flowers

garden : refugees and autumn clean-up

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This autumn found us with a number of refugee plants on our porch that required a permanent spot in the yard. The sad demise of the hydrangea and the clethra twigs at the end of the summer left some space open, and we expanded the planted areas to include spaces in front of and under the azaleas near the house.

There were two main categories of plants: those moved from our neighbor’s yard as she thinned the plants she’d acquired with the house, and those I couldn’t resist bringing home from the autumn plant swap I organized in town. In the first category, I had pink and red mums and a bag of mixed daffodil and jonquil bulbs, the latter of which had spent the summer under the bench on the front porch, a storage method I don’t recommend but which resulted in only a handful of rotten bulbs. The pink mums went in front of the white azalea on the right side of the porch (as you face the house); not that they bloom at the same time of year, but I like to spread the pink around. For a person who really is not a fan of pink, I’m acquiring quite the variety of pink flowers in my garden. The daffodil bulbs I planted under the smaller of the pink azaleas on the left side of the house, under the sassafras. There’s quite a nice patch of ground there, now that the liriope and ivy has been beaten back, and if the daffodils do bloom, they’ll be easily visible from the street. I am not entirely confident that they’ll get enough sun, but they’re easy enough to move (and they certainly weren’t going to bloom from a bag on the porch!).

The last refugee from a friend was a small sage, which I also planted on the right side of the steps. It will probably grow into the space currently occupied by the spring bulbs, which is fine; I’ll move them as needed and it will be nice to have an herb there rather than the bare patch we get when the bulbs die back. None of the perennials I planted on that side of the steps really took, either from lack of sun or competition from the maple roots. I hope the ones in the larger front bed will return next year; we may need to take the more drastic step of burying edging material to keep the small tree roots from encroaching and smothering the flowers.

For the first time this year, Women’s Club members (myself included) organized an autumn plant exchange. The real hit of the swap was the sale of plants by Chesapeake Natives volunteers; the group raised over $300 by selling native perennials for $2 to $6 each. I managed to resist purchasing any—although I will probably replace some of the plants I purchased last spring with native varieties, now that I know where to find them—and came home with only a few flowers that were donated by neighbors. I was pleased to acquire a peach climbing rose and more bearded iris. I have found myself incapable of turning down a free iris, so despite already having some lavender irises waiting to be planted (in a bag, under the bench on the porch) I accepted some white ones and a couple of a fancier variety that combine cream and a darker purple (I think). The irises went into the sidewalk bed, on the end where the space had been cleared for the ill-fated clethra ‘bush,’ and the rose was planted on the southeast corner of the house in the spot that had been prepared for the hydrangea. The iris will look nice on that end of the bed, as it’s the first group of plants you see as you approach the house. I expect that if I’m able to keep the rose alive and create an adequate support for it, it will also look nice anchoring the corner of the bed against the house. Any support will also create some visual structure for that front bed, as everything else currently in it dies down and is cut back in the winter. Just as soon as I get another couple of dry days, I’m going to put the next batch of compost around the plant and cover the whole area with mulch.

In addition to all this planting, I cut back and cleaned up the dying foliage from the summer plants, something I will try to do earlier next year (at least in the case of the peonies). We’ve also completed two rounds of leaf raking, and the ground is covered again. With a little luck we’ll get a dry stretch next week that will allow us to clean them up when they’re a bit easier to manage. Wrestling with a lawn full of wet leaves is not my idea of fun, even by yard work standards!

garden : refugees and autumn clean-up

garden : clean up

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It has finally begun to rain again, which means that the plants are less brown and the rain barrel is filled up again. I was surprised to empty it, and it definitely came in handy during the dry spell. We have yet to set up the second one, although we could have used it. The indoor plants seem to like the untreated water just fine, so that’s a bonus use as well.

Now that the daylilies are done blooming, I took some time to cut out the dead stalks. They now look tidier, but much shorter. I also cut the flowering stems off the lavender, which was time-consuming as I didn’t want to simply shear the plant down. Perhaps in future years; at the moment it looks nice and bushy and more like it belongs in its spot (in contrast to when all the stems were growing nearly horizontally in their attempts to be in the sun at all times).

Besides those two efforts, I have done very little in the yard lately. It’s been brutally hot and humid, but also dry so not much has been growing. The big excitement has been the insects that have discovered the milkweed: we have a whole slew of orange milkweed aphids, and just last week I returned to see a female Monarch flitting around. It appeared as if she were inspecting greenery, but I couldn’t locate any eggs so we’ll have to wait and see if she laid them. On the butterfly front, I’ve had several other small visitors to the garden now that the liatris is blooming, a Horace’s Duskywing and a Silver-Spotted Skipper.

It’s my hope that we’ll get back out in the yard and finish clearing it of weeds in a few weeks, after we go on vacation and the weather cools down. Of course, around here we could be a couple of months waiting for cooler weather. Plenty to do inside as well!

garden : clean up

garden : butterflies

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First of the Gay Butterflies Butterfly Weed assortment to bloom.

One of my goals in selecting plants to add to our garden is to attract more butterflies and predator insects. As with the desire to have more birds, it’s my hope that the mosquitoes can be kept to a minimum by natural predation. So far, we’ve seen some improvement over last year; it’s now possible to walk around in the yard and work in some areas without getting eaten alive. There are still a few problem areas, notably the puddle-ish area at the foot of the basement stairs (where we’re going to install a drain as part of the work on the basement) and the bumpy black plastic downspout extension on that same side of the addition. So, that corner of the yard is not so great. The rest is pretty good on a sunny day though, and even working outside at dusk I was able to make do with just the citronella bucket and not a DEET coating. Between our water management work, the birds, and the insects, we seem to be making progress.

In terms of butterflies, I’ve so far seen only the most common ones. They’ve appeared in greater numbers than I remember, Spring Azures and Cabbage Whites being the most frequent visitors. We had a larger black and blue butterfly hang around for a few days in the spring, however I wasn’t able to identify it. I’ve been using a poster that I picked up in Hilton Head, Butterflies of the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast, as a way to narrow down my options and then Peterson’s Eastern Butterflies or an online guide to our county to confirm the identifications. In addition to the two common white butterflies, I’ve noted several Eastern Tailed-blues in the yard, and caught visits by a Clouded Sulphur and what I believe was a Hobomok Skipper.

During trips farther south, I’ve seen a few other species. During our bi-annual farm party we saw a large number of Cloudless Sulphurs grouped along a puddled lane. We also spotted a Tiger Swallowtail and a variety of small and medium orange-and-black butterflies that were just too fast for us to identify. Similarly, we spotted a large orange butterfly that looked like a Great Spangled Fritillary during an outside wedding last weekend, but had neither binoculars nor book at hand. I’ve seen orange butterflies in our yard, but haven’t been quick enough to get a good look at them. I’m hoping that once the flowers start coming into bloom I’ll start to be able to get a good look at them at rest.

garden : butterflies

garden : nesting birds and a developing ecological balance

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There have always been a lot of birds around our yard, but this year we seem to have hit a sweet spot in terms of cover and food because we’ve seen a greater variety of fledgling birds than ever before. It’s possible that these birds have been here every year and I just haven’t noticed because I haven’t been as active in the yard after April. It’s also possible that I was finally sufficiently threatening with regard to the neighbors’ cats being in the yard every other day for three years, as I haven’t seen them around in months. We’ve also sprayed the cherry trees for Eastern Tent Caterpillars for two years now, which has enabled them to fully foliate and have enough energy to actually produce cherries. Most likely the proliferation is a combination of all of those factors plus the near-constant rain keeping fresh water in the birdbath.

At any rate, I’ve seen rumpled no-tail-feathers wobbly-flying young of 13 species in our yard (or on the street in front of the house): American Crow, Blue Jay, Catbird, Eastern Phoebe, Hairy Woodpecker, House Sparrow, Northern Cardinal, Grackle, European Starling, Brown Thrasher, Mourning Dove, American Robin, and (just this morning) Carolina Wren. Of all of these, I was most pleased by the ones I hadn’t seen before. The phoebe was a wonderful surprise, as I’d read they were shy nesters; in addition to being a pretty little bird (I have a northerner’s affinity for the gray species) they eat mosquitoes almost exclusively. I was excited about the crow, too, mostly because it’s one of those large birds about which you joke of never seeing a juvenile. And, truly, the young one would have been indistinguishable from an adult were it not making such plaintive cries for attention and had I not witnessed its parent actually feeding it. Finally, the woodpecker was a treat just because it was so cute. Without tail feathers, it was the quintessential Weeble ™ fluffball as it tried to peck for bugs up and down the limbs of the red maple.

My father rightly observes that all of these birds are ‘the loud ones,’ which is likely related to being the large ones, which is definitely related to being the voracious insect-eating ones. After years of effort, I seem to be finally developing ecological balance. We have numerous predator bugs in the yard, most noticeably fireflies, and just this week I discovered a beautiful spider—I bet you never expected me to use those two words together—camped out in the daylilies and another of the same in the climbing rose in the backyard.

Now, if only the slugs would attract some toads, I’d be set.

garden : nesting birds and a developing ecological balance

garden : foundation bed, volunteer wildflower, and leaves on the twig

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The front flower bed, newly planted.


The front flower bed, one month later.

A month after planting the foundation bed with flowering perennials, we’re seeing all kinds of growth. It doesn’t look like a mature flower garden yet, but it’s showing signs of how it will be when it fills in. When the plants first arrived, I was disappointed; I had expected all of the plants to be in pots and all of the potted plants to be larger. Now that the bare roots have sprouted, we’ve been able to tell which had crown rot and need to be replaced and which are likely going to survive. I probably should have been prepared for how scraggly it looks with just sprouts, but I have never done this kind of planting before.


Lavender buds just opening.

In terms of flowers, the bellflowers were coming into bloom when they arrived, so they have been a nice splash of purple. The scabiosa took off, and they are also sprouting multiple pale purple blooms. While lovely, neither is the true blue that was advertised, and everything looks washed in purple with the lavender in full bloom next to the bed. The butterfly weed grew like, well, a weed, and several of the shoots have developed flower buds. I look forward to that splash of orange or yellow color. The dwarf aster bloomed as well, and I can’t remember whether it was supposed to bloom this time of year or whether it was just early because of the planting schedule. And, the small rudbeckia on the other side of the steps has bloomed, and looks quite cheery in that dark little patch. Besides those, everything else is still in the sprout stage; I’m not sure I’ll get any daisies at all this year at the rate they’re growing. I remind myself that it’s barely summer, and there’s plenty of time for them to shoot up and get established.


The volunteer aster.


Leaves on the clethra.

Elsewhere around the front yard everything’s loving all the rain and heat. The clethra now has a full set of leaves, and we’re hoping to see more shoots once it starts actually photosynthesizing. The aster that I left unmowed has bloomed all over with lovely yellow-centered white flowers. I kind of like it as an outpost at the property line, but I’m under some household pressure to relocate it into the flowerbed. The monarda has grown significantly, and now has a healthy colony of predator insects eating the healthy colony of aphids that discovered it within the first days of planting. It hasn’t bloomed yet, but I’m hopeful. The daylilies are bursting out all over, of course; they love this climate and have been reveling in the rain. I had been thinking of phasing them out in favor of more natives, as I wasn’t sure anything found sustenance in them; I’ve since seen some insects eating the pollen and at least one butterfly—possibly a Delaware skipper—drinking from a bloom.


The daylily bed, with the clethra in the lower left corner.

garden : foundation bed, volunteer wildflower, and leaves on the twig