What do you see on your garden walks? 2012

[Lori S.]

I'm going to have to look out for more Rosularia - that one sure is attractive, Trond.

Despite the heat and drought, everything looks so fresh and pristine, Rick!  A few hostas around here too, though I tend to think of them more and more as space-fillers (ones that are rather vulnerable to hail damage). 
I dunno, I think your plant could very well be Orostachys iwarenge... it doesn't look too dissimilar to this one (except that mine's a little hail-bruised):


Stachys minima:


Mother-of-thyme, Thymus serpyllum - I love seeing the bees enjoying it!


Showing, yet again, the rose 'Amsterdam' - what a knockout!


Dracocephalum grandiflorum:

[Hoy]

This is what I have from seed labeled as Orostachys iwarenge from the NARGS seed ex.  I don't know if it will ever look like yours, Trond.  I wonder what it is...
             
I have to agree, I don't really understand the hosta mania, either.  Although I do keep several around.  In fact, another one of my favorites is all green leaved, too:  Hosta 'Sparkling Beauty'.  Fairly (but not completely) slug resistant.

Have your tried your Orostachys outside?
'Sparkling beauty' is a beauty, indeed!  . . . . and somebody should start breeding Hostas for flowerpower, not leafpower!

I'm going to have to look out for more Rosularia - that one sure is attractive, Trond.

Despite the heat and drought, everything looks so fresh and pristine, Rick!  A few hostas around here too, though I tend to think of them more and more as space-fillers (ones that are rather vulnerable to hail damage). 
I dunno, I think your plant could very well be Orostachys iwarenge... it doesn't look too dissimilar to this one (except that mine's a little hail-bruised):

Stachys minima:

Mother-of-thyme, Thymus serpyllum - I love seeing the bees enjoying it!

Showing, yet again, the rose 'Amsterdam' - what a knockout!

Dracocephalum grandiflorum:

Lori, I could send some pieces of R sedoides if you think it possible.

Here the thyme is done for the season - and almost all the bees disappeared. However bumblebees still hang around and visit everything in flower.

'Amsterdam' really is a stunner, Lori! My father would have loved to see it, he was a passionate rose grower in his elder days.

[Tim Ingram]

After seeing that flowering clump of hosta from Rick I agree with Trond - there must be real scope to breed for hostas with good flowers. Some of the older varieties must be much better in this respect.

This year's wet summer has led to far better flowering of many later perennials - usually only the weeds grow well for us at this time - and Crocosmia 'Emily Mckenzie' is a good example. This has a looser and more elegant habit than some and has never been divided over the more than 20 years it has been in the garden.

[RickR]

Tim, Emily McKenzie crocosmia is indeed elegant.  And as with everything in your gardens, so well placed!

Have your tried your Orostachys outside?

This is a first year seedling for me. one of three in the same pot.  (The other two seemed to have disappeared.)  Time will tell if it is true to name.  Obviously, Lori grows Orostachys iwarenge outside, and I remember seeing a nice big patch of it in a pic on this forum from someone in Massachusetts (Peter, I think?).  I have grown another species many years ago, but it never produced any offsets, so when it bloomed, it was gone.

A word to the wise:
Back then, when a species died or I removed it and no longer grew it, I deleted it from my list of plants I kept on the Excel program.  And now I don't have a record of what it was.  I've gotten smarter now.  First I just formatted a strkethrough the plant's name, but there got to be so many.   So I created another book in the same file and labeled it "Past Plants".  So when a species dies or is removed, I simply transfer the data out of "Present Plants" to the new book: "Past plants".  I refer back to this old plant list more than I ever thought I would.

Despite the heat and drought, everything looks so fresh and pristine, Rick!  A few hostas around here too, though I tend to think of them more and more as space-fillers

Our severe drought here lasted from August 2011 through April 2012.  Since then, my area has had an abundance of rain, and even our normal seasonal drought period was much reduced.  Although, it has been very hot.  Those hosta are on the north side of the house, too.

Space-fillers is an apropos name.  Hostas have saved space in my garden for new and upcoming special plants several times.  The Hosta clausa var. clausa grows where nothing else will (except weeds and woody plants) in compacted clay gumbo (hence the moss). Incidentally, The hosta is rhizomatous, with flowers that never open(clausa).
              

[Bundraba!]

After viewing the last few posts I realized I had to go out in the garden and hunt down a truly huge bun of Gypsophila aretioides. I found two! They aren't nearly as grand as that pictured from Alan Tower's garden (but I could always sneak them together) There's actually more here too; all from a start or two I acquired when I began seeking out alpine plants in the nineties. The second pictured had three flowers on it many years ago; a BIG event and it even, for a moment, became the mysterious Penstemonella aretioides which many Yahooed!, AOLed, and may have even Googled to no avail. Rock gardening is to be not all drudgery and dirge; laboring with heavy rocks and obstinate little plants, tirelessly under the hot sun. One must be light of heart! The first was posted previously but this is obviously the money shot.

 

Lewisia cotyledon beautifully set for summer and a hint of blue in Lycoris squamigera.

 

A low growing Phlox paniculata in hot pink/orange. It was a hand-me-down so I don't have a name. Is it 'Red Riding Hood'?



And here's another look at that trough. On the north side under the spruce is Saxifraga 'minutifolia' and little plastic piggies. Below is London Pride; just out of the photo is the tan line (ouch!). The second is a photo of a weird little Selaginella I found in the arid Uintah foothills growing among Ephedras and Echinocereus. I call it "cactus moss".

   

Bees like onions! -and the giant native Silphium perfoliatum.

 

[Krish]

The second plant, Symphytum x uplandicum 'Axminster Yellow', is equally hard to propagate as root cuttings lose any variegation and it hardly produces enough growth to divide easily. A nice feature with Phlomis russeliana.

Sorry very late to reply. Today my  gardening friend who has a beautiful garden told me about your problem of propagating this plant. I got flowering  stalk from the nodes of her plants which rooted easily.

[Tim Ingram]

Krish - thank you so much! Now why didn't I think of that; we will give it a go.

[cohan]

Gee, I didn't think I missed that many days, but too many posts to comment on!
Trond, love your meadow, and good you are able to preserve some of those plants.. here, the ration of open to wooded land constantly changes on different properties - forest and wetlands are  bulldozed for grazing and shade plants have to be replaced by meadow plants, others become completely overgrown with shrubs and trees squeezing out all of the sun plants, and numbers of animals grazed on a plot vary over years as well, with some becoming mostly the d****d buttercup or yarrow etc; On my family's land, grazed fairly heavily (in the open areas) for a long time, then not so much for recent decades, there are some weedy areas but still a lot of native plants, with some plants I knew in my youth lost to cleared forest sections or loss of meadow to woodies; The last few summers, a neighbour had more cattle on the land again, and it was interesting to me to see more flowering on some wetland plants like Pedicularis and Menyanthes..
Fortunately, most of these plants are regionally fairly common and while particular patches are lost, regionally they are mostly doing fine with this continual habitat flux..
Tim, re: Crocosmia- a few weeks ago I was in a local big box store that was selling Crocs discounted in their garden centre.. I really doubt these are hardy here? but they were just sold as garden plants....

[Hoy]

The Crocosmias in my garden have not started showing buds yet this year

Bundraba, those Lycoris are beautiful!

We went for a boat trip yesterday in the nice weather. Thought we should enjoy a flowering island due to enough rain this summer. But they have introduced sheep there too  >  
Previously a few calves have grazed there, but a bunch of sheep eat it all!

Part of the island Jomfruland named Skadden: From left 1 &2, view west, 3 view east (Rick, this is Skagerak!).

     


Only a few, common plants survive the hard grazing: Hieracium peleteranum and Scleranthus perennis on drier ground, Matricaria maritima, Potentilla anserina and Sagina nodosa on moister ground.

       


Also the tiny Spergularia salina survive. Only one species benefits from the hard grazing, Senecio viscosus. The animals doesn't like it!

     

[Spiegel]

A few more pictures of "my other garden" in the Dolomites.  Joe and I spent a day with Cliff and Sue Booker, introducing them to one of our favorite hikes.  We came to an area of limestone rubble which was the habitat for hundreds of Papaver rhaeticum.  The typical color is a brilliant yellow which fades towards orange as it goes over.  This day we found some white ones and some pale yellow, definitely not typical, and an exciting find.  If you see an area with many of the same plant, you can often find one or two that are different.  I can remember a few years ago finding a white Linaria alpina when hiking with Elisabeth and Rod Zander, an exciting find that I've never been able to duplicate, and many years ago seeing a white Oxytropis podocarpa
when hiking with Panayoti.  (Unfortunately, all those pictures are slides.)  As you can see, we've been so lucky to have wonderful hiking companions. 

[Lori S.]

A rhizomatous hosta - how interesting, Rick.  I wasn't aware of these at all.

Great scenes, Michael - now yours is a garden that just won't quit!  What an amazing variety of plants.

Trond, I'm enjoying your boat trip and island tour!

Love the crocosmia, Tim - just a summer plant here though, sadly.

Stunning poppies, Anne!  Have you grown these?  I have yet to see any of the 3 native alpine poppy species here yet... some day though...

Some pix from the garden - a lot of repeats, admittedly, but hey, summer is short!
Sidalcea malviflora; daylily (the warm summer is favouring them - most didn't even bloom last summer); Allium flavum:
   

Rose 'Dolly Parton' - very fragrant; flower bed view; Lysimachia vulgaris:
   

Clematis 'Pamiat Serdtsa'; Dalea purpurea; Linum flavum 'Compactum':
   

Clematis viticella 'Rubra':

[Lori S.]

Dianthus knappii - probably notable only for being yellow!
 

Catananche caerulea, normal colour and white that popped up from self-seeding:
 

Eryngium sphaerocephalum:


A couple more views - a colourful mess, to some perhaps, but I like it!  
 

[Spiegel]

Lori, in my early rock gardening days I thought that Papaver rhaeticum and Gentiana verna would be a brilliant primary color combination.  I would have had a red in there a well but couldn't think of one that would look well with the other two.  So I grew them from seed and put several seedlings in the scree together.  They came through the winter fine and in the spring they made a glorious combination, one that would probably make the lovers of subtlety in the garden shrink in horror.  I enjoyed them immensely and in my rock gardening innocence was absolutely stunned when they did not reappear the  next spring after a very cold and almost snowless winter.  Isn't it amazing the things you will try as a newbie when you're not overburdened with much knowledge.

[Hoy]

I have always loved poppies and many, many years ago I had a very large patch with poppies. Only when the flowers were spent I realized they were opium poppies that are forbidden to grow here

Unfortunately I have never managed to grow poppies from mountain areas more than a year or two 

Lori, your garden is like the Jar of Zarephat: It never ends producing!

I like your "colourful mess", mine is also a mess but not colourful!

[Bundraba!]

Great scenes, Michael - now yours is a garden that just won't quit!

That's part the fun; it doesn't quit! Well there can be a period, and two winters ago was a good example, and because a lot of the "structure" is new, when it does quit. We had so much snow here that even the tallest of my Rhodies was completely buried. The garden was a white desert flat as a pancake for weeks!