catching up in the garden

Not much going on here, so here's a few garden pics from last week:

The Hyperion daylily I've been praising. It looks sort of pathetic, but it's taken them about 4 years to get this far. I'm hoping they'll do the daylily thing and keep increasing. Yes, those are weeds all around it. I haven't been able to decide what else I want to plant there. Once in a while I go out and yank things up, but you know how weeds are.

Hyperion close up. The true color is somewhere between these two extremes--not so pale as above, but not so intense as below.

I tried to get rid of this blue spruce when I first moved in and it was only about 6 feet tall, but nobody would take it. Then I set fire to it (accidentally), which gave it a very odd shape. Finally I planted an autumn clematis at the foot of it, and after sitting there at the foot of the tree for a couple of years, that baby took off. I was standing on the porch waiting for the pizza the other night, and noticed that this year the clematis is starting to reach for the tulip trees that overhang the blue spruce. See that little squiggle in the top right hand corner? That's a clematis stem reaching for the tulip tree. The blue spruce is, of course, blue, and all the rest of the green is clematis.


I couldn't get the entire spruce into the viewfinder, but this might give you some idea of just how enthusiastic that clematis is. The past couple of years it's been a sheet of white way up there in the spruce in September. It looks like it may outdo itself this year. I hope the poor little spruce can stand up to the weight!

To get a sense of the size of this stuff (and enthusiasm of the clematis), here's a shot from the neighbor's yard across the street. There's actually some snow-in-summer, a couple of plants of blue fescue, a single Shasta daisy, and some Russian sage under the spruce--none of it any too happy. Probably too acidic. I suspect it would all benefit from a good top-dressing of some really good-quality compost.

As you see, the clematis has, in a sense, its arms around the spruce--the swathe you see on this side above and the garland on the house side as pictured from the porch. I still didn't get the top of the spruce into the picture, but you can see it's taller than my house--we're not talking a measly 8 or 10 feet here! I'm not fond of the spruce, but I do love the clematis.