Garden - Kim's Garden
Kim's Garden
Hi and welcome to my garden! My Mom liked to garden, although I recall her
using mostly annuals, but I do remember helping her plant bulbs one fall
day when I was about four years old. I found it very exciting...She told
me that if you planted the bulbs upside down they would grow down and bloom
underground. (I didn't find out that this was wrong until ten years later,
when I read in my high school biology book about negative geotropism.) I
worked in a nursery one summer when I was in my late 20s and made a list of
all the perennials I wanted...Happily, I've got most of them, and many
more. I garden in southeastern Iowa which is in USDA zone 5, (-20 to -10
degrees F. is our average annual minimum temperature). Our yard is a
corner lot, which seemed big when we bought it--small now! We may have to
move so I can get more land to garden on...
This photo is of my biggest bed, a large island in our back yard. I
started it in 1996. So many plants have been moved and added since
then...This photo is in late May of 2000, and you can see 'May Night'
salvia in the front left, lupines in the middle, and 'Caesar's Brother'
siberian iris is slightly behind them. The white "bloom" on the right side
of the photo is actually the fuzzy seed heads of my anemone pulsatillas (or
pulsatillas vulgaris). I dearly love lupines. They're a plant that I had
never even heard of until my teens (and then in a Monty Python sketch).
They seem very exotic to me. I don't recall ever seeing them grown in my
home town, or anywhere else for that matter...This year I grew 'The
Governor' (blue and white), 'Chatelaine' (pink and white) and a red
variety, perhaps 'My Castle'? I tried the 'New Generations' hybrids, or as
I call them, 'Dead Generations'. One out of six of them has survived
(barely) and it's never bloomed.
Lupine 'The Governor'
Another flower combination that turned out well is my pink-purple phlox and
blue larkspur with golden marguerite (Anthemis) 'E.C. Buxton' nearby...if
only larkspur bloomed all summer. I can grow them much better than I can
delphiniums. I grew them from seed, and the first year they were quite
short, but they grew tall the next year after they reseeded themselves.
You need to thin them drastically, to about 10 inches apart, which means
wiping out about a hundred siblings, but they don't do well when they are
too close together, so you have to be cruel to be kind...you can move them
when they are little, if you take a deep soil ball along with the tap root.
This photo is from early May. You can see the tulip 'Marilyn' in the
foreground, a white lily-flowered tulip with a red stripe down the middle
of each petal. The tall yellow and rose tulip in 'Blushing Lady', which
grows nearly a yard high! The narcissus 'Yellow Cheerfulness' is behind
that. I later put in a couple of furry white verbascums in this area to
distract from the declining bulb foliage, 'Polar Summer' and 'Arctic
Summer'...I think the latter grew whiter, more attractively shaped leaves..
This is a picture of my north bed where 'Mrs. Scott Elliot' columbines bloom
with 'Johnson's Blue' geraniums. I like columbines and epimediums; I find
their intricate flowers endearing.
Columbine Mrs. Scott Elliot
This is my 'Miss Wilmott's Ghost' eryngium, Eryngium giganteum. I saw
eryngiums and echinops used very well in a public garden I visited in
Brooklyn. Something ate the top off my 'Veitch's Blue' echinops this
spring and I don't know if it will flower this year or not...I don't know
who did it, but it wasn't me.
My 'Intrigue' daffodils and Muscari latifolium did well the first year.
The second year the muscari didn't come back. We found a dead vole in that
bed...I suspect he ate himself to death. Should have done an autopsy...
Windswept 'Blushing Lady' tulips in another bed..you can compare their size
to the 'Apricot Beauty' tulips below them. I find the size of these tulips
astonishing, and they are so beautiful, lemon yellow with a rose stripe
down the center of each petal...I highly recommend them. 'Blushing Beauty'
is a slightly paler version.
My 'Pink Hawaiian Coral' peony with my Baptisia australis in bloom behind
it. I like the coral peonies so much. It took my baptisia three years to
really get established, then it bloomed like crazy. It has nice foliage
all year and gets black seed pods in the fall...
My bleeding heart which got so huge, I cut it into four divisions and gave
three away. The next year, it was still huge! Another plant with
intricate flowers, fascinating.
A swallowtail enjoying some zinnias I put in for old times sake...I grew
some of this variety of zinnia as a little girl. Annuals are so valuable
to try in amongst the perennials. They really keep blooming in late summer
when many perennials are done. I like the ones I can grow from seed right
in the ground, especially in spots where the bulb foliage is declining.
A lythrum 'Morden Gleam' next to 'Goldsturm' rudbeckia in July. I seem to
like to combine yellows and magenta pinks with indigo blues, like the
larkspur/phlox/marguerite combination in spring. There is a clematis
'Durandii' supplying the indigo blue, growing between the two, but it can't
be seen in the photo.
One of my favorite daylilies, 'Chorus Line'. The color seems to be very
temperature dependent. I like it best on cool mornings when it is very
coral-pink. This is in the north bed of daylilies where I have
predominantly coral-peach flowers in honor of my Mom's favorite
color--peach!!!
Prairie Charmer (with eye), Cherry Cheeks
My north bulb bed is red, white and blue in late spring, with 'Apeldoorn'
tulips supplying the red, 'Winston Churchill' daffodils the white and
muscari armeniacum the blue...We DID get married on July 4th, but the bed
colors are just because I like that flower combination. This year I will
be replacing the 'Apeldoorn' with another red, "Come Back', which is
supposed to be more perennial. We'll see!!!
These last photos are of my only rose, 'Constance Spry', which is a David
Austin English climbing rose, and a tree peony, 'Yachiyo Tsubaki'. Now
that I look at them together I realize that they are rather similar: pink,
roundish, and prone to getting blowsy with age (hmmm, not unlike myself!).
When I like something I will find myself buying the same thing over and
over. I finally stopped myself from buying pink daylilies with a rose eye
when I realized the whole bed was beginning to look the same.
Rose 'Constance Spry'
Tree Peony 'Yachiyo Tsubaki'
Gardening is somewhat like juggling, in that you are combining your plants'
colors, heights, forms and bloom times with your own space and climate (and
budget) limitations...and when you consider that the weather, diseases, and
pests are thrown in the mix too...it is very satisfying, in the face of all
these factors, to succeed in making something beautiful, by your own design
or by the luck of a plant popping up in an unexpected and wonderful place.