Hot day, in the garden with a beer.

Happy Memorial Day weekend to all. This is my neighbor's beautiful Japanese maple I "borrow" for my garden. So lucky to have it.

Visiting an "old friend"

This is a garden I planted a couple years ago. It is always nice when I happen across a former project and it looks this happy. The request was for a naturalistic garden with a lot of low maintenance and native plants.
And what a perfect spring day.

Today's work

This is the garden we built today. It was a typical urban pit, the neglected yard of a 6-flat. Now we have a woodland with a "stream" and a "pond."

Crazy viburnum!

Check out my doublefile viburnum (v. plicatum var. tomentosum). Always gorgeous but this year...wow. My dad's ashes are under this tree. Not much of a gardener in this life, but apparently he's got a flair in the next one.

Mulched!

So...mulch yesterday! I encourage all the peoples of the earth to mulch. Mulch with shredded hardwood bark (dark stuff, looks great) or forest fines, or pea gravel if you're feeling French. "Mulch" with groundcover that keeps the moisture in and sunlight (=weeds) down. Mulch!
Walking around my own garden, I have to say I'm starting to get excited. Here are some beautiful, dark leafed sambucus nigra 'Eva.' Here are my favorite salvia, 'Caradonna,' just really getting started. Here is the side of my house with alliums, giant white ones, about to pop. And the last shot is several lavender 'Hidcote,' which,
normally, I treat as an annual. Don't usually bother with it here, people. It's not that it doesn't overwinter. It's not that you can't amend the soil so it's not so heavy. It's that some things just belong somewhere else. We have nepeta. French people and Californians have lavender.
But see these? Left over from a job, had a rare bare spot, and I was having a party, so I stuck 'em in for color. And look at them. They will be gorgeous. And here's why; easy winter, and right here, between foundation and path, there's 4" of compost and the rest is limestone gravel. Gravel. Grow your lavender in gravel, treat it badly, expect nothing, and it will come back. Like a real Frenchman.
I think I will go back outside and curse at it.