Many of you know I left my beautiful garden last year to move to a new location. It has been a wonderful move with so many changes in perspective and light. The new owner of my old house (and garden) is so amazed by the cycle of bloom that she posts a daily bloom. Yep, every day she sends me (and a list of other people) pictures of what is in bloom in ‘her’ garden. I actually love that she loves the garden. Her enthusiasm is very rewarding and infectious. It constantly reminds me of things I loved in that garden and sets me on a course to find some of the things again. As the spring approaches I can’t help but plan or is it buy?
A load of good soil has been sitting at the top of my property for about two weeks. It needs to be spread around and things planted in it! A trip to Wells Medina Nursery to gather things for a job resulted in a car load of plants to come back to me. Things I loved were added to my car along with new things I didn’t have room for in my old garden. Do I have a plan? Sort of.. Kind of.. I know what and I need…. I don’t know that I can resist buying plants when I see them, love them, and know I have a place for them.
So there is the problem. Then to make matters worse, while checking the names from the tags of my new plants on the internet, I ran across a website called ‘Plant Lust‘. REALLY…. Like I need to look at that! It is a website that sources rare and unusual plants from 56 nurseries that sell via mail order. Oh GREAT! So now I have not just great nurseries in my area but the UPS driver can also visit me often.
Here are a few of my favorite things I found this weekend:
Magnolia Macrophylla. A little stick was what it was when I planted it. It looked like a stick in the winter for 3 winters. Last year it had branches and 3 blooms. Lemon scent streamed throughout the spring garden coming from the 12 inch blossoms. Amazing and worth the wait. I now have another stick.
Primula Veris ‘Sunset Shades’ – a diminutive sweet primrose that spreads into the cracks in the garden. Not the cracks in paving or pathways but the spaces between plants that need filling in. The leaves have a blue tinge to them and the orange flowers are bright to begin with and fade to a dull red that is also amazing.
Photo by Rictor Norton & David Allen via Flickr
Paeonia mlokosewitschii – Molly the Witch Peony – This has a long and crazy story in my garden. I first fell in love with this plant in England at the Harlow Carr Botanical Garden. It was a peony in a cage. It is such a beautiful peony that the visitors to the garden would always steal the seeds from the plant even before the seed pods were mature. Yes those little old ladies and gentlemen wanted it and wanted it free. A metal fence wrapped around the whole plant to keep the longest of arms from reaching it. When I got back I started on my own quest to find the plant. I then understood how hard it was to find and was ready to fly back and try to steal a seed pod of my own. But I found one a plant, planted it and it died. I found another one at a local nursery, planted it, waited for 2 years for it to bloom. When it did it was pink, not Molly the witch at all. Found another one, it died. That brings us to this year. I did not leave a Molly at my old garden but I did just get one this week end… Oh, I actually bought 3! I will try again…….
Arisarum proboscideum – Mouse tail plant. This is another plant I first saw in England. I was taking a botanical water color class and we had to go into the garden and chose a subject. I loved this little plant that looks like mouse bottoms in the air! I still do. It spreads and seems like there are hundreds of mice looking for something they lost!
Tell me of the things you love and can’t live without in your garden. Tell me your favorite web site for plant hunting. How about the things someone gave you that mean something special! Plants are more that just beautiful. They tell stories of where we have been, who we were at one time, and people we have met along the way that add to out lives in a myriad of ways.
