Tuesday, May 04, 2010

How my garden grows

It's early days in the garden, but things are looking promising. The geraniums & million bells for the deck planters are looking just fine, despite having waited 2 weeks in their little nursery pots for me to plant them, and the tomato plant is doing just fine. The thyme and (partia? pratia?) I bought as groundcovers for the driveway are hanging in there too. Best of all, I still have some mazus reptans from a few years ago that came back despite the poor soil and the abuse it took over the winter. (That part of the driveway got rather trenched as we tried to maneuver cars in & out the narrow channel we'd shoveled out after all the blizzards.)

My impatiens haven't done much, but they haven't died yet, either. The ones closest to the house are so far under the eaves that they always need watering, and one of the 3 I planted between the downspout and the driveway got dug up, probably by a squirrel, and doesn't seem to want to reestablish itself, poor thing.

One of the azaleas in front took quite a brutal beating during the winter and may have to be replaced. The sad-looking bush has only a few leaves & blooms on it; for the most part, it's nothing but a great big bundle of sticks. I'd hate to lose it, but maybe I'll replace it with a forsythia, or try something new and get a camellia, which I'm told do well in our clay-ey soil and climate.

For the first time in several years, my irises actually bloomed! This morning when I left for work, there was a single yellow iris standing tall in a clump of little boxwoods, and a couple of purple ones right next to some (trillium?) of the same shade of purple. Lovely!

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