Urban Garden Hodgepodge

[guardbear]

Just posting a few pics from this past weekend of some of the garden areas. After last years terrible heat and drought I am super surprised at how well most things have come back this year. I have 6-7 plants or so that came back noticeably smaller, some with bunches of smaller leaves- Silver Bay, Thunderbolt, Earth Angel, Gypsy Rose, Black Hills, and Francee that I can remember off-hand. They are located all over the garden, got the same watering and feeding as all the others, and have the same sun exposure as in previous years. Go figure. They are all doing well however, so I'm hoping next year they will really increase in size and all those nice leaves will be bigger also.

I only moved a couple of plants this year -- deciding to let things grow in place until a portion of the last grassy area is turned into a new bed next year to spread things out in what will hopefully be permenant homes. The spacing is less than ideal in numerous places as you can see. I'd like to come up with some kind of pattern for permanent placement, but can't decide on a good way to do it. I have limited ability to visualize. Also only added a couple new ones this year and you can likely tell by their size if they show up in the pics - Great Expectations (2nd try), April Snow, Paradise Island, Golden Meadows, and Allegan Fog.

Had to post the one of Beckoning that captures its color change occurring - pretty neat how it does that.

Good gardening to all.
Linda

H. Beckoning 2013

IMG_0754comp.jpg (36.33 KiB) Viewed 737 times

[Linda P]

Beautiful compositions, guardbear. I lost Beckoning, and have been debating about whether to try it again. Yours is very nice! Mine failed to grow from the time I got it, and got smaller every year. Plants all around it grew just fine, so I think maybe it was just a dud.

[Chris_W]

That's beautiful!

We had some that shrank this year too, and like you mentioned, they could be in random areas where others did fine. I dug a few of them to see what was going on and noticed that even after all the rain we've had lately, some were bone dry down under the crowns and around the roots. Maybe some of the leaves act too much like an umbrella or something, so I'm going to try and water down around the crowns more in some spots.

Thanks for sharing your garden

[Mark Raw]

I may be wrong on this but have always wondered if there is a reason hosta leaf stems are shaped as they are, ie u or v shaped. In my idea it is to carry the rain water (as in a gutter) to the crown and central area, and on the same theory the leaf tips are usualy pointed (drip tips) so the excess rain will fall to the outer are of the roots. It's maybe just my theory.