I hope to be going back to work completely focused on Monday after the holiday weekend. I slipped into some sort of semi-coma when my truck died. It felt nice so I didn't fight it. I just want to drive the thing without thinking about it. Not quite there yet.
Rain, rain, rain and the clouds roll over the mountain after another passing thunderstorm. Regular rain makes for billowing Lush.
The Rudbeckia hirta is starting to bloom. This plant barely qualifies as a perennial. Two to three years is all you get from a plant. Good thing it is an abundant self seeder.
Other perennials are much more durable and long lived. You can't kill day lilies with dynamite, unless you take them to Florida. In Florida they drop dead.
It is important in my wildness to have a large number of stable and durable perennials that don't wander much and just get bigger with time. They provide a dependable backbone to the fluctuations of the Tall Flower Meadow. Grasses are quite stable, particularly if they don't set viable seed.
The Yucca filamentosa cultivars are good too. They are even evergreen which makes them a key player in the winter under garden. So far the liatris looks to be long lived. It sets seed and spreads which I am fine with. My one complaint is they don't always bloom every year.
When there are stable shrubs and perennials in the garden, the wanderings of the annuals and biennials like Queen Ann's Lace are much more enjoyable. You never know where they will show up and how happy they will be in a particular spot.
Put all the parts together and you get this astounding Lush full of fireworks in the short six month window of the time of vegetation. Just add water and watch out.
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5 comments:
Liatris is so pretty. It doesn't like my garden. It doesn't reseed, it doesn't always bloom as you say and it doesn't last very long. It does irk me when it disappears. The lush is gorgeous. Lots of rain here too. I am lovin it. I hope your truck doesn't need more help. It seems like when one thing goes wrong another does too. Vehicles are necessary evils.
My liatris came up last year with nary a sign of a bloom but lots of foliage. This year, 1 bloom stalk and a little foliage. I wish I knew what it took to make this stuff grow in zone 8b hot and humid.
Lisa in one bed I tend the liatris has become a pest. This year instead of a few falling out of the ground, I think I need to be ruthless and cull a lot of them. I have tried three species of lupine now and had no luck at all. I think there are still things we don't really know about plant's needs. It is a mystery why some things do great and others disappear. My little truck has 166,000 mile and this is its first major surgery. I can't complain too much. I do need to decide if it it is time to buy new.
Sallysmom is there a liatris more native to you. I would look to get seed from some of them.
As a resident of upstate NY where the woolly adelgid is just digging in, I'm curious what is replacing all the dead hemlocks. A Harvard Forestry study found that they were quickly replaced in their hemlock forest by black birches, among other native species. So please let me know what is replacing dead hemlocks in NC.
Thanks for your beautiful blog.
ES
Hi Millie. I am a little afraid to go look under the dead hemlocks to see what is happening. They are in an active state of decomposition and these are 80 to 100 foot tall trees. Where I had some of them cut down, the first and fastest trees to show up were Fire Cherry and Black Locust and those were in a thicket of 10 foot high blackberry. There is a lot of Birch, probably Black Birch, another fast grower, but there is also oak, magnolia, tulip poplar and maple. Here in NC I think the replacement of the hemlocks would be a very mixed bag highly dependent on the specific site and slope conditions.
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