Our neighbor's mother is a professional horticulturalist and apparently has an impressive garden of her own up north. She is always bringing plants down and planting and inspecting and advising our neighbors. Whenever I see her around I beg her to come over and identify mystery plants for me. She is an absolute wealth of knowledge, and a very sweet person too.
A couple weeks ago I mentioned wanting more plants and she said I should give her a list. If she had plants to spare she would bring some over. I was pretty happy about that! I wrote up a quick list and passed it over to her.
Last week she was in town again and I saw her walking up to our front door. I hoped she had a couple plants in tow. She said she had brought some plants and she'd put them behind our fence on the alley. She had to do something else and then she'd meet me around back to label the plants.
I ran out back expecting to find a couple little plants and was amazed to see two large crates and a bucket of plants! I was bowled over by her generosity! Here's what we got:
- a bunch of wild ginger (in the round pot on the far right)
- a couple white bleeding heart (I didn't know they came in white!)
- some purple dome aster
- Great Blue Lobelia (lobelia siphilitica)
- a bunch of white phlox
- a columbine
- Red Turtlehead (chelone obliqua)
- several coneflowers
- one Foamflower (tiarella)
- and of course, one mystery plant that hitched a ride!
I found places for all of them, divided amongst our three rain gardens, up on the terrace, and in between some of the new berry bushes. I had also purchased two standard columbine which went into the front rain garden and I swiped some mystery plant from a pathway and planted that. The front rain garden is looking really spectacular. Now that I look back, I realize I haven't posted any followup pictures on the front rain garden! How embarrassing. I will remedy that soon.
In the meantime, I want to show off how lovely our flowers are right now.
Early phlox blooming:
Wild purple violets everywhere! I love them!
One of our bleeding hearts - the biggest and most beautiful:
Lastly, I hate to be right, but after all the lovely warm weather we had Minnesota is dumping some cold, cold weather, frosts, and possible snow on us! I think the snow danger has passed, but I saw a lot of blankets, sheets, plastic, and burlap bags out protecting plants on Saturday and Sunday mornings. There wasn't much we could do for our plants - we don't really have extra sheets and blankets. We'll just have to see what this frost does to everything.
3 comments:
Beautiful blog, beautiful pictures, bravo, love your garden.
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Gorgeous bleedings hearts! White should be fun but not exactly bleeding.
We have a rose turtlehead, and I'll tell you now to expect a big plant. Well, I guess 3 or 5 feet high. You probably know that, but I didn't. Our cup plant, which reached about ten feet last year, is already growing profusely. It may be a Jack the Giant Killer plant!
If you look at the first photo, the Turtlehead is the enormous plant taking up most of the bin on the far left. It's perked up now and I'd say it's probably 3 feet high. yep, it's a big one! I have some little plants around it that I'll have to move, but I'm excited about the rain garden eventually being inundated with green (and flowers of course!)
The white bleeding hearts are beautiful - but I guess it does take away from the name. =) I'll get a shot of them when I do an update on the raingarden (which I'll do as soon as we have a sunny day around here!)
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