On first look today, our world was enrobed in a down-to-the-ground cloud. It was the thickest fog I can remember in ages. School looked super spooky:

Back at home, I thought how blah and sad the street garden looked, as it has since the deep December freeze killed off so many things that often overwinter and I didn’t plant enough winter interest to keep it looking good all year.

Then I decided to take a closer look to see if I could see something beautiful, something interesting, something worth noticing, signs of spring to come or summer past. In just a few minutes of slowing down and looking closely, here is some of what I found in my seemingly nondescript landscape.

Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’ seedheads

Purple sprouting broccoli sticking out its wet “tongue”

Lemon balm seeds (need to get rid of those pronto!) against Mexican feather grass tendrils

Crocus awaiting the sun’s kiss to open up shop for the day

One giant dewdrop and a million little ones on a lupine leaf

Gossamer strands, evidence of a spider’s presence on iris seedpods

and coneflower too

Then this, which would have been enough on its own to banish the gloom of the day

The first tulip! Don’t scream, yours aren’t behind. This tulipa greigii came up first here last year, before the snowdrops and crocus had stopped blooming, so it must be in its nature to be the earliest bird.

Even in the less spectacular garden seasons, there’s probably always something to notice – even if it’s “just” spiderwebs on a dead flower or, in another climate, bird tracks in the snow. We just have to slow down enough to find it.

Late January is usually a really un-spectacular time for my parking strip garden. So much so that I am too ashamed to include a full shot of it here! I will stick to the few details that have provided a second glance amid the brownish wasteland that otherwise is sadly characteristic of this time of year. When will I learn? ****Must plant more evergreens!***

I didn’t plant a lot of winter veggies this year. They never do much anyway except sit around looking sad all winter and then bolt as soon as it gets warm, so it was interesting to see that some of the open space is being colonized by volunteer chervil from the mesclun mix that was in the same spot last summer. I do love chervil, but hope I won’t be chasing down seedlings all over the garden forever more.

(By the way, I got a new camera for Christmas – Thanks, Mom and Dad! – but haven’t really figured out how to use it yet. I somehow pressed something that made the settings take these strange wide-screen photos, which I guess are kind of arty but not particularly useful for the web. I got it reset eventually, but by then the sun was gone.)

I never covered up my broccoli starts, so whatever survived is tough enough to stay below freezing for over a week! We’ll see if it ends up producing anything edible.

Eek, popping weed is on the march already, thanks to the warm days! Can you see its cute little white flower all set to come up, bloom for a bit, and then release its evil batch of 100% germination seeds?

This senecio should do well in hot, dry conditions, but I think I didn’t water it enough in its first growing season so it is still struggling a bit (you can see yellow/brown patches on some of the leaves, but there has been new growth so I am hoping it will hang in there).

For lack of much else to look at, I have left my dead coneflowers to provide a bit of sculptural height. They would probably look a lot nicer with a little dusting of snow underneath, but the senecio is a next-best backdrop.

This euphorbia wandered over from the neighbor’s and I transplanted it rather rudely a few years ago, down to the parking strip. Further proof of how tough these plants are – it looked a little sad for about two minutes, and then made a full recovery and is now thriving and putting out its pendant flowers. I was afraid of this plant family for so long, due to its toxic sap, but I am just careful around and also have it in a spot where my kid would never get too close. I just noticed that it has produced its own “baby” a few feet away, which I may move or give away before it gets too big.

And, after getting the camera switched back to regular old photo size mode, I noticed what I truly hope is the return of my favorite tulips ever. Looking back at that earlier post, I can see that I had them in three spots, and here I only saw one clump coming up. I will just have to be patient, maybe they will all return for another show-offy time in the early spring garden.

Which plant’s return to glory are you most anticipating this spring?

The uncharacteristically deep and long freeze Seattle endured in December subjected winter veggie gardens to a real beating. Many unprotected plants, including some that were hurriedly swaddled in floating row cover, did not survive. Even some carefully shielded by a pro gardener under the warming embrace of a hoop house just couldn’t hack it after days in the 20sF or lower. This was one mean frost!

That’s why, when I saw this plastic tent-like structure in a parking strip recently, I wondered if its contents had made it through okay.

Looks like it might be a pretty easy DIY project, just a few lengths of PVC and some heavy-duty plastic. I wonder if the low and compact shape, as compared with a hoop house, trapped warm air inside more effectively and helped to keep things alive? The lettuce seems to have survived:

Are the crows just decorative or do they deter potential pilferers? I took them as a warning and didn’t poke my camera inside for a closer look.

Later, some real corvids were spotted on a house’s rooftop. They like to look in rain gutters for tasty tidbits.

I seem to be on a tree kick here so maybe I will just keep it going…

Garden Rant had an invitation to discuss thoughts on street tree policy here. Lots of comments! People feel strongly about their streets and trees, go figure.

Local Ecologist blogger Georgia writes from NYC now, she always has great insights about public policy and plants.

A monthly Festival of the Trees rotates among a variety of blogs, including co-founder Dave’s at Via Negativa this month. Always good arboreal stuff in this round-up, from photos to poetry to links that will lead you to look at our leafy friends in new ways.

Now, back to photos. Some of my favorite street trees in the neighborhood, all taken a few weeks ago when more leaves were up than down.

Japanese maple, unknown variety (it would be on my short-list for the back garden, if only I knew what it was!):

A pretty dogwood (I would say maybe Cornus kousa except that I have one and it lost its leaves much earlier, so I’m not sure):

Close up of dogwood fruit – do they remind anyone else of Crunchberries?

Another Japanese maple, I’m going to go with ‘Bloodgood’:

Nothing like sunlight through those leaves, turns them from wine to scarlet:

I’ll save the neighbor’s magnificent gingkos for another time. They deserve their very own page, I think!

A few weeks ago, Seattle was ripped by a series of powerful wind storms. Still nothing to match our legendary Hanukkah Eve blowout of 2006, when everything from telephone poles to Douglas firs went belly-up overnight, but still some pretty strong gusts that knocked out power and did some damage to the unsteadier trees.

Just up my street, this one met its end:

The trunk just snapped off, luckily missing any humans or property. I’m not sure what kind of tree it is, or if it’s on the city’s list for approved parking strip trees. If anyone has a guess, please speak forth. It was planted in a group, which is often the MO for street trees that come free from the city.

Another breakage point, showing the leaves closer up for you ID experts:

Bark detail – does it look like the inside of the trunk was diseased?

Poor thing. I always mourn the death of a tree. I’m glad nobody was hurt – this would have made a pretty big dent in anyone’s head:

One unlucky fellow did lose his life during this set of storms. He was just out with his wife, walking their dog, when a big limb in a local park came down and that was it. I admit I’m a chicken – when the winds start to blow, I make a dash for the house and try to stay in until it’s all over. I try not to look at our big cedar too closely, although I’ve heard they tend to be pretty good at staying upright.

I will be curious to see what, if anything, is chosen to replace the poor broken tree on my street. If it were me, I’d go for something different!

(For those curious about Seattle parking strip tree planting procedures, permits, and lists of approved street trees, click here.)

Leave enough empty space in the garden and interesting things start to show up. I have refrained from completely filling up my parking strip once it was cleared of St. John’s Wort, partly due to cheapness and also just to see what would come to grow here. Allowing nature to fill in the empty spots has been an exercise in patience and restraint – I tend not to yank things out until they have proven to be either totally invasive or just things I intensely dislike.

Blog buddies have helped me ID a few plants that were new here, including Mexican feather grass. It is a spreader for sure, but not so vigorously that I can’t keep on top of it, and I have enjoyed its fluffy tendrils – they are fun to pet (although apparently not fun FOR pets – someone I know spent several hundred dollars having its seedheads removed from the inside of her dog’s nose!). So maybe some of you will clue me in on what this one is, and whether I should stop it in its tracks while I still can.

It’s a pretty sizable grass, and it grew to a couple of feet high over the past two years. I just had an awful thought that it might be Pampas grass, in which case I need to dig it out before it takes over and becomes immovable, but if it’s something more well-behaved I might still need to move it further away from the edge of the bed.

It’s friendly with its next-door neighbor, the feather grass:

In this shot, you can see how I have let another volunteer, violets, colonize unwisely large swaths of ground:

Need to get on that one of these days, before it takes over completely!

So, anyone got a guess about my latest mystery plant?

We had a few white birch trees at our previous place, and I have to admit I didn’t appreciate them very much. One was poorly sited in the tiny front lawn, shading the struggling fruit trees, and the others were in the parking strip, dropping their tiny, storm-drain-clogging, hard-to-rake leaves everywhere in the fall. Their branches tended to hang low and get brutally thwacked every time the UPS truck barrelled down our hill, and when we tried to prune them, they bled fountains of weeping sap.

But now that I can admire them from afar, I have fallen in love with these trees. I think ours were Betula pendula (European white birch), which form huge jagged dark cracks in their white bark, but the ones I’m enjoying in the neighborhood are more likely B. papyrifera (Paper birch), at least I think so – please correct me if you think otherwise.

A white tree looks so very mod and chic in the fall landscape.

Looks like the children (or rodents?) of the neighborhood have not been able to resist a little peeling. Not good for the tree, I would imagine.

This one might be my old nemesis, it seem to have more of a weeping shape.

I had to really admire this trunk base for a while. It was hard not to peel just a little tiny strip – so tempting! But I managed to contain myself.

Has a tree (or plant) ever lost your heart but then won it back again?

PS Acer negundo (aka Box elder), I am so over you. A decidious tree that is this blah in fall is just off my list. Thanks to everyone who warned me away from getting one!

This is one for the flower-lovers (you know who you are, and aren’t).

A year or so ago, a simple raised bed appeared in the parking strip a few blocks from my house. Good soil went in, things were planted, I didn’t go past for a while, but when I was out for a walk the other day, we’re talking almost-mid-November here, I almost fell over when I saw this.

What are they feeding those things? The good stuff, obviously.

My cosmos are long gone, at least I think they are – maybe I should look again! These ones are not only still blooming, they are forming new buds even as the evening temps dip toward freezing.

Massive orange dahlias abound:

Guess I’m not the only one who plants stuff and forgets what it’s called (this was attached to one of the massive dahlia stalks):

I loved this tattered but still-glowing zinnia, its charms a bit faded but still cheerful on a cold fall day:

My sunflowers are long gone too, and yet here are these, still standing proud and topping out at probably 11 ft. How they survived the previous night’s wind storm, I have no idea.

Well, mostly survived:

This gardener chose not to rip up the entire parking strip, just a small patch of sod for the raised bed. But man, you can fit a lot of loveliness in a small space if you get it right. I can’t wait to see what they get up to next year!

Just one house over, strange things are growing in the lawn…

The asters that reseed vigorously in my parking strip garden are tall, leggy, often in the wrong place and prone to rust late in the season. But I keep them anyway. Do you know why?

Here’s another look:

Yes, for the bees. Most of the blossoms are gone by now (these photos were taken back in late September), but since there aren’t many flowers on the street still blooming at that time of year, I like giving my buzzing friends a last little taste of summer before it’s time to close up the honey shop for the year.

Do you have any plants you keep around mostly for the wildlife to enjoy?

The Green Lake area of Seattle is swamped on sunny days by folks from all over the city, who come to walk, jog, bike or skate the lake’s 3+ mi. loop, enjoy its ample playground, or go for the goals on its many soccer fields. Houses are spiffy but street gardens are fairly scarce, probably since there is so much foot traffic and car inflow from outside the neighborhood.

So it was with great surprise and delight that I turned a corner there yesterday and found this view:

Varying fall tree foliage colors – check. Huge raised bed in the parking strip – yup. Massive pottery urns trusted to the elements and passers-by/would-be thieves – yes indeedy. But what really got me was that mass of Japanese anemones.

I have had limited success with windflowers in a couple of gardens, maybe I don’t water them enough or they don’t get the right amount of filtered sunlight. All I can say is, these people figured out how to grow them and then really went for it!

We were rushing past, late for lunch, needing burritos, but I wanted to stay in this unexpected approximation of a Japanese woodland for a while longer. I wonder what it looks like when the anemones go underground for the winter?

I have been thinking about this for years: to quiet arterial streets (and especially the homes that stand beside them, why don’t we install earthen (possibly planted) berms? I believe that this would be a great way to lessen the impact of car traffic in our City and beyond. So, I started a new site, BermPortland.com, for this cause/idea, and am seeking support – both financial and research, to prove that this would make sense to do on a grand scale.  I welcome your participation!

Photo credit and great background info here!

It has been several months now since i dug out the old plants and sawd from the plant beds until i finally found the time to finish this monster project. Last week, i got 1 quarter yard compost, gravel and mulch delivered. Big event for Leona – bigger days ahead for me.

It took the help of 2 very laborous ladies 2 wheel barrels, 3 shovels and 1 days to finish digging out the beds, filling it with compost and gravel, tearing out all the sawd around the house. Tuesday i finished the sides and back of the house by laying down cardboard and topping it off with bark mulch – now no weed shall permeate this layer – or so i hope.

Wednesday i was able to dig out holes for the first plants. All of which have their allocated position and i am sticking to Karen’s design and am delighted about her plant choice. I will be continuing to plant for the next couple weeks or until i have all the plants gathered together as a lot of the plants are harder to get at this time of year. But Portland Nursery is helping to find them all for me.

Pink has never been my favorite color, in fact it is pretty much at the bottom of my list, but somehow it seems to have worked its way into my life despite my protestations. My daughter discovered it in preschool, it was like a social virus running from one girl to the next. Now, thankfully, she seems to be moving on to other colors, but in the meantime she still has pink clothes that fit and I’m not going to just toss them out because purple is the new pink.

In the garden, I love the soft whitish-pink of cherry blossoms, although my current garden does not have any. My mom gave me a ton of echinacea, which goes by Purple Coneflower but the purple has always looked more pink to me. Or maybe you could use the term “pinky-purple,” which my 2 yr. old niece taught me recently when she was visiting.

Although the pink of this Gaura is a little on the Pepto-Bismol side for my taste, it has bloomed its head off for months with almost no supplemental water and zero fertilizer in crummy parking strip soil, despite being a new addition in the spring. Its full name is Gaura lindheimeri ‘Passionate Rainbow’ and the purple leaves that it started out with have not been quite as apparent as I had hoped.

Every year, I say I will be more ruthless about ripping out the tall aster seedlings that reseed with wild abandon, but then I’m glad of them when summer begins its freefall into September and many of the other blooming plants start to give up. This is another pinky-purple one, and this blossom was the first to open of the many that will linger well into the fall.

Are there any colors that have crept into your garden (and your heart) despite initial resistance?

A few months ago, I wrote a post about a row of raised beds that had suddenly appeared in the parking strip of a house on our route to school. If you have a spare second, click here to see the “before” photos.

The other day, I was back by that way and almost crashed the car when I saw the transformation that had taken place. I guess the question of whether raised beds with good soil assist in the growing of delicious veggies in a tough spot has now been definitively answered. Check it out!

Tomatoes and nasturtiums with a simple wood frame trellis:

Carrots, lettuces and marigolds galore:

Broccoli, chard and a bunch of squash that is going to have to colonize the sidewalk if it gets any bigger:

One bed left, maybe for fall veggies?

The narrow bed on the arterial, no raised planter box but things still look pretty happy:

The furry farmer, who came out to see what I was doing:

The Seattle Times had this article on the front page of its online edition today, discussing the newly relaxed rules for growing veggies in our city’s parking strips. The revolution is underway!

Ohoooo, my arms and back are hurting. I am a bit exhausted but in a good way. I have finally started to tackle the ‘backyard beast’. Let’s talk more about the beast then the backyard – you couldn’t really call the small grass/weed strip around our house a backyard. None the less, it was planted with lawn (sawd?) about 2 years ago. Which wasn’t the best idea considering our house being built green. Needs constant irrigation in summer, doesn’t like shady spots, and doesn’t soak up the water well enough in the Pacific NW winters. The weed took over big time and after battling it out for a while, we decided we needed a different solution. 

Karen Schwartz from Schwartz Garden Designs created a planting plan for me which i am now willingly executing. As i don’t have any idea about native plants, their growth, pros and cons, i felt i needed some guidance and found it in Karen, a former colleague of mine, who after quitting her job as a materials analyst is working on becoming a full time landscaper. We devised a plan to create a ‘zeroscape’ garden, which after the first year of being planted will only need watering ONCE a year. And still look beautifully colorful and vibrant, giving our house the needed ambiance. 

For today, the basis is laid: I cut down the remainder of the lawn around the house, dug out any deep rooting weed and covered everything with black plastic to create intense heat during the hot summer months, thus sustainably killing off all growth underneath. Once done, we’ll decide more. To create an elevated planting bed, i dug out all lawn roots and weed and started digging the border which will prevent growth coming from the neighbouring property. Once that’s done i will install a cedar edge fixed with stakes. 

As all i can show right now is black plastic covered areas and raw soil, i am staying with a photo of Karen’s design for me. And will update on the progress over the next couple of weeks.

I lack the design sense to think up successful plant pairings, but sometimes a combination of self-sowers will show up that I find delightful.

I didn’t even know what Mexican Feather Grass was until you guys told me, but now I love it. I’m not sure where it came from, but I’m letting (some of) it stay in my parking strip. Ditto this coreopsis (of course I just bought one to replace one that died last winter, before noticing this one), which I can see has migrated from up the street in a neighbor’s street garden. The only drawback is that both of these are growing at the edge of the sidewalk, when they’d probably look better inset a bit. If I find a spare un-lazy moment, I might try to move them. Then again, if we never have any rain in Seattle anymore (there’s been nothing to speak of since early May), then transplanting should probably wait indefinitely.

Do you have any self-sown plant combos that you are enjoying this summer?

Who says that major city thoroughfares and nice streetside plantings can’t mix? Someone in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood decided to buck the trend of boring parking strips along the busiest street in the sector, 45th Ave, and put in something really enjoyable to walk past. This strip is actually in two sections, separated by a crosswalk.

Even though cars, trucks, and buses thunder by regularly to and from the freeway, the neighborhood is actually very walkable and having some nice perennials to look at on the way distracts from the vehicular noise.

I kind of wish I could go back and start over in my own parking strip, choose plants more carefully and intelligently and have something harmonious like this. It does look like a designer was involved, but in a good way.

Epimediums, barberries, and small-leaf hebes are all tough, drought-tolerant plants that should need little or no care throughout the year. Grasses like the blue fescue below and a mass of Carex morowii ‘Ice Dance’ on the edge (guessing on that one) are also able to take the heat and keep looking good.

In the second part of the strip, purple spikes of Linaria harmonize with silvery groundcover and the brilliant orange of California poppies.

I missed the neighborhood garden tour, as it happened when I was on kid duty all day and I didn’t think she could hack it. Plus, $15 per person, maybe another year. Did any of you locals go?

Yet another reason to love the species tulips that came up first and lasted longest in the parking strip this spring:

I just read recently that the trick to getting tulips to repeat is to plant them in an area where they receive little or no water during their dormant season. If they’re where it will get wet, it’s better to dig them up and store them until fall, so they don’t rot. I might have to go to the trouble, which I never have before, for these ones. They’re just too cool to treat as an annual like I usually do with tulips.

It’s weird to be thinking about bulbs now that the Summer Solstice has passed, but I’m trying to be good about letting my bulb foliage hang around as long as it needs to, so I’m grateful this bunch is at least not too ugly to look at amid all the surrounding greenery.

Do summer’s beauties make you forget about your little spring friends who are done for the year? Or do you miss them and think of them, even a little bit, sometimes? (I do.)

A couple of weeks ago, I took a stroll to the public library to return some overdue books and on the way I saw a raised bed in the parking strip I hadn’t notice before. It was a biggie, most of the width of the property, and pretty much a monoculture.

As of a few months ago, I might not have recognized this crop, thinking it looked a bit like tomatoes but not quite (they are both members of the nightshade family, along with tobacco, peppers and eggplant). Now that I am a potato farmer myself, on a much smaller scale, I realized right away that this gardener is gunning for a really big crop o’ spuds.

They were all planted in nice neat rows and hilled up (the new potatoes form between the original seed potato and the top of the hill).

Potatoes do take up a bit of room, so I can see why the streetside planter box was tempting to build. OK, it wasn’t quite a monoculture – there were some really massive rhubarb plants at the end of the rows.

I’d seen rhubarb on the street before but not potatoes. Urban farming is really catching on in Seattle, as is parking strip gardening. I love it when I see people combining the two!

(Oh, that whole signing off for the summer thing didn’t last long, did it? I guess I must be addicted to blogging. Not going to be a daily thing but when I can get to it, I will.)

For the first time in many years, one of my over-wintered leeks (yes, just one, but it’s better than none!) grew to normal grocery-store size and I was able to harvest it. If I plant these again, I need to do some better research on optimal planting time and conditions, since I do love their flavor and it was fun to pick one right out of the garden. Here is mine, all cleaned up:

The roots had 50 tons of dirt on them, which made me think that I need to get a better set-up for washing veggies outside. I remember doing that when I was a kid, using a stiff brush to get the worst of the soil off before bringing in carrots and other tasty treats.

I had to buy a second leek to make one of my all-time most cherished recipes, Three-Onion Risotto (click here to find it on Food & Wine, which was my favorite cooking mag back when I had time to cook non-kid food), but did get to clip some fresh chives to use as a garnish. First real harvest meal of the summer, including outside leaves from the lettuce starts my mom gave me a few weeks ago. Yum! Eating anything good out of the garden this week?

I should know by now that my impulse bulb purchases often turn out to be busts. I’ve had a few lucky finds (especially these species tulips, the hands-down winners of Best Bulb in my garden this spring) but the rest are usually either kind of boring or just too weird to be useful.

My hand inexplicably reached for a bag of Allium moly, despite the lack of an accompanying picture (should have been a tip-off) at the Arboretum bulb sale last fall. I thought, what the hey, never heard of these before, Allium are super trendy, maybe these will be fun.

Well, they might have their proponents (please speak forth if you are one!) or could be nice when massed among other colors or against a background of silvery foliage plants, but dotted in twos and threes in my parking strip, their primary yellow is just not that welcome in mid-June. I can barely stand plain bright shades of this color in the earliest of spring blooms (tiny narcissi are exempted, they’re so cute), and by this time of year I’m just aching for richer and more subtle hues. I do kind of like the semi-fan shape, different from the typical Allium globes, more like something you might find growing in a meadow somewhere.

Maybe they come in other colors? I could handle purple or reddish-orange or white, or even pink. I don’t generally have that much success with alliums, so maybe these will disappear after this season, never to be seen again. Next year, I’m just going to put a. ‘Globemaster’ on my list and stick with it! Did you have any disappointing bulbs this year?

Every year at the Seattle Tilth Edible Plant Sale, I buy some unfamiliar (to me) herbs and other edibles. Last year, one was shiso, which is used mainly in Japanese cooking and also has medicinal uses. One source I found said that it’s often served with raw fish (i.e. sushi) because it can help prevent food poisoning.

I can’t even remember if I actually ate any of the leaves, but I really enjoyed the plant. It grew without any care in my hot, dry parking strip garden, had lovely variegated purple leaves all summer long, and then the seed pods were interesting and stuck around for most of the winter.

So, since it’s an annual (and a member of the mint family), I decided to buy another plant this year at the sale. It took me a while to get it into the ground, but I put it in my daughter’s veggie patch since I thought she might enjoy having a purple plant (her new favorite color, thank god the pink phase finally seems to be ending!) that is also fine to pick a leaf off and nibble on. Here it is, watered in but dirt not covering it up yet. Hot sunny day, terrible transplanting weather of course.

As it was going into the ground, I had a horrible thought. Wait, those leaves look so familiar – could those million little seedlings I just pulled up thinking they were an invasive mint-ish weed that my dad warned me not to let get established in my garden, and that I was so proud of myself for seeing and yanking early, be shiso volunteers? I pulled them out of the weed bucket to take a look:

Oh, um, yes, that would be they. Now I know! If you have as shiso plant, at least in my climate (Zone 8), you never need to buy another plant – you will have seeds and seedlings forever! Enough to spread around the garden if you wish, or give away or pull up if not. Lesson learned.

Other names for shiso are Perilla, Kemangi. and Beefsteak Leaf. Click here for a yummy-sounding recipe for edamame (soy beans) with shiso and Meyer lemon vinaigrette.

The one-gallon Rockrose (cistus) I planted at the end of my parking strip that’s furthest from the house (and hose) a couple of years ago is at least three feet wide now and fully established. I highly recommend this drought-tolerant shrub to anyone looking to add a little height and a lot of width to a dry spot – I barely remembered to water it at all when I first planted it, but it seems not to have minded. Now it’s covered with blooms like this:

I still don’t water it much and have never fertilized or otherwise done anything to it. It blooms once in a single and fairly short profusion and then goes back to being a green clump, which is a bit of a drawback, but it keeps the weeds away from that area and is evergreen in my climate, Zone 8. This is probably the last year I’ll be able to just let it be before I have to figure out when and how to prune it.

Cistus Nursery on Sauvie Island near Portland is beloved of some of my favorite garden bloggers, Megan of Nestmaker and Loree of Danger Garden. They seem to focus more on agaves, yuccas, and other desert-y plants but maybe they have a nice collection of their namesake plant too. I hope to visit there someday and bring home some cross-border beauties.

If there is one thing I’m not, it’s tidy. Not in the garden, not in the house, not in my life. I’d like to be, and I try sometimes, but I always fail. Maybe it’s lack of organization, forethought, or energy. Or that given the choice between reading a book/going to the beach vs. putting the junk mail in the recycling/making sure all the nursery pots are cleaned out and stacked, I’ll always choose the former.

My neighbors probably cried real tears when we moved in – “Oh no, here come the Beverly Hillbillies!” I feel kind of bad for them, it’s probably the first time in their lives that they had to look out their windows at plastic mulch bags and actual weeds (the previous owner was pretty fussy and also had a professional gardener who used herbicides and never let a single poppy go to seed).

When I see tidy parking strip gardens like the one below, I kind of admire them on the one hand but on the other I wonder how the person planning it had the restraint to leave so much bare ground (or were they just being cheap?). I also wonder if it will stay tidy, or if it was put in by a landscaper and will be left to go wild. I kind of hope to see self-seeding flowers showing up to mess up the design a little, is that evil of me?

It is just a baby garden right now, and I walk by it at least once a week so I will be interested to see it grow. That one yellow sedum in the corner is a known spreader, so maybe the whole thing will be filled in with a nice mix of gold, purple and green before too long and I’ll be satisfied with the plants’ tendency to resist, along with me, the tendency to be too neat around the edges.

My spring plant purchasing has been pretty restrained. Because of some revamping in the backyard, I haven’t wanted to buy too much until I knew what we really needed. But still, the odd plant sale managed to creep onto my radar and it was impossible to resist at least a few new treasures.

I am terrible at plant combinations, but when I saw these two at the same sale, I kind of imagined them together. Japanese blood grass, or Imperata cylindrica ‘Red Baron’ (illegal to grow in the Southern US, unfortunately, since it reverts to its non-hybrid form and becomes horribly invasive – it is tame in the NW and I have always wanted to own a clump) and Phygelius x rectus ‘Sunshine,’ a golden cultivar of Cape Fuchsia (a South African plant that dies back in our climate but regrows from the ground and is a hummingbird magnet when the tubular pinkish-red flowers bloom). I wedged them into the parking strip and I hope they grow up to get along together and not bicker too much. I probably need some ground cover there right now, nothing that will clash with reddish-purple or goldeny-green.

There is nothing like seeing a plant, going “Cool!,” buying it, bringing it home, putting it in the ground, finally getting around to looking it up in the old plant book, and going “Duh – I already have this!” Please tell me I am not the only person to do that… in the latest case, with Phlomis russeliana (Sticky Jerusalem Sage). I had wanted something with bigger leaves since everything in the parking strip seems to have little tiny ones. I forgot that I have a huge clump of this growing in the shade under the Harry Lauder’s Walking Stick tree in our upper garden. I may have to move this one eventually, as I think it will get quite large. I do love the fuzzy leaves, they beg to be touched, and the flower spikes are quite interesting when they appear and even after they die. Pardon the holey leaves, the snails had a go at this before I got it into the ground.

Gaura lindheimeri ‘Passionate Rainbow’ appealed to me despite its somewhat silly cultivar name. I am trying to add more purple to the parking strip as a resting point for the eye, kind of a lot going on down there… I like the way the sun catches it late in the day.

There’s more but I think I will stop after this last one. It’s not a new addition, just a returnee that I had forgotten would be there. My mom gave me a lot of echinacea (coneflower) seedlings last year, too late for them to bloom during the summer. One of the delights of being a forgetful gardener is the surprise of seeing plants you’d not remembered planting! There are many of these, and I hope to see the bees enjoying their long-lasting flowers all summer long.

The playhouse for my daughter has arrived, and the raised bed for the probably pot-bound raspberry canes has finally been built, although it’s still awaiting soil. I will try to post pictures of those new structural additions to our lives soon.