Garden Walk April 06, lots blooming!

Folks, its likely the best time of the year for flowers in our garden. We are finally getting it to what we want. OK yeah right. Part of the joy of gardening in experimentation and exploration.

Anyway there is a lot of photos to share, let me begin..

  Creeping phlox.

  Creeping phlox and primrose together.

 Creeping phlox.

 Woodland phlox.

Muscari with an honey bee!

Pansies, we have lots of different pansies, this is just one of them. Survived an 8 degree night this past winter as you can see. Planted last fall.

 Daffodil 'Hawera'

 Daffodil ' Mt Hood'

Daffodil 'Actaea' Showy and tall makes a great cut flower!

 Daffodil 'Broadway Star' one of my favorites for sure.

Daffodil 'Sailboat' These produce a lot of flowers!

Daffodil 'Sir Winston Churchill'

 Daffodil 'Quail' at least I think it is Quail.

Daffodil 'Pipit'

Daffodil 'Sound'

Daffodil 'Delibe' drop dead gorgeous!

 Daffodil 'Pink Charms' never seen any pink on this.

Daffodil 'Silver Smiles'

Daffodil 'Falconet' Nice..

 
Snow Flakes!

 Penny's Pink hellebore. Wow wow!

 Bleeding Heart, this is our newest one Meg brought back from Wilmington! Nearly 3 foot tall.

 This is a tiny Wild Bleeding Heart. About 6 inches tall.

Bleeding Heart from the front garden.

 15+ year old primrose. The oldest in our garden. Has been known to shoot about 50 stems of blooms, slow to burst this year.

 We've had this primrose 3 years, man its crazy.

I split this primrose when we planted it, the other plant looks almost as good as this one.

 Blue primrose

 Red primrose

Purple primrose.

Native anemone "Windflower"in our garden.

Our newest camellia, Camellia X 'Tiny Princess'. Meg and I visited the Coker Arboretum in March of 2010 and saw this blooming with thousands of fallen flowers covering the ground. Anyway Camellia Forest had it and I brought it home, see my post from 2010 about it with photos at 

Bottle Wall, Day Six

Seems there is never enough time. The heat is already upon us. Today the fava beans and other plants in the garden were wilting in the heat. I Worked on the bottle wall and wilted also, so much to do. I feel as if I'm ever going to get this done I'm going to need help. Laying the bottles in one job in its self. Fetching and readying the bottles is another job. Then after you set the bottles the mortar needs dressed as it hardens up and then cleaned.

As you can see the darker mortar near the top is the progress I made today. The wall will be rolling up and down, the flower will have a mortar cap at the very top. The right side is close to being done, then the middle needs another flower.

 

Mid day the blue bottles were glowing in the sun, awesome. Even the concrete was blue for a while under the blue bottles. I was thinking of changing my name to Cobalt for a few minutes. I can't wait to see it without the 2 x 6 supports on the back. It'll be weeks before I have time to get back to it.

I did get a little nature in while working on it. I saw a 7-8 inch snapping turtle in the pond swimming, also lots of Eastern Painted Turtles. We see snappers only once or twice a year here, at breeding time. Also had two good butterfly sighting on the bolted kale flowers first a Hayhurst's Scallopwing and next a Henry's Elfin.

This is it, the last daffodil to open in our garden this year. It is ' Lieke ' and several are still opening. This is from Brent and Becky's own seedlings.  Pretty nice IMO.

This anemone is for Janet, We planted these very late in December or January. A lot of foliage came on and now we have 5-6 blooms like this right now. 

This is two hydrangea plants from the planter we purchased at Costco. The square planter contained 4 plants, this is have to $20 planter. Supposed to be hardy here. I looked online and the mail order nurseries get $24 a gallon pot and up for plants like this!

Here is a portion of our front garden by the driveway. Notice under spider guy the phlox is almost gone. The pansies are looking great, in a few weeks it will be pulled out, they just do not manage 90 degree days very well.  The blue iris was a house warming gift from Meg's sister. Sorry the water feature needs work, it is a mess.

The Blue Bottle Flower

Today I worked a bit on the blue bottle flower for the bottle wall. Here is a photo of after I started wiring it up. Seventeen bottles in all! The center will have a light green salad dressing bottle in it.

The plan is to hang this on a support over the bottle wall and start mortaring around it.  It weighs about 40-50 pounds right now. I will be adding welded wire around the outside to hold together the concrete band. Once I get the concrete done and set up I'll cut away the plywood band and the support structure.

 

Here is the bottle flower on Easter morning! I used some salvaged lumber to brace it in place, it took an hour to do this and the first try was exactly where I wanted it. On to making mortar and adding bottles so the support can be removed. Those are our Sugar Snap Peas in the background, should be flowering in days.

 Meg planted this mixed package of daffodils we bought on clearance at Home Depot last fall. Several of these came up, I really like it any one have a clue to what it might be?

When I moved in here 14 years ago I planted this honeysuckle. At one point it had hundreds of bloom clusters like this one. During the building of the addition  in 2008 it was left growing under the new deck and had been abused by all the building processes. In 2009 I moved it to a new location, the droughts have left it barely alive. This year it has 20 or so bloom clusters so it is making a comeback!! You know when I bought this I did not know the native coral(red) honeysuckle grew at the edge of our woods.

Garden Goodies & More Daffodils

Meg pulled our first Carrot last week, here it is with one of the French Breakfast Radishes from the garden.

More of the French Breakfast Radishes. I think these are the best radishes we have grown, very tasty and not as hot as some radishes. I like eating 2-3 as a snack. Our garden is over run with them. The rain so far has made them extra big.

 As many of you might have recalled, I waited for Brent and Becky's end of season sale to get 50% off on daffodils and crocuses last year. For most of March I was thinking this was a mistake, as everything was so slow to come up having been planted so late. Now I have changed my mind.

Above is 'Falconet', I planted it on both sides of the back steps. It is very fragrant and has lots of flowers per stem, this is two stems. I'd rate this one very high on my list of favorites.

Above is 'Sound', it looks a bit like a slightly smaller Ice Follies to me, but is fragrant. The cup is supposed to be a sunset orange cup, to me it seems slightly orange. Wondering if the cone will turn orange as it ages?

 Not 100% sure but I think this is 'Ice Follies' it came in one of those mixed packages of daffodils. The cone should turn white with age.

Here is 'Misty Glen" I bought it locally and planted it in the fall on the dam to the pond. It is supposed to have a greenish cup, looks white to me.

Thought I'd revisit 'Pink Charms' I posted this 7 days ago and said I did not see any pink.  The flower in the front is about 7 days old and has turned slightly pink. The flower on the right is a fresh one and very yellow. These are planted along the driveway.

Above is 'Silver Chimes' it is fragrant and planted next to the gardenia bush in the back yard. I was able to take in the daffodil aromas standing in the backyard 15 foot from the daffodil plantings, misson accomplished! Another new favorite, just love the tazettas like 'Silver Charms' and 'Falconet'.

Here is 'Sir Winston Churchill' planted by the bamboo garden edging.

odorus flore pleno (plenus) Not looking very good, most bulbs did not bloom. Supposed to be a good naturalizer and is very fragrant. Still very unusual.


 Camellia Japonica 'April Dawn' we purchased at Camellia Forest two years ago in a gallon pot. This is the first and only bloom. We both really like this bloom!

 Japanese Roof Irises that I have had for a very long time. Meg brought over some blue ones they are almost ready to bloom.

Crested iris opened yesterday. We have maybe 25 blooms right now and expect 200-300. They are wild in the woods by our septic field.

Dr Ruppel our first clematis of the season. Clematis Armandii  'Snowdrift' did not survive the winter.

Last item. The new hydrangea I bought Meg at Costco. Looks like 4 plants in that pot and only $20.