through the garden. 'Louis Philippe' looked fabulous...the week before.

 As did the tea rose, 'Mrs. B. R. Cant'.

 

But it was a lovely day, and most of the garden was showing its stuff very prettily.

The back garden didn't get enough attention or the right companion plants in 2010. It's hoping I'll treat it with more love next year.

 

 Later in May 'Red Cascade' was showing off, and Ellie is camera shy.

The companion plants that I had set out before spring broke were my pride and joy this year. They filled the spaces between the roses perfectly and gave it the cottage garden look that I have come to love. I splurged on dozens of evergreen reblooming daylilies in the fall of '09. They were fantastic even in their first year. The mounding dianthus is a wonderful plant in my garden, effected not at all by 20 degree temps or even 95 degree days. They disguise the brown mulch with a lovely bright green. Very pleasing! The tall dianthus thrilled me by coming back in the spring and lasted well into the heat of summer, probably was still blooming into August. Of course, my fave is echinacea. Love, love, love them. I was overjoyed when they had added to their numbers in the spring, and I made a point of dropping their spent seed heads all around the ground so fingers are crossed that they'll pop up everywhere! Plus I managed to find 3 pots of them on the clearance rack in November.

June, of course, was lovely and naturally hot, but nothing seemed to mind as long as the garden was getting its daily morning misting. I was really surprised that even late in the afternoon it was moist a few inches under the mulch. That made me a very happy gardener! Below is an early hybrid tea, 'Madame Abel Chatenay', bred sometime before 1895.

The double Hollyhocks - one pink and one rose - that I started from seeds last winter were an absolute surprise - not just to me but to my friend who could not believe they were still blooming in July. They are my kind of frilly flower, and they looked striking, standing tall in the middle of the bed. I tried to start some more seeds this fall, but every single one of them failed to survive after sprouting. I'll try again in January. By the way one of the two plants is still green and not bothered at all by temps in the 20's. Amazing.

My shade garden in the back was another part of the garden that made my heart sing this year. 'Limelight' Hydrangea paniculata got nice and big with the addition of daily water in this normally dry bed beneath the oak trees. I even had a flower or two on the variegated lacecap hydrangea. That was a first in four years. I desperately wanted to plant azaleas in this bed when I first started my gardens, but my soil has a lot of limestone in it, and this bed was over 7.0 pH. So after several failures I dug it all out in sections, piling the soil on a tarp outside the bed, and lining the bottom with black plastic garbage bags, my theory being the plastic would hold water and prevent the native soil from migrating up into the new soil. It has seemed to work in that one azalea is thriving, but one died. We had a very wet spring this year, and I think the plastic was holding too much water. I stabbed holes down into the plastic in an attempt to save the azalea but to no avail. I replaced it with Plectranthus 'Mona Lavender'. There are several in the bed now along with begonias, ginger and an 'Endless Summer' hydrangea. I need more of those 'Endless Summer' bushes!

Another favorite (my, aren't they all!!) is this tea named 'Souvenir de Francois Gaulain from 1889. His silvery magenta flowers are rare for tea roses, most of them being of the pastel persuasion. Here he is a little over a year old and just full of buds in hot September. He seems to be a type of tea that grows slowly low and wide before it gets taller, and he has beautiful, healthy foliage!

The pale yellow rose above is a 'found' tea rose, 'Bermuda's Anna Olivier' shown as she looked on July 29th. Do you see any blackspot or are all those flowers just hiding it all? A very effective camouflage, wouldn't you say? 'BAO' absolutely loves the heat, so much so that she was a late starter to get going in spring. She is a fabulous shrub in my garden.

This rose is 'Le Vesuve', a China-Tea, and don't tell 'Louis Philippe', but this rose may be my other favorite due to its non-stop blooming and wonderful pink/red, flouncy flowers. I'm a sucker for pink/red! I could easily wax poetic about this rose for pages and pages - and will probably do so pretty soon.

This winter of 2010 brought me a greenhouse - a 5x6 pop-up greenhouse to be exact. Today I was watering the plants in it, and AAACK! A black snake was in there. I know they're friends, but truly they give me the willies!!!

Yes, 2010 was a grand year for this gardener. Not to say everything is just the way I want it. No doubt, that will never happen! But I definitely got smarter, more savvy about what gardening is all about, less apt to make rash decisions and yet quicker to see when a plant is not working in the garden scene. Some have called me ruthless, but the fact is I'm not getting any younger, and my garden should be just that -- my garden.

P.S. Here's the list of roses that left us in 2010 (but some live elsewhere):

Blumenschmidt

Carnation

Chrysler Imperial

Cramoisi Superieur

Don Juan (all but the stump)

Fortune's Double Yellow

Gartendirektor Otto Linne

Jean Bach Sisley

Kronprincessin Viktoria

Climbing Madame Caroline Testout

Climbing White Maman Cochet

Marie Nabonnand (all but the stump)

Marjory Palmer

Monsieur Tillier

Mrs Dudley Cross

Perle d'Or

Purrezza

R Roxburghii plena 'The Chestnut Rose'

Rosette Delizy

The Fairy

Tiffany

Happy New Year, everybody!!