Garden Observations

A few odds and ends today.

False Indigo
I've learned that with certain plants, it pays to buy a bigger plant right away. False Indigo (Baptisia) is one of them. I planted these two plants at exactly the same time, only I paid about $10 for one and $6 for the other. See if you can guess which is which. That said, I can't say enough good things about this plan. While slow to establish, one it gets going it's practically shrub-sized and requires almost no maintenance The flowers are lovely in the late spring, followed by cool seed pods. Plus the foliage looks great all season and into the winter. I don't cut it down until the spring.

Siberian Iris
I've come to love Siberian irises. While they only bloom for a week or so, their foliage looks decent all summer and they require practically no maintenance, other than cutting off the expired stems. This particular cultivar is called 'Flight of Butterflies' and is wonderful because the foliage is diminutive (the big foliage in the picture is dying tulip foliage) and you have these very dainty flowers on an almost non-existant stem. From a distance it really looks like floating purple butterflies.

Poppies
I planted this papavar orientale two years ago (I don't know the culivar off-hand), but last year the bunnies ate it down to the ground before i could put chicken wire around it that it never recovered. This year, i protected it in time and it bloomed. But the blooms lasted exactly 1.5 days and are now gone. This is a picture at the end of day 2. You can see they're already deteriorating. By the next afternoon, all the petals had fallen off. The foliage is ok, but not pretty enough on its own that I think it's worth having just for that. So overall, I'm not a fan of these poppies.

Allium
This plant has jumped up to the top of my fall-planted, spring-flowering bulb list.  I just can't get over how reliable, bunny-proof, low-maintenance (some of the taller ones do require staking, but I don't mind that - I buy bamboo stakes in bulk), and lovely they are. I'm already planning all the additional places I should plant alliums this fall.