Lots of blooming going on around here now.  Foxgloves:

This is the one from Debby. The one to the right that is just starting is Pam’s Choice split.  I am really hoping these seed themselves so I have lots of foxgloves. Foxgloves are are classic for a cottage garden.

These are Star of Persia allium:

I love these! The blooms keep getting bigger and rounder, too. It’s hard to get a picture of them because the blooms are airy.  The size of the blooms is about 3-4 inches across? These were bulbs planted in the fall. I will be ordering more for sure!

The tippy pots are starting to grow now. They are planted with allysum and million bells. Hopefully they will trail more. This is the beginnings of a new bed:

The plant at the left is the climbing rose. It’s in its 2nd year, so probably not until next year for it to climb. This bed is where the new path was made.That little Azalea will grow big and strong, hopefully. Now it’s tiny and I have annuals planted in front of it 😀  Eventually it will be 4 feet tall.

Speaking of baby gardens, this is part of the shade garden in the back:

Right behind those hostas is where our fence used to be. Now we just see the weeds behind our neighbor’s house! It doesn’t look that great, so we might need something to block this area. This bed has the heuchera, bleeding heart and columbine in it (and daffodil remains). All baby plants. This will look fuller this summer and next year should be cooking along.

The columbines in this garden are blooming:

I love the spurs on the blooms

Hopefully these will reseed and spread. Or that’s the plan anyway.

Also in this bed, although not shown in the picture above, is the incarvilea, aka flowering fern.

Ferns don’t flower, so this is a misnomer, but the incarvilea look like ferns, don’t they? I got these tubers at the flower show earlier this spring and they actually came up!

This is Brindled Beauty Iris:

For a first year iris, it has a lot of blooms.

The last one to open was Night Ruler. Yes, you do have to say that in Movie Guy voice, too.

It’s such a deep purple and looks black from a distance.

So pretty!  I am happy with all of my new irises this year.  It’s so hard to be patient waiting for the gardens to mature and I am happy to be getting any blooms!

I am glad the weekend is here. I will be working on Monday, but at least I’ve got a weekend. 😀

It’s been sooo hot here. July/August hot.  Everything is now all greened up.  I’ve been working on the back yard beds now. The main bed is pretty much weed free, but I need to get control of the rest of the area around the trees and where the fence was.

I spent time delineating the bed edges. It looks better from afar than up close, though LOL.  Our neighbor has a line of plants that she had along the fence, so that’s kind of nice to see.

The Lily of the Valleys are in full bloom now and when the sun hits them, the scent wafts around.

I complain about the LOTV, but I do love them. Just not so many of them. There are plenty of these along with daylilies on the side of the house.

The property line with the neighbor on this side runs down the middle of all the green. It’s mostly shade over here because of trees and our house, so the lilies don’t bloom a lot.

Irises are also blooming! Those on Facebook saw these already. This is the Boysenbery Buttercup:

That one I had at our old house. This is one of the new ones I planted last fall. This is Batik:

isn’t that lovely?  I can’t wait until it multiplies.

My unknown iris types are blooming in the front as well:

Those were the ones I divided last year and sent pieces out to people. Anyone who got them, let me know if they came up for you!

In the back shade bed, the bleeding hearts are really coming along. I love the white ones.

And the red ones. Or pink, I guess:

I have some columbine planted as well. One isn’t blooming, but one is. It’s funny how when you buy a baby plant, they will sometimes put out baby blooms. This is called Winky Blue:

It’s so tiny and cute, about an inch across.

I’ll have more irises next week once they open up. It’s going to be a little hot to be working much in the garden and we are going for an early long ride tomorrow to beat the heat.

Have a safe and enjoyable Memorial Weekend!

The garden is really starting to pop out now. There will be lots of blooms coming up soon – most likely next week. Yay!  My peonies survived the winter and look good. They will bloom this year for me. I’m so excited because I’ve never had peonies before and they are so pretty.  There are a lot of flowers that I haven’t had before now that we are at Radiance Manor. I have so much room! Although, it’s seems to be running out fast 😀

You can see our sad lawn there. We should be able to lay seed in a week or so.

The centaurea are really going strong. These were 3 tiny plants last year and this is how they look already in May.

This will bloom periodically over the summer, too, which is nice.

Remember my yellow Antoinette tulips from last week? Look at them now!

I knew I wasn’t crazy thinking they were pink — whew.

My irises are almost ready!

You can see some annual cosmos peeking out there. I planted them in the tulips so they will fill in that space after the tulips die back.

We are pretty happy with how the front of the house is looking. The plants just need to grow now.

I have been getting annuals to plant. This is my ‘cauldron’ full of geraniums:

Another pot with a geranium and some dark sweet potato vine:

Pansies still going strong:

The back of the house seems to be lagging behind the front. I think is just is cooler back there in general because it gets the sun an hour or two after the front bed.

I have 3 different kinds of bleeding heart in my shade bed. Fringed:

Then the classic kind. This is the red one:

And the white one!

Those are the very early blooms and there should be more. coming.

My “I don’t care about you” hostas are doing well:

I just dug these up from another spot in chunks and stuffed them in the ground in the shade bed. I didn’t care if they came back. I swear, I can’t kill these things! I think they actually liked the move. Go figure.  😀

It’s feeling so much like spring around here. The trees are leafing out and more plants are waking up from winter slumber.

The bleeding heart is continuing to put out little stems.

I’ve got some white ones, too, which I am really excited about. They might be blooming next week!

A new tulip opened up. This is Antoinette, a bouquet tulip:

I planted it with the Monte Carlo, which wasn’t really the look I was going for:

The Montes are on their way out now.

I think my favorite of the tulips this year is the Carnival de Nice. I just love how it looks:

The black and white tulips are going strong:

One of my very favorite flowers is popping out blooms, too. This is Centaurea, Amethyst in Snow:

Long time readers will remember this one. I snagged some of the babies from the garden at our old house and they were too small to flower last year, but this year we are rewarded!  I just love the look of this plant.

And *finally* – the hummers are back!

I was so happy to see this little guy. If he is here now, he will love the garden in a couple months since I have a lot of hummingbird friendly flowers coming.

There has been a lot of rain this week, which is always good for the garden. Not so great for working in it, but we need it.

Lots of tulips going on around here!

The path is getting close to being done:

This angle looks like a big wrench or something 🙂  John has put down the filler and stones. Now he has to find the loose areas to pack in sand. The maple trees have been dropping all those tiny green things that are all over the bed now. It’s a mess. Next is putting the slate down under the bench.

New tulips this week. This is a double flowering one called Carnival de Nice:

The double tulips are sometimes called peony tulips because they look like them (Captain Obvious).

This one is Cilesta:

The Repel All spray seemed to work since the squirrels didn’t get the rest of these. Yippee!

Apricot impression tulips:

Queen of the Night and Catherine:

The Queen has this velvety look to the petals:

My neighbors  or any passing motorists probably think I’m pretty weird always out in the garden beds crouched down taking pictures.

Lawn violets

My fringed bleeding heart is blooming, even though it is really tiny!

“Regular” bleeding hearts will die out after blooming, but the fringed one will stay green all summer long and bloom, too. I have some of the others, but they aren’t even close to blooming yet. One of them is white, too! Can’t wait to see that one.

More weeding to do this weekend in the garden bed to get it ready for planting.

Now it’s feeling like spring! 60s weather and sunny for a couple days anyway.  I feel like it has been endless digging in that front bed to get it cleared of roots and ground cover, and I guess it has been endless. I’m a little worried that some of these might be tree roots as well as ivy, bushes and groundcover, so I am not going to go gung ho and rip all that out, mostly the surface stuff.  I would hate to cause problems with the trees, seeing as they are our neighbor’s and not ours.

We were at Lowe’s last night and I couldn’t resist looking at the discount rack for plants. Wouldn’t you know there were $5 clematis vines?  I have no idea why because they look fine. Just need a little water:

I think what they do is that when the “buy me” blooms fall off, they move the plant to discount. Even though people in the garden world know that clematis don’t bloom yet here, I guess if you don’t see blooms you don’t buy it? Whatever, I’ll take a $5 vine to help cover the chain link fence on the one side of our yard (which is ours).

I went back there to dig a hole for it and wouldn’t you know, more of those slate rocks are buried right along the fence. So I dug up another big pile — go muscles!

That bucket was for me to cart dirt that we dug out of the front bed for the path to replace the space the stones left. Functional fitness!  I think we can about build another Stonhenge with all the rocks I’ve dug up so far. I then planted the new clematis and moved over the sweet autumn clematis that was supposed to grow on our old fence.

I had a frustrating bit with squirrel damage. There were new tulips just about open and a squirrel came and ate all the buds.

Grrrr!  So, I got some animal repellant (at said Lowe’s visit last night).

This stuff I guess is kind of like the bitter apple to keep dogs from licking. It’s safe for humans and pets, it just doesn’t taste good. It stinks, though. It smells sort of like a cross between liquid smoke, garlic and maybe bacon? LOL. Yuck. Hopefully this will save the other tulips.

They only seem to bother stuff out in the back and never the front of the house. Not sure why. Anyway, bloom time!

Forget me nots, which are in the lawn.

All of the claudias are open now. They are so pretty!

The triumph tulips are open now:

This is called Escape and what a red color it is in the sun!

Even in the evening it has a nice glow to it.

Front shot:

Still more tulips to come, the black and white ones, plus a couple others.  The majority of the plants made it through the winter. Just a couple casualties, but I will wait a bit and see if they are just really slow to wake up.

Saturday will be good riding weather and we are planning on a 40-mile ride for the first time this year. That means cupcakes!! 😀

I have real live blooms from the ground today! Woo Hoo!  The warm temps and sun the last couple day and poof – blooms are starting to appear.

This is the Monte Carlo tulip:

It doesn’t look like a traditional tulip and when it is in full sun during the day, the petals spread out almost flat. It’s actually fragrant as well.

The next tulip that has started to open is the lily flowering tulip:

It’s called Claudia. I bought the majority of my tulips from Tulip World last fall. And if you are interested, they have a 50% off sale for fall bulbs going on right now. You order them now and they will ship this fall. Not saying I bought a bunch or anything… I’m just mentioning it for all of you 🙂

I also have some daffodils coming up. These were already in ground when we moved in, but only 1 bloom showed up. When I dug up the clump, there were tons of bulblets all stuck together. So, I separated them and just put them willy nilly wherever and wouldn’t you know it, I’ve got blooms this year!

.

I don’t usually have luck with daffs, so this was nice to see. And free — other than buying the house, of course.

Hummingbirds have been sighted very close to our area, so I have my feeders out. I bought a new one as well.

Right now it’s just the early males zooming through to the breeding areas and then the resident ones will follow shortly.

The garden bed up front is seeing some progress. John’s been helping me dig out the ground cover and roots and what a job that is. It’s going to take another week or so to get that out. Unfortunately, there are 2 stumps that are just too deeply rooted to get out, so those will get cut down and left to decompose. Anyway, we thought a sitting area would be nice and had thought about a bistro set, but then brought up my bench (my $8 garage sale bench!!!) and put it in.

The slate is just laid down for planning right now. It needs the barrier and gravel. Not to mention the perfect bench placement. I was moving it around, backing up, viewing, moving it around, puttting it back in the same spot LOL.  John just patiently waited for me to figure out where I wanted it. Then we will lay some stones. I think we have enough that we could have the stones under the bench if we want. This picture doesn’t show it, but there is also enough room to walk behind the bench. I may plant some foxglove back there or something.

Lots of root digging this weekend and more blog fiddling because the pictures are driving me insane! I’m going to copy the exact setup of my garden blog and see if that works since I have no problem with that one.

This is the planning post for What’s Blooming. The ideas that we are mulling over — or that should be I am mulling over. I make all the garden decisions LOL. John helps construct stuff. He still has no interest in actual gardening, but at least I can get him to help dig stumps and make pathways.  I know he enjoys looking the gardens and appreciates the hard work that goes into them. These pictures coming up kind of show the scope of work that still needs to be done around here. 

Anyhoo, we got the bushes cut down in the front bed. Did I say it turns out there were only 2? They were so spread out. That’s good because there are only 2 stumps to dig up, but they are really big. We may have to dig down and cut them off below the soil level if they don’t come up.

The plan is to have the path come around the front of this bed like on the other side:

I just plopped rocks down to get an idea of the look. We  probably have enough slate to curve all the way around to the side, which we didn’t think was going to happen. The other option is to put in a little slate path to a sitting area for a bistro set:

That T-rex head thing is supposed to be the path and sitting area. I have Zero drawing skills. I bet if I tried to draw a T-rex, it wouldn’t look as good as that. 

I am still undecided about keeping the rhododendrens.

There were probably 4 or so here with a couple stumps and some very old growth. I whacked one way down and was hoping it would put on new growth last year, but it didn’t. So it’s unlikely rejuvenation pruning will work on these. The stems are so woody and thick that new  bud growth probably won’t happen. The flowers are so pretty and the bees love it, so I might wait until after they flower to take them out, or I might try moving them to the back and see if I can’t resurrect them.  They just don’t look very good.

My tulips are popping up everywhere now:

I haven’t cleaned up much of the old growth from last year yet since we are supposed to get more cold weather. I left the straw on my roses and the tender aliums to give them a little more protected time. I’ll pull that off in a couple weeks.

The water feature we are looking at will go in the back of the house off the patio. This bed is a wreck, even after I got the majority of plants out of it and broken glass  – and those pieces of wood buried in there. I tell you, the state of this house when we bought it makes me so angry sometimes.

We are going to use that slope to create a tiered pondless waterfall and then have plants around it We thought about having a pond, but I don’t want pond maintenance  and also for safety in case anybody’s kid or pet wandered back there.  With the pondless, the water is in a resevoir that is covered up, but the water can drain through the surface back to the reservoir. It disappears like magic!

Here are my rock piles to choose from to build it:

That would have cost a lot of money to buy all that rock – and there is more along the fence I could dig up if I wanted.   Notice that I have a pallet for a planter project, too. Too many projects!

Debby posted about her beautiful garden today and we have a similar idea. I also have plans for a fairy garden right at the edge of the patio. Can’t you picture a little door on this tree with some tiny things around it?

The patio starts right below this picture, so it’s perfect for viewing.

Here’s is something else we tried that actually worked! I have a squirrel buster feeder, which is great, but I can’t put large seeds in it. We decided to try a squirrel baffle on a pole with another feeder:

It works! I wasn’t sure it would, but they cannot seem to get on the baffle. It tips them off no matter how hard they try – and kind of funny to watch. You just need it far enough away from things so they can’t leap onto it. The other point is that the pole needs to be just a pole without a foot at the bottom or you can’t slide the baffle on it (if that makes sense). I need to get more of these. There was a cardinal pair feeding at the feeders today. I’m sure it’s the same pair from last year since they over winter. They had babies last year and brought the little ones into our yard, which was fun to watch – although they would not shut up. 

Anyway, as you can see – there is a ton of work to be done here at Radiance Manor. I am a little embarrassed showing all these photos that look like a trash house, but there you go.

On a plant note, I see that at least a few of my lupines survived the winter!

I really hope these bloom. So much is still dormant in the gardens. At least I know something made it 😀

I am so excited — so excited, look what I spied today!!!

I can’t believe the tulips are poking up already. Those didn’t show up until April last year.  I am over the moon about that!  I guess it doesn’t take much to make me happy 😀 Now to impatiently run outside every day and see how big they are getting.

On to some more things that will be arriving for the garden in a couple months:

More foxglove. I can’t resist a free shipping and 50% discount sale. These companies know what they’re doing in January, I tell you.

It a mixed bunch, so I don’t know what colors will be coming, which is kind of fun. I like surprises.

I am trying this plant again – torch lily, aka red hot poker. A name John finds the need to make jokes about for some reason…

I tried these before a few years ago and they didn’t make it. The torch lilies are normally to zone 6, but there is one variety that is supposed to be hardy to 5 (which is our zone). So, I’m trying it again.

This is a plant that I was going to grow from seed, but then it was on sale for not much more than a packet of seeds would be. Normally I would never get an annual by mail, but there is always a first time for everything, right?

Purple passion flower. It’s a vine and I love the look. These are all from Michigan Bulb Company. They have kind of mixed reviews online, so I don’t know what to expect with these.

We have 2 big outdoor projects planned for next year. One is the water feature in the back bed next to the house. We are going to use all of those rocks I dug up to make a pondless waterfall of sorts. 

The design is still in the thought process. The other project is the complete rennovation of the front bed on the other side of the house. Last year was working on the left side of the house, this year is the right wild and wooly side:

All of those shrubs are coming out. They are really overgrown and I hate them. I think there are 3 or 4 bushes in that pile.  I am hoping to keep the rhododendrons on the left there, but I think they might be too old and woody. I pruned one of them way down and will see if it comes back. If it does, then I will prune the other. If it doesn’t I will take these down.

We will be doing the slate walkway along the front of this bed just like on the other side and putting my bench in there to be able to sit out front. 

We can’t do much just yet as the ground is still too wet and soggy to be doing much, but I have an itchy trigger finger LOL