There comes a time most summers (i.e. those years with enough rain) when things in the garden are so lush and large that walking along several of the pathways just isn’t fun anymore. And with my local garden club adding my garden as a stop on their annual member’s tour last Saturday it was high time I took my secateurs and weed wacker out and ruthlessly reclaimed a few lovely walks. There were casualties aplenty but I was careful at the beginning to snip off quite a few stems, thinking ahead to both a vase on the patio and today’s post. I’m joining Cathy at Rambling in the Garden with the vase, and sending fervent hopes and wishes her way (and to all other gardeners in the UK and parts of Europe), who are experiencing severe drought and heat this summer.
Anyway…the garden tour went well. Twelve or 15 cars pulled into my driveway…the cars totally blocked the view of the Island Bed and no one walked along the pathways I had sliced through the Echinacea field…the most asked about flower was the patch of Allium carinatum that I featured here, on Friday. So my bonus vases today, my props, as it were, are these little vases I’ve had on my back porch for a few weeks now. the Alliums and a few Nigella, salvaged from my last IAVOM post. Hope everyone has a wonderful week, rain falls where it’s needed, temperatures moderate a bit (although a different Cathy of Words and Herbs fame, has warned that in her part of Germany…not so much…) and All Is Good for All.
Definitely thankful for enough rain. We received 4” last week…very necessary and helpful. Too bad about your pineapple plant. Snapdragon has pretty colors…maybe it’ll re-seed some more! ❤️ all your Alliums.
Four inches!!! That’s more than 100 mm – Your trees especially were dancing with joy I bet!
Love that drift of Echinacea, it’s stunning! Glad your cuttings made it to some vases, worth the heavy hand. 🙂
Definitely worth it – nice to be able to walk about the garden again with no fear of breaking something or being mutilated by something else…
Echinaceas are among my summer favourites coping so well with the heat and fairly well with the drought. Your border looks stunning.
Thanks Annette – the island bed is having A Good Year!
Coneflower like that needs no props. That drift is impressive.
Your lovely echinacea, Chris! Something I have somehow never been able to grow. Isn’t it interesting what people ask about on a garden visit, and it’s rarely the same from year to year I find
Yes, it’s an unusual Allium but really, in a garden with a thousand (figuratively speaking) other plants…
Your Echinaceas are wonderful! So many! And they look great in your glass vase with pebbles. Like Annette said, they are fantastic in our hot and dry summer. Glad the opening went well Chris. And I do hope you continue to have a great gardening summer. Send some showers our way! 😁
I was looking at the Hamburg temperatures this week and it seems your heat wave has broken? No rain in the forecast there but at least you can breath again.
I’d love to have an annual display of Echincea in my garden but, sadly, it doesn’t much appreciate conditions here. At best, I’d call it a short-lived annual in my part of SoCal. Glad to hear that your tour was a success!
What a wonderful honor to have visitors to your garden. Seeing all those echinacea has me missing mine.
It was a fun experience! And, of course, great motivation to get things done!!
The combination of colors in the snapdragon are beautiful, as is that large collection of coneflowers. I smiled to see the Gaillardia at the edge of them, and I’m curious: what’s the large white ‘poofy’ set of blooms in the midst of the coneflowers? It almost looks like hydrangea; did a shrub set up shop there?
Yes! It’s my one and only Hydrangea – an Annabelle. I bought it YEARS ago when it was a single stalk, less than a foot high. It has sent up numerous additional stalks since then, as they do, and it will soon outgrow (to my eye) its current location…The Gaillardia tis year are fewer than in years past; they don’t like competition and prefer a gravelly soil than straight up dirt, it seems. I need to collect seeds this year and scatter them in other areas.