The muhly grass is so lovely now with the morning sun behind it.
There’s no saying which species this is. It’s a native one that blazes on the sand dunes in fall, but there are 500 or so species and nobody knows them all. It is also the “sweet grass,” used to make sweetgrass baskets, which is becoming rare in the wild.
The butterfly gingers are still in flower on the right. (We’ve had a mild fall with only one non-killing frost.) Agapanthus in front. To the left is the baby Tung oil tree (Aleurites fordii) which is just beginning to lose its leaves.
We’re selling the house and I am so happy that it is going to a very enthusiastic gardener. I was unhappy at the thought of someone bulldozing all my treasures!
Nan over at GGW has started a new design topic–sigh. Containers. Rather a sore point for me because I very much admire containers that are well done, but I don’t have the design savoir-faire to pull them off myself, except occasionally by accident. However, in looking through my photos, I see many examples of much better gardeners than I am who don’t pull them off very well either.
Here is a bit of a jumble of pots at the Nathaniel Russell House Museum in Charleston. Very pretty, no doubt, when full of flowers at the end of March as here, but hardly a triumph of design.
Here, on the other hand, is the window box on my garden shed about a week ago. Small violas, which don’t need nearly as much deadheading as big pansies, complementary colors, self-watering (from Gardeners Supply Company and, much to my surprise, the self-watering feature actually works). The perfect unpretentious window box? Well, no. If you look closely, you will see that I never cleaned off the black mold that covers the white box. And the lamium has rotting dead leaves that should be picked off every time I happen by there. Pretty uncouth, really.
Here’s a vista in a Savannah town garden that I feel has pros and cons. The pro is that a formal design is undoubtedly appropriate for a small walled garden. Also, that semi-circle of dwarf mondo grass (Ophiopogon japonicus) is low-maintenance and attractive year round.
On the other hand the boxwoods that outline the whole design are a real mistake. They’ll get much too big and will need to be pruned viciously approximately every 3 minutes to keep them in bounds. I really hate that pillar, apparently pilfered from an Italian villa. And that trellis is pretty pointless until some vine grows up it.
The containers are just plain dull. That heuchera is all very well now (early April), but it will turn to mush in the heat of summer after putting out some straggly, pathetic flowers.
To be continued….
Pennisetum rubrum by the pond with the frost-bitten crinums behind. The Pennisetum clumps are much happier here than they were in pots on the patio. A dry sandbank is what they like.
This photo disguises the fact that that bank is riddled with trumpet vine, which is a right beast to remove. In fact, I don’t think you can get rid of it. I just have to weed it out every year. I have done that with the one in the middle of the fig, and it still comes up every year.
We’re having a lovely spell of warm, damp weather. Perfect for planting. Yesterday, I moved the blue agapanthus from the front bed. Amazing how much it has grown. It was a single bulb 4 years ago and now it’s a huge clump that took ages to wrestle out of the ground.
