April 25, 2008

From the Producer: 4/25/08

This weekend, it’s time to prune asters and other fall bloomers, and tidy up the iris and first daylilies by removing spent flower scapes. Here are exuberant asters in the front room bed. Left unpruned, in a few months they’ll just splay. I take off about 3″ every month before July.

I’ll also deadhead the roses and fertilize them again. Here’s Iceberg against Gulf penstemon in the den bed.

Here’s Buff Beauty on the cat cove arbor.

New Dawn climbs the other side of the cat cove arbor. I couldn’t decide which fragrant pastel I liked most, so Greg suggested I plant one on each side!

They’re really in too much shade, but that situation is changing. For one thing, I’m budgeting for the old cottonwood against the shed to leave us next year. Its bottom trunk is huge, but its top is ever smaller as it drops elderly branches. In one way, it will be sad, since it will be the last to go from what came with the yard.

In addition, with the recent creek project, all the trash trees and ligustrums are razed (at least for the moment). The back fence bed is getting a lot more sun, and we’ve temporarily lost our sense of enclosure, as we watch the bulldozers beyond the Lady Banks in the cat cove.

Here’s another fragrance sensation: the patio star jasmine with rose Marie Pavie.

Here they are wide. The jasmine’s shrub form was happenstance. It just so happened that my trellis was too short, so I wound branches around each other and pruned. These flowers follow spring bulbs. Daylilies and Eupatorium greggii take over after that, with turks cap as their background against the patio. In fall, lycoris and oxblood lilies join it, along with Marie’s second or (third) outburst. The new cove jasmine on its trellis is 4′ to the right to form the cove entrance. When it finishes blooming, I’ll tip it here and there to encourage branching into its shrub form.

Re-bloomer Marie Pavie is a compact fragrant sensation from spring through fall and is happy with its few hours of morning and late afternoon sun.

On this week’s show, we visit Sue Nazar’s garden. I met her on the

In-studio, Deena Berg from Bastrop Gardens (celebrating their 10th anniversary!) pulls together designs for hot weather groups. Also, I asked her to explain how to plant once it gets hot, since every gardener finds a new gap to fill after spring’s orgy. She includes plumbago, one of my favorites in hot sun and in partial shade, like this one under the Chinese pistache in back.

It’s not as robust as the ones in front sun, but it blooms reliably, joining the shrimp plants that join it to encircle that bed.

Finally, here’s a shot of the front porch bed. Nandina-ville almost extended to the purple heart on the left next to the edging. It’ll be another season or two before everything fills in. On the far right is the dead cenizo, now replaced with a variegated Miscanthus.

Crepe tour next week for sure! Until then, Linda

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