Monday, May 10, 2010

Best Combos in the Garden...This Week

I love browsing through garden centers and seed catalogs. Plants I like end up in my shopping cart with little or no thought to where they will go in the garden. I buy a particular plant because I like it and hence, must have it.

New arrivals get stuck in the ground where I believe they are most likely to survive. Color or texture or other design elements never enter the picture. Beautiful combinations are entirely accidental. Here are some of my favorite combos from this weekend.
In the picture above, Small's Penstemon 'Violet Dusk' and Valerian 'Anthos' rise above day lilies, mums, begonias and dianthus. The grass in the background is Miscanthus 'Strictus'.
Yellow and orange California Poppies bloom with Painted Daisies, purple spikes of Larkspur, and in the background, pink Catchfly (Silene). The bronze fennel is hard to beat as a foliage plant. You can barely see the butterfly weeds about to bloom behind the larkspur. Most of the tall foliage comes from several varieties of butterfly bush.
The Catchfly and bronze fennel turn up again in this photo. The peony ('Karl Rosenfield') just gets more beautiful every year even when wind and rain take their toll. The daisies and day lilies in the foreground take over later in the summer.

Finally, Valerian (aka Centranthus ruber) blooms with Miscanthus in the background. I grew the grasses from seed (easily done) and use them as a hedge along the street. The Valerian was planted last year and appears to have settled in nicely.

More to come. Thanks for following along!

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