Garden pics

I read somewhere about a woman who used to braid the ripening foliage of her daffodils to keep it looking tidy. I noticed mine is sprawling all over the place this year and that this year it actually matters--it sprawls over things that don't really want to be sprawled on. I'm not about to sit around and braid my daffodil foliage, but I did decide to tie it up with string, so now I've got these funny little stacks sitting around the yard--they look like little haystacks or bunches of asparagus or something. I figure once the foliage dies off, I'll just cut the whole stack to the ground and toss it in the compost pile.

One of my favorite plants, my giant hosta. The only thing wrong with this plant is that it shades out everything around it, but before it gets its growth for the year I have bare dirt and weeds. I'm not sure what to do about that. But the plant itself gives me great pleasure. I'm wondering if I divided it into 2 or 3 clumps and spread them out a little bit if I'd kill it off. Probably. The silver lamium is beautiful, isn't it? And it makes such a great background for the hosta.

Blue spiderwort. I love this stuff. This isn't the real shade of blue, but it gives you the idea. I think one of the things I love about it is the bright gold stamens against the blue of the flower, like bright little stars in a twilight sky.

The mauve spiderwort. This is a bit washed out, but you can see how enthusiastically they're blooming. I guess the reason I don't love them as much as the blues is that the little gold stars aren't as visible. But it's nice to see them happy.

More beautiful blues: veronica (or possibly salvia, I can't remember), siberian iris, and german iris. The siberian iris is completely gorgeous; I'm going to see if I can get a closer picture. They're dark, dark velvet purple, trimmed with gold and black. Absolutely royal. Henry Mitchell talks about "poise" in flowers, and for me these siberian iris have it. They're about as close to perfect as a flower can get.

Timber, posing to show the size of the veronica. I don't know why he looks like he's expecting me to pull his toenails out. Poor little guy--he really looks apprehensive, doesn't he?

One thing I plan to do today is plant things. One of my bosses gave me a clematis and the other gave me an aster (or maybe it's a chrysanthemum--I always think of asters as being in the mauve-blue-purple range and chrysanthemums as being in the yellow-orange-rust, and this one's lavender-blue), and I want to put them around the roses out front. The clematis is supposed to replace the one that didn't come up this year, and I'm a little worried about it--it's a really NICE plant--not just one of those ones in a 4" pot with two little wiry vines and a couple dozen leaves; this is in a big pot and quite lush-looking, and I'm not sure the site gets enough sun for it to thrive (the neighbor's small flowering tree having gotten large enough to block a good deal of the afternoon sun that corner formerly received). I hate to kill such a gorgeous plant, but you know how short on sunny spots my yard is. It's been sitting out on my porch for days while I tried to figure out another place to put it, but I'm afraid this is about the best I can do.

At any rate, the purple clematis and lavender-blue aster will look good with the pink and crimson roses and the lavender and Russian sage and clematis durandii (the picture in the link is not the correct color. Lest you think that Henry Mitchell is the only garden writer I read, let me say that Katharine S. White, wife of the writer E.B. White, used to (among other things) review garden catalogs and books and mentioned several times that blue is the most difficult color to reproduce accurately in photographs. My copy of her collected essays, Onward and Upward in the Garden, is coming to pieces, alas).

ADDENDUM: Here's a pretty good picture of the Siberian iris. I didn't really get the character of the flower, but the color is pretty close.