Design

We don't like to water much;  we've designed our landscapes (yikes, it's now plural) to be largely self-reliant on rainfall, but a very long spell (weeks and weeks, maybe a month or more without any rain), and pushing 90°F temperatures through the end of September has even hardy natives looking wan, not to mention those from moister sites and higher elevations. So I'm dragging the hose around, my gardening companion has gone to the mountains this weekend to water newly planted trees and shrubs in our landscape there  (he also has vegetable harvesting duties, and watering the raised beds, too).   So, we're hoping for some decent rain with the cold front that's coming in tomorrow. In the meantime, I've managed to tidy up the perennial beds, get them ready for needed renovation, change out some containers, and plant to edit the front meadow tomorrow morning (it needs it, big time). There's a group of folks coming after a Osher Lifelong Learning Gardening fo...

A tremendous thunderstorm in the North Carolina mountains last night was a surprise. It wasn't in the forecast, but the rain was welcome there. June was dry in the Piedmont and mountains, and the lush spring green is starting to look crispy around the edges. The mountains are doing better than we are in the Piedmont, however; we haven't had any rain here for about 3 weeks, with temperatures well over 90°F for some of that time. Coming down the Blue Ridge Escarpment towards home today, I was wondering how my vegetable garden had fared. Happily, the tomato and pepper seedlings in flats in the shade were fine, thanks to a friend checking on them yesterday on a 'emergency' basis, and everything was OK, although dry. The brutal drought years of the last decade (and especially the last three years) have made me wary of planting anything that's not drought-tolerant, and able to withstand hot, dry weather without visible stress. But, now even the deep-rooted meadow plan...

Sedums are one of my favorite groups of drought tolerant plants. I like to use the m in window boxes and containers, where they thrive with minimal care. They also have a tremendous diversity of habits, color, and form within the large numbers of species available, although with much cultivar diversity. I was admiring a green roof display at a mountain nursery a couple of weeks ago, and took my gardening companion back to look at some other plants (thinking that he'd enjoy the sedums, too). They were exceptionally attractive (happily, he doesn't need much encouragement) and we set about adding a small sedum garden in the dry mulched area above the bog-in-progress. We even went back the next day to get more to add, along with a few with some height. We're hoping that they'll thrive with minimal care! Our gardening assistant (perhaps I should say 'supervisor') seems to approve.

After several years of drought (quite severe), it's been a relief (a joy, really) to be able to be away for a few days without coming home to drought-stressed plants (vegetables and containers, window boxes, and hanging baskets). It's early in the growing season, to be sure, and we've got LOTS of hot weather ahead, so I'm still working with an array of drought tolerant species in my containers. But I do hope that we'll have a respite from the unrelenting drought of the last decade or so, minus a year or two!

I managed to get most of the native perennials in the ground today. A good friend and I put half of them in the pollinator border at the Garden on Friday; this afternoon, in spite of distractions, and wind, I put the rest of them in the front meadow. They're all tough, and will hopefully flourish in the hot and dry conditions there.

It's been a banner year for butterfly weed, Asclepias tuberosa . Very deep-rooted, with somewhat fleshy, tuberous roots, it's sailed through months of minimal rain and heat to produce abundant fruits and seeds. It's a widespread species across Eastern North America and the Midwest, occurring along roadsides, open areas, and in its native grassland sites.

It started with the farmer's market this morning. I wanted to check on a type of tomato that was being sold at Thursday evening's market (of course, the tomato fellow must have been at another market this morning). But a local garden club had plants for sale from a small nursery that I hadn't heard of before, so after buying some thread-leaved coreopsis (Coreopsis verticillata ), a pink-flowered form called C. rosea , lemon verbena, and dwarf thyme, I thought I'd go check out the nursery. Much to my delight, they had all sorts of things that you usually don't come across locally, so first I broke my rule about not buying big plants in small pots (because they're usually pretty pot-bound) and some of these had been subjected to less than ideal conditions (it's been so hot and dry, it's hard to keep up), and second, it's quite a subpar time to be planting perennials, in early summer with hot, dry conditions predicted. But I added a perennial foxglo...

On an excursion to one of our remaining independent nurseries yesterday looking for a pot of Bolivian begonia , which had been wonderful last summer on the porch, I didn't find any, and will just have to wait until the one I ordered as a 'summer bulb' arrives. I did find a number of other things (of course!) that I thought it would be fun to try. A large flat of Bidens in one of the greenhouses (species not given) was unusual among the normal collection of warm season annuals. Bidens is a genus in the Aster family full of tough, sometimes weedy wildflowers (common names include Tickseed, Beggar's Ticks, and Bur-Marigold), so seeing flats of something tame-looking labeled as an annual got my attention. I had run across a reference to selections of Bidens ferulifolia a couple of weeks ago, working on a drought-tolerant plant list for our zone (7b). They supposedly flowered all summer, were attractive to bees and butterflies, and were happily drought-tolerant in...

In this summer of extreme heat, and severe drought here in South Carolina, it's hard NOT to think about drought-tolerant plants. We have tried to establish a low-water use landscape, but that doesn't mean no water, especially with recently planted perennials, shrubs, and trees. We've both gotten really tired of dragging the hoses around to water these young plants that we don't want to lose, but anything planted this year needs water to survive the high temperatures, hardly any rain, and too much wind conditions that we've had. Our plants would normally thrive, after establishment, on normal rainfall, but rainfall this summer has been anything but normal, and even the toughest drought-tolerant perennials have wilted in the late afternoon sun. Trees, with their much more extensive root systems, and shrubs haven't been much affected, and certainly reflect their higher drought-tolerance. Conditions this summer have me thinking about waterwise gardening (a 'n...