Good morning, and Happy Anniversary! Welcome to Saturday Morning Garden Blogging, Fourth Anniversary Edition.
We've had a very windy week here in Denver: every day about noon, the winds have whipped up. The "best" days saw gusts over 20 mph; the worst day was Tuesday, at over 50 mph. I really hate wind: I have long curly hair that gets whipped into knots; a small body that is easily pushed around; and it just feels so damned cold, even if temperatures are in the 40s and 50s.
On Wednesday night I made a bad boo boo: I've been putting my roman chamomile seedlings out to harden off, and forgot to bring them in before going to bed. Thursday morning, when the temperature dipped into the low 20s, they froze solid. Happily, although they were very unhappy, they weren't dead — somewhat frost burned, but recovering.
But on to the main event: a look back at the best photos from the fourth year of Saturday Morning Garden Blogging, and sharing whatever extra plant divisions or seeds we can with other gardeners.
The shot above the fold was taken through my back door last August, during a rare summer day of long, soaking rains. This is a rarity among my photos: I tend to go for macro shots which show the structure of blossoms or for interesting plays of light and shadow in the early morning or late afternoon. The view is of my "veggie patch" — I actually include flowers amongst the vegetables. The blurred splotches of color are dahlias, gladiolus and nicotiana sylvestris. Those nicotiana plants are huge — 6' tall and a yard across. I let them self-seed in the veggie patch, and leave them to fill in and scent the evening air. If anyone would like seed, I do have some — plant them once, and you'll never have to plant them again.
If I didn't know this was a picture of blue flax, I would never have guessed it. The gloss, the shadows of the stamens, the dark blue veining; this is one of my favorites of all time. I think I need to hang this in my kitchen — it would go well with the peach and blue color scheme.
I really like blue flax: it self-seeds quite readily so I feel free to pull any that sprouts where I don't want it — however, unlike cleome or cosmos, it doesn't try to take over and choke out everything else. Besides, it's a clear, true blue — a rarity in flowers, which generally have an underlying red tone mixed in with the blue, making them photograph purple.
And speaking of purple — I have tons and tons of pale lavender asters in my front yard — it spreads quite readily, and gives a nice burst of late summer/early fall color. I'll be ripping it out by the fist-full in a week or two, so if you want any, let me know and I'll pop some in the mail.
This is a Lauren's grape poppy, taken on an early morning in mid-August when the sun was just starting to slant into the bed. Many years ago I had bought seed, but couldn't get it to start. I bought a plant two years ago at a local nursery, and was thrilled to discover that the seed from the plants did germinate in the beds; it's a "Turkish somniferum" — opium — poppy, and as I'd really hate to lose the color by having it cross-breed with other poppies, I won't plant any other opium poppies.
The last item I have to share this spring is old-fashioned white lilac. The bush in our back yard sends out copious shoots every year and when I do the back-yard clean up, I'll be digging out the excess to keep our bush in check. Because the lilac is so vigorous, if you transplant those shoots, in a couple of years you'll have a nice, hardy lilac bush.
If you're interested in any of my offerings, e-mail me at Frankenoid at conen dot net. Also, I need some one to cover garden blogging on Saturday, March 28; welso has already volunteered for March 21.
That's what's happening here. What's going in your gardens?