Late June Garden

Here are some pictures of the back yard beds.

The back bed has a sweet cherry tree, self-seeding yellow coreopsis, a Red Lake currant, some white alliums, lamb's ear, basket of gold, false indigo, mock orange, corydalis, a Rosanne geranium, among others.

 The cottage garden I planted this yera is starting to grow, though it will get a lot more colorful in a month.

The deck bed features a Rainbow Mix coleus I grew from seed in the basement, columbine, my poor New Jersey Tea (it's the chicken wire on the far right), hostas, asiatic lilies, and perennial bachelor buttons among others.

Baby Spinach

Adam and I are expecting a baby in early November. My friend in Phoenix requested a baby bump picture, so Adam took this one before work this morning. You can see Action Owl in the background, failing in his job to scare away bunnies. Though, despite the fact that I've seen a LOT of bunnies this year, the damage hasn't been too bad. I guess I've gotten good at figuring out which plants I have to protect and which ones they'll leave alone. The exception is that I failed to protect my New Jersey Tea (Ceanothus americanus), a nice native shrub, and they keep nibbling it down to the ground. So it's definitely not going to bloom this year.

June is a beautiful month

First, I failed to post the picture i took of our front yard in May. So I'll start with that:

I'm always amazed at how small everything starts and how easy it is to keep things under control at this stage. I forget how big things get in the coming months.
Here's our front yard from this morning. Unfortunately, the irises are already done so i didn't get them in the picture. And the false indigo are past peak (though still lovely structurally).

The other picture I didn't post right away was my new 'cottage garden' that I planted on the south side of our house. I used colors that seemed like a cottage garden: blue, purple, green, pink, and white. A true cottage garden is pretty wild, but this is my interpretation. It doesn't look like much yet of course. But give it a few months. Thanks to Adam for building me that trellis to hold my Clematis integrifolia 'Rooguchi'. Other plans include nicotiana (flowering tobacco), digitalis 'Foxy', some siberian and german iris I transplanted from other places in the yard, Leucanthemum 'Crazy Daisy' that i grew from seed, bells of ireland that i grew from seed (though not very many germinated), snapdragons, zinnias i direct seeded, and dahlias.

This morning before work Adam said that my wood lily (Lilium philadelphicum) was blooming. Sure enough. We planted it about five years ago as a tiny seedling we bought from a prairie nursery at the farmer's market. And this is the first year it bloomed. I knew it was a slow grower (and truth be told, I wasn't entirely sure it was still there at all, despite my attempts to protect it from the purple coneflowers and bloodroot that keep threatening to swallow it. I'd say it was worth the wait.