The Fragrant Garden

I'm about to go off on an adventure, so I thought I'd post again before I start packing in earnest.

One of the most important parts of gardening for me is fragrance. You can regularly find me wandering around our garden savouring the scent of the roses, running my hands through the lavender or monarda or rosemary and sniffing happily. While not everything in our garden has fragrance by a long shot, we do have plenty that do. In fact, I will often forego varieties with no fragrance for those that have plenty.


What does heliotrope smell like to you? Cherry Pie? Cream Soda? Vanilla? Whatever the case, it's wonderful, and an ideal plant to put right beside walkways and doorsteps so that you can savour its fragrance regularly. This plant likes sun but doesn't like to dry out, so make sure you water it and deadhead it regularly to keep it flowering until frost.


Ah, the wonderfully and accurately named hummingbird mint is another of those plants I need to have. Its flowers and foliage have this delectable lemony minty fragrance, but it grows in a polite clump rather than running. I think it would overwinter outside if I didn't forget where I planted it. Usually I have it in containers, but this year I've put several plants into the ground and I will mark them to see if they make a return.


Here's one of those cases where I cheerfully hold to the oldfashioned roses rather than newer hybrids that might be pretty but not fragrant. I love my rugosas, even though they're thorny as all get out, many of them sucker quite generously, and some have leaves that turn pretty ugly by this time of year. All those things however are forgiven because the fragrance of the rugosas just makes me exquisitely happy. This is the common everyday 'Hansa', which is generous with its growing behaviours and heady of fragrance.


This is my favourite rose, hands down. Snow Pavement makes me deliriously happy. It flowers like a mad maniac with these lovely lavender tinged creamy flowers that smell like heaven must smell. The only thing about this variety is that the fog will cause the flowers to ball and turn brown, necessitating a big deadheading festival, but that also guarantees that it will promptly put up another flush of blooms.


Ah, bee balm. At last count, we have five or six varieties of monarda around our property, and I keep moving some of it around so that it will spread even more than it has. This is 'Raspberry Wine', which is approaching triffid-like status because it spreads wide and grows way tall, at least in my garden, where it's attempting to overwhelm the weed-beleaguered gardener.


Yummy tall phlox make me extremely happy too, with their brilliant colours and lovely spicy scent. I love this one for its bicolour foliage as much as for the flamingly bright flowers...


But this is 'David', my absolute favourite. I think it's one of the most fragrant, it grows into impressive clumps, I've not needed to stake it, and it's been oblivious to mildew--not that mildew is something I ever worry about anyway.


And this is currently the fragrant centre of my gardening universe, with 'David', 'Stargazer' oriental lily, globe thistles, Snow Pavement rose, and hummingbird mint and heliotrope (not seen in the photo) all combining to load the air with divine fragrances. Somehow, they all seem to work together very, very well.


This autumn and next spring I will be putting in more oriental lilies as well as trumpets and orienpets. Their fragrance is simply the best.


This is a daylily, Victorian Days, which has a pleasing fragrance and is just a lovely exotic colour combination. Our daylilies continue to flower like gangbusters, courtesy of the cooler weather, and they don't seem to care whether it rains or fogs or is sunny--they just perform like the stars they are.


As far as I know, this is the oriental lily Willeke Alberti, but I could be mistaken. Whatever it is, it smells simply glorious. Last year it was the last to flower (it was planted last spring) and produced only a couple of blossoms. It's gaining in enthusiasm, hugely, this year, with large flowers and quite a few of them.

And with that...I'm off to Kansas City, Missouri, on a bit of a break from what has been a challenging summer. While part of it is for work purposes (I'll be exploring such delights as Powell Gardens, some of the many public fountains of the city, and the reputedly awesome barbecue), I'll also be doing some highly fun stuff with some friends of mine, a few of whom are flying in from other parts of the US for a couple of events we're taking in on Friday and Saturday evening. This is a big step for me, who just got a passport, and maybe, just maybe, it'll mean that I'll get to Austin next spring, if there's a Spring Fling to be enjoyed.

I'll try to post while I'm in KC, but no promises. Reports when I get back, though.

The Week the Sun Came Back

Finally, the sun has remembered where we live. Even if there's a skein of fog along some of the rivers in the early morning,


It's gone within a couple of hours. We've had a baskingly lovely week--not too hot, definitely not muggy, and refreshingly pleasant at night.


The garden has yawned and stretched, shaking off its malaise of wetness and those plants that have been waiting for their entry cue are starting to put on their late summer performances. I have several of the lower-growing helenium, which tend to bloom a little earlier than the 5 foot tall ones out in the back garden. I love the deep rich colour of this particular variety, which reproduces almost as dark as it is.


Despite the fact that we're moving into the season of many hot coloured flowers, yellows, and oranges and bronzes, I have a lot of blue and lavender-purple yet happening. One of my blue favourites are the gentians, with their rich cobalt blue to purple-blue flowers.


And while some of my echinops are more blue than others, they're all wonderful, scented, strikingly architectural, and just plain awesome plants. Bee magnets, too, which is 90 percent of the reason I let them come up wherever they want.


This dandy plant is a groundcover, blue leadwort or plumbago, Ceratostigma plumbaginoides. The flowers are glorious, as you can see, but this plant will really come into its own come fall, when the foliage turns all kinds of splendid shades. I think I have it located in a good spot for it to overwinter, but we'll see come next spring.


I mentioned hot-colour plants earlier, and these are among my favourite of brilliant-hued flowers. The annual ice plants make me very, very happy, although some of them suffered greatly from the excess moisture we were enduring until earlier in the week. Only those in containers or with excellent drainage managed to fight off the dangers of rot from all the wet, and those that did are doing splendidly.


I buy these as annual transplants and my summer garden would not be complete with out them, in containers, in areas with good drainage, where their brilliant colours make me smile until a hard frost--last year it was late October or early November!


The osteospermums, relatives of the ice plants, didn't like the wet we were having either. But those that survived have shrugged it off and rewarded me for not giving up on them by blooming in incredible colours.


One of the most amazingly floriferous and wellbehaved verbenas I've ever encountered, this hasn't paused in its blooming since I planted it out in mid May.


I go gaga over lantana, despite the unpleasant smell of the foliage (it reminds me of tomato foliage somewhat) because the flowers just rock my world with their complex colour combinations. Butterflies love this plant too, and the varieties I've planted out in containers have done well despite the wet sogginess we were having.


Pincushion flower is another of my favourites; this is Scabiosa, not the Knautia that is also referred to as pincushion flower.


I've been explaining to a friend of mine about the vagaries of the tide here on the upper Bay of Fundy, and how when it goes out, it goes WAYYYYYYY out. I gotta get down to this wharf in Delhaven at high water to show you the full effect, but here the boats sit at low water, resting their keels on the mud.


And look, a real, genuine sunset--not a fog-set. We've even seen the moon a few nights in a row now. Here's hoping that we're past our season of excess fog and into some decent weather, for what's left of the season.

The Endless Summer that Isn't

This is truly being the summer of my gardening discontent. The weather is enough to drive a person to drink. While others around the province have been enduring dry yet cloudy and humid conditions, we've been getting wet , cloudy and humid conditions. Fog doesn't bother me, normally--it's here, it's gone. Not this year. So much southwest wind and therefore fog. When everything is soggy wet, it's just not conducive to wanting to be out playing in the garden. So I stay inside, work and glower out the window on occasion, waiting for those dry days to arrive. Harrumph!

Despite the lack of real tender attention from me, things continue to grow and flower, as they do. Above is Endless Summer hydrangea, which seems to be having a better year this than last, when I threatened it with being moved to the compost pile if it didn't pull up its socks, so to speak. It's not having huge numbers of flowers, but what it has are definitely pretty.


Flat sea holly (Eryngium planum) is one of the stars of our garden from early August onwards. Other sea hollies have flowered already and are drying into pleasing seedheads, but this one just goes on and on, covering itself in rich lavender blue flowers. It's very beloved by the pollinating bees, butterflies and other creatures that visit here.


There aren't a lot of yellow rugosa roses, but one that I'm fond of is Topaz Jewel, well named with its glowing yellow flowers. They aren't as fragrant as their red or white counterparts, and they do shatter easily, so I just leave them on the shrub to flower merrily along.


A sign that summer is past its peak; the helenium have begun blooming. Several of these more compact varieties tend to come on earlier than my exuberant tall yellow ones in the back garden, but I love each and every one of them.

And now it's time for a bit of an ode to coneflowers. I know many of you who are regular readers share my absorption in coneflowers--they're just such splendid, undemanding, high performing plants, and with the diligence of plant breeders in recent years, we have so many more colours than just the white and purple we were long accustomed to.

White Swan IS one of my favourites, just because it's a tidy, handsome plant and its flowers are so pristine.


And this would be your standard purple coneflower. I have a lot of these, because as with other plants that we have many of, they're pollinator magnets. And we are very gratified to see a LOT of bees this summer, I think more than usual, or maybe I"m just spending more time watching out for them.


'Green Envy' is definitely a star in my books, and I'm awestruck at how well it settled in and multiplied itself from last year's planting. It's doing very, very well, wouldn't you say?


As a nice counterpart to all that green, 'Harvest Moon', one of the Itsaul Big Sky series of coneflowers, is richly gold and another favourite.


This is 'Jade', one of the first of the so-called green coneflowers. Compared to Green Envy, it's not so green, but I love it anyway. IN the blurred background, you can see 'Coconut Lime', which has also settled in well and is flowering happily. Double coneflowers aren't to everyone's tastes, but that's the pleasure of gardening--we can all plant what gives us joy. I never met a coneflower that I didn't love, though some have been cranky growers for me.

But they always behave better than hollyhocks.

A followup to all your lovely comments on the hollyhocks. I DID plant yellow ones out there, because a few people sent or gave me seed. But there are apparently garden gnomes at work that, because they've never been freed, insist on exercising their mischief in my garden by roguing out the yellow ones.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

The Ongoing Tragic Tale of My Hollyhocks

I've whined before about my ongoing problem with hollyhocks. The Reader's Digest condensed version of the story is that I have hollyhock challenges, particularly when it comes to one particular colour. Yellow. I've been trying for years to get yellow hollyhocks.

They refuse to bloom that colour for me.

It's become a point of some horticultural hilarity in my world. People have kindly sent me seed, left me seed on my doorstep along with flowers to prove that the seeds came from yellow plants. I've sown them. I've tossed them around the garden.

This year, I thought I'd finally had success. I have quite a few hollyhocks growing, mostly in some rather unlikely places. I DON'T remember throwing seeds there, but whatever. There are different leaf shapes. I was sure among them would be at least one yellow one. Of course there would.

Wouldn't there?


Well, let's see....there's the black ones, of course. I AM very fond of these, deep wine as they are, and they make a nice colour echo near the Actaea 'Black Negligee'. So they're just fine.

Hmmm. I don't know WHERE this one came from. It is, most definitely a pretty thing, but I'm quite sure I haven't had these before. Nor planted them. Hmmmph. One of life's little mysteries, I guess.


This, I think, is legacy of the huge giant pink monster hollyhock I had two years ago. I figured it would produce enough seed to populate the world in pink hollyhocks. It did indeed yield a few plants in this colour. Not my favourite colour, by a long shot. Definitely not yellow.


I don't want my hopes dashed the way they were two years ago when I thought I finally had a yellow hollyhock. When the buds showed beautifully yellow as they prepared to open...and this is what I got.
This is the one I argued about with my long-suffering spouse. Told him it was orange. It certainly wasn't yellow--and I had bought this plant as a yellow-frakkin' hollyhock.
Maybe it's my soil. Or my karma. At least my hydrangeas are all blue rather than pink.
Well, there is one other option. Last year at the Saltscapes Expo, there was a very talented metalworker who did sculptures of plants and other items using recycled oil tanks from people's homes. When I saw this, I had to have it.


Okay, they aren't bright yellow. Sort of a cream colour. He said he'd paint them for me, but I like them as they are. They aren't botanically correct, but I can live with that. They DO suffer from hollyhock rust, but it's a noncontagious kind...And they won't get winter rot, fall over in windstorms, or be pink.

And I'm all right with that.

And now the dark garden

Once again life got in the way this week, but mostly in a good way. Except for the weather, that is. More fog, more heat, but now today it's actually raining. Rain is good. Despite the fog, things are dry, and we need a day of long, contemplative, soaking rain. Although since I'm putting in my request, let it clear off for the performances of my friend Ami McKay's play "Jerome-The Historical Spectacle" up at Ross Creek Centre for the Arts. We went to last night's opening performance and it was, in a word, joyously wonderful!



Okay, back to the garden. Last time, we focused on the whites in the garden. This time, we'll rejoice in the darker plants--both flowers and foliage. And in fact, we'll kick off with Ami's black hollyhocks. This plant appeared and grew like a mad maniac this spring--I remember throwing the seeds around with little expectation that they'd cooperate. I'll have a hollyhock tantrum post in a day or too, though.


My young purple/copper beech has just the best colour of foliage ever. I probably shouldn't have planted Actaea 'Pink Spike' quite so close because there's nothing between them for contrast, but as the beech grows that will correct itself. Perhaps a gold hosta or two nearby to set things off will do the trick.


Chocolate Joe Pye weed grows here but doesn't get any significant size, not like its native relatives, which I actually prefer because they are such butterfly magnets. However, it's a pretty plant and looks nice with the gold sambucus beside it.


I have mentioned in the past that clematis do really, really well here. I think it's the fog, which keeps roots cool, and when the sun is out, it's lovely here. The clematis perform like maniacs every year, but this is definitely the star of the show.


Japanese Parsley, or cryptotanea, is a neat plant with handsome foliage. However, you do need to watch its self seeding ability as it does get quite exuberant with seeding. It's easy to rogue out, though. I'm thinking of letting it go crazy up under the birches where the grass keeps getting ahead of me.


I have quite a few sedum, including a few with dark foliage. This is 'Voodoo', a particularly neat one. Others include 'Purple Emporer' and 'Vera Jameson'.


A little segue now to dark flower colours. I have numerous deep-wine daylilies, including 'Wayside King Royale', 'Ed Murray', and a host of others that are...ummmm...currently unnamed because I've lost their labels. But this beauty is 'Malaysian Monarch', a real star in my books.

And because I never get tired of them...my favourite annual poppies, the deep wine ones that rejoice throughout the front garden.

There's a really good sized 'Diabolo' ninebark in this lower garden, and not far from it is 'Black Lace' sambucus, which is doing very nicely despite the tendancy of that garden to run slightly amok. There are numerous giant perennials in it, including Macleaya (plume poppy), aconitum, 'Herbstsonne' rudbeckia, and a host of globe thistles that reach for the sky. So things sometimes feel a wee bit overwhelmed.

In the left background you can see Ami's giant hollyhock going for the sky. The foreground has another of my actaeas, this one 'Black Negligee'. The 'Raspberry Wine' monarda has deeper red-wine flowers than my camera would have you believe, and handsome dark bracts too.



I really like lychnis, although some of these are much shorter than I'd like. This goes by the delightful name of 'Molten Lava.' I've decided I'll have to relocate it and plant it beside the two plants in the following photos. Why is that?


Well...'Molten Lava' triggers a memory in my head of "molten hot lava bomb." And so it belongs with this phlox....


...and this geum. Those of you who know me and my sense of humour will get this perfectly. For the rest...I'll explain at the end of August.