May-June 2026

 

A picture of our new fence, installed last fall.

Greetings! It's been an entire year since I've posted here, but I thought I'd share some photos and updates of what's been going on with me and in my gardens.

I was pretty busy last fall and winter, as my brother and I moved my mom from her home of 60 years three hours away, to an apartment near me. This was a major logistical challenge, and this spring we cleared out her house and listed it for sale.

But I was ready to get back to my gardens by May of this year. Also, I had been hoping for many years to have an open garden, and last summer I determined that early June this year would finally be the time. I'd had a few small groups visit before, but I'd never announced my garden being open to the general public before.

The pressure was definitely on to get my gardens shipshape, although the weather this spring wasn't ideal: April was cold and rainy, so I did hardly any garden work, and then the summer blow-dryer was suddenly switched on at the end of April, with no rain and hot winds for almost six weeks. But we still managed to do some necessary projects and improvements:

Our New Picket Fence

Last fall we finally bit the bullet and replaced our rotting wood fence with a vinyl fence. One of the things I've really loved about this house since we bought it (in 2008, more than 18 years ago) was the white picket fence surrounding it. But it was totally rotten within a few years, so we replaced it in 2011 with a cedar picket fence, which every 2-3 years our family has spent a day or two laboriously painting. But still it too rotted: the pickets were breaking off when I touched them and even the posts were rotting out of the ground. Grr. I considered steel and aluminum fences, but they don't make flat pickets in those materials (at least here in the US), and composite still isn't very good according to reviews. So vinyl it had to be. 

The new fence looks a lot better than the rotting previous fence, and the better vinyl fences have improved quite a bit in the past decades, so maybe it will look good for a while. And we'll never have to paint it again!

But the fence installers displaced many of the paving stones inside the fence when removing the old posts, and my gardens were a wreck this spring:

The Paradise Garden looked pretty ragged on May 1 of this year. Most of the paving stones and steel edging along the left side were displaced by the new fence and needed to be re-laid. My 20-year-old son very kindly helped me fix things. 

New Paver Paths

Another bigger project was adding pavers between my Herb Garden and my east patio beds. I removed the sod with a shovel and leveled the area, and my son laid the pavers over gravel and sand.

My son is getting pretty good at doing this....

This is the new "Superhighway" to my Herb Garden. My son also dug out two of the boxwoods to make a new, second entrance into the Herb Garden closer to our house. (It used to have just one entrance at the far end at right.) I hope this new sidewalk will keep grass from invading the flower beds around the patio.

Here it is from the opposite angle. We also leveled up and laid pavers between the Herb Garden and this side of the flower beds around the patio. There used to be a strip of lawn and more fence between them, and grass and weeds constantly invaded that bed, growing under the fence. (The fence used to entirely enclose this area, with a gate at the sidewalk at left, and another gate in the distance near the corner of our house. But we liked the open, un-fenced view on this side of our house, and I also wanted to connect the Herb Garden with the patio and pergola--plus keep out the grass.)

A view from the patio under the pergola. This view is why we didn't want to re-install the fence here. Clematis 'Princess Diana' is covered with beautiful hot pink, bell-shaped blooms every June.

Our son, an engineering student, is moving out this fall to live closer to college, and I will definitely miss both him and his help with projects like these....

A Few Photos

I held our open garden on June 6, and I was happy that around 50 people visited, plus I raised a small amount in donations for a local garden charity I volunteer with. Despite our mini-drought and blow-dryer winds (I was watering newly-planted annuals in the ground twice a day!), I think my gardens have never looked more orderly and flower-filled. Here are a few pictures from May and June:

Looking across the new picket fence and our small lawn, to the Paradise Garden. I thought this clematis ('Jackmanii' I think) was dead last year, but it has bloomed beautifully for nearly two months.

My roses were attacked by spider mites a couple of weeks before my open garden, which sent me into a panic. Apparently that's caused by hot dry weather stressing the roses. So I sprayed insecticidal soap and sprayed them off with the hose every other day, and they mostly recovered by opening day.

I allow the bachelor buttons to seed everywhere, and they always fill in any spots I need early-summer color.  

Now in June, the lilies are blooming in the Paradise Garden, and the tall snapdragons are making a show. The lilies smell lovely.

A patriotic display for our semiquincentennial 250th anniversary of The United States of America. A solar light with red, white & blue stars illuminates at night, which is surprisingly pretty.

We bought a new ornamental rock for the West Island,
and placed it in front of a sumac tree (rhus glabra) cultivar we planted
a couple of years ago. The edge of the rock echoes the shape of the trunk.

A closeup of the rock shows the interesting silvery places in the orangey-pink
rock. I'm not sure what kind of rock this is, possibly feldspar with mica.
But the silver glitters in the sunlight and it's really pretty.

The east patio is surrounded by mostly tropical plants, many of them potted houseplants that overwinter in my sunroom or in my basement under lights. The patio is a very nice shaded place in summer.

The day after our garden tour, it finally started raining again after our mini-drought. We then got probably around eight inches of rain over the next two weeks. It was strangely cool too, for June, and I didn't need to water anything at all for almost three weeks. Plants and lawns look green and lush again. :-)

A green and verdant land...

New Camera

Finally, I've begun learning how to use the better digital camera, a Sony Nex-6 with Sony 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6, that my father gave me a decade ago before he passed away. I was always too intimidated and too busy to learn how to use it before, and I just used my pocket camera, a Canon Powershot, for all my personal, garden, and research photos. (I don't have a smartphone, so I always keep my Powershot in my purse.)

I'm now taking a Udemy online professional photography course, and have been taking photos using both manual settings and the camera's autoshoot programs, using a tripod, and figuring things out. This will be a yearslong process--just like learning how to garden.

Potted mint with a small ornament I kept from my mother's garden

A wild turkey wandered into our back yard, and I captured it with my zoom lens communing with my metal crane statues through the window, while seated at my desk. I bought these cranes last fall when I was writing a paper about the use of bronze crane sculptures in prewar gardens of Japan, which will be published by the Journal of the North American Japanese Garden Association at the end of this year.

Getting down on the ground gets harder each year, but it can make better photos....

I hope your own gardens are looking lush, green, and flower-filled, and that your photos can capture just how lovely they are. Thanks for reading!  -Beth

April -- May

 

Greetings! Another springtime in Iowa, and there have been many beautiful blooming flowers in my gardens.

First, I've been making a few changes to my gardens:

RIP Rainbow Border:

The biggest change has been my continued work to eliminate my largest perennial border, which I originally named the Rainbow Border. I first started that border in 2013, and here's what it looked like in 2014:

It was nice for a few years, but I think being so close to the red cedar trees behind it made some plants--especially the orien-pet hybrid lilies--not grow well there. And then runner grass kept creeping in, and eventually it just became too much work to keep up.

I tried to rejuvenate it in 2019, and it looked better in 2020:

But I finally gave up and began removing plants from it in fall of 2023. I thought I had taken out most of them, but in spring 2024 after everything came up, I was shocked that the border still looked completely full. :-)

So I vowed to remove the rest of plants last fall, but then I had some shoulder issues and could hardly do any work at that point. I've finally been busy this spring trying to dig out as many as possible, and I've made a lot of progress.

I moved many of the plants to the bed under our old windmill:

This doesn't look like much yet, but I'm hoping the plants and bulbs will survive and look nice next spring.

We'll seed the Rainbow Border area with grass this fall, and if anything else comes up next spring, I can move it then.

Tree Peonies

Another change has been to eliminate part of a bed that used to have my collection of tree and intersectional Itoh peonies.

This area, which I call the North Island, was very difficult to keep weeded, and my husband had to spray it constantly.

In fall 2023, I moved the tree peonies onto the West Terrace, closer to my house:

The peonies bloomed beautifully in April and early May in their new home on my West Terrace, and this area is much easier to maintain.

Here's the other end of the West Terrace.

We tilled and seeded grass in the back part of the North Island this spring, and it's coming in nicely.

I also got rid of one of our oldest garden beds, which I called the Mint Circle. It existed when we bought our property, and because I planted mint there when we first moved here, which was impossible to get rid of, that's how the bed got its name (it smelled pretty nice and was useful too though, so I don't really mind the mint). I usually planted annual flowers in it, but it was never very great, so we dug out the edging pavers, tilled it, and seeded it this spring:

The Mint Circle will soon be just another part of our lawn--although I wouldn't be surprised if the mint continues to grow there even after I mow it regularly.

At the last minute, I did dig out some of the mint and put it in a large pot on our patio, so we could enjoy mint juleps, etc. 

Pretty Spring Flowers

Enough with the work photos. Here are a few pretty spring flowers blooming:

Early irises in the Paradise Garden.

We had to hack back the 'Bloomerang' reblooming lilac in the Paradise Garden in order to get by on the paths, but it was still beautiful and fragrant.

A flowering cherry and a magnolia looked pretty nice this spring in the west side yard.

As did this eastern redbud, which I thought had completely died a few years ago.
Luckily, I was too lazy to getting around to cutting it down right away, and it regrew again. 

These tulips are leftover from some I planted a few years ago--it's nice when some tulips come back for a few years!

Anyway, that's what's been happening here in my gardens this springtime: downsizing a few areas, and enjoying the others.

I hope your own gardens are wonderfully enjoyable this spring too. Thanks so much for reading! -Beth

Autumn

 

Greetings! I thought I should post at least once more before the end of the gardening season, now that Autumn is upon us.

It's been a pretty nice autumn. Our first frost is usually around October 15th, and sure enough, this year's first frost happened the night of October 16th, and we've had a few more since then. But they've all been light frosts, so some flowers have persisted in continuing to bloom.

Like the nasturtium ("nasty urchins") in the above photo in my Paradise Garden. It's a variegated type, Burpee's 'Alaska Mix' I think. It took forever to grow and flower--I planted the seeds outside in the soil (to the right of the bench) in mid-May, and even by September they hadn't amounted to much. I was quite surprised to see how beautifully they had filled in and continued to flower when I took this photo in the first week of November. I think I will try to start them inside next year.

Here's some pictures from early September:

The Paradise Garden still looked great in early September, with self-seeded flowering tobacco and vining fragrant petunias, and red dahlias in full flower, together with some roses.

My favorite 'Jaipur' dahlias, which I divide and have more of every year because they look great and don't need to be staked.

A closeup of pale white/pinkish snapdragons (did you know some of the white ones are fragrant?), along with some truly fragrant tuberoses, which gave the entire garden a heady scent.

Sweet Autumn clematis, tobacco, and roses. All deliciously scented in the warm sunlight.

Here's the other side of the fence, with the Sweet Autumn clematis spilling over.

Going around the side of my house, the salvias I planted on the newly replanted west terrace among the tree and intersectional peonies I moved there last fall, were looking pretty orderly (compared to the disorder reigning here last year).

The Yellow Garden behind my house was looking pretty yellow with marigolds and goldenrod (please ignore the giant grass clump--I did hoick that out after I took this picture).

Anyway, September has been and gone, along with October, and I can't believe we're already in the second half of November! Where did the year go?

An Autumnal pumpkin-mum scene

All the dahlias and cannas were dug and brought inside for winter just this last weekend (with my husband's kind help).

In early September, I contracted an annoyingly painful frozen shoulder and my left arm is still pretty useless. So I wasn't able to finish moving some plants around and eliminating some of my less-successful borders I've been working on getting rid of. I'm glad I have the entire winter to recover: with any luck, I'll be back to normal by April.

Hope you've been enjoying a few last warm golden days in your own gardens as Autumn comes to an end this year. 'Till Spring, and thanks for reading!

-Beth

Late Spring: Roses & Cornflowers

 

Hello! My gardens looked pretty nice during early June this year: we had significant rain nearly every week during May, so the lawns have looked lush and green, and the annual flowers I planted have become established.

But the main stars have been my roses, and the self-seeded cool-season annuals that have looked great this year: the snapdragons, oxeye daisies, and in particular, the numerous bachelor buttons or cornflowers that have filled in empty spots with a blue haze of lovely little flowers.

The roses have bloomed beautifully this year. I've been sprinkling All-In-One Rose & Flower Care on the soil under them four times a season since spring a year ago. They had been completely defoliated in early spring the previous couple of years, due to the rose sawfly larvae that appear in April and totally munch the leaves. I think preserving the leaves, together with the fertilizer, has made the shrubs much more vigorous and they look great this year. (It's too bad the Japanese beetles will destroy them starting next week when they arrive on schedule.)

These snapdragons seeded themselves here, and the dianthus has survived several years in this spot (the only one left of a dozen I planted about five years ago. It's just random chance that the snapdragons match the dianthus and the David Austin English Rose next to it.

You can see how the batchelor buttons have filled in and added color at a time when not too many annuals are blooming yet. I'll pull them out after they've finished flowering and seeded a bit.

This rose, 'Lovely Fairy,' has tiny hot pink flowers, and really does look lovely with another randomly matching self-seeded snapdragon, as well as the batchelor buttons and a deep purple Wave petunia in a pot.

And in the most unusual color matching incident, the batchelor buttons under the pergola are not the usual cornflower blue, but instead an inky deep blue, matching the clematis growing above them (click to enlarge). I remember that the original packet of seeds I planted more than a decade ago was a mixed-color selection, but it's almost a bit.... unsettling that so many randomly self-seeded combinations match so well....

My Paradise Garden has really outdone itself this year. This is by far the best garden area I've ever made. Sometimes I'm astounded by its beauty, and it's really pretty easy to maintain and to enjoy.

The blue batchelor buttons look beautiful with these bell-shaped 'Rooguchi' clematis too. Their friendly blue faces, like the snapdragons, are welcome anywhere in my gardens that they want to plant themselves!

The Yellow Garden behind my house looked very nice when the Bartzella peony and the yellow baptisia were blooming. The marigolds have already grown much larger than when I took this picture a couple of weeks ago. (The secret to allowing them to establish is the mulching to prevent them from drying out before they can establish--I found a new mulch supplier nearby who sells finely shredded wood and bark chips, much nicer than the free coarse wood mulch from the landfill.)

And this year, I further reduced the nearby border against the back of my house, and seeded new grass in the removed area this spring, which is filling in nicely. This area began as one large garden that swooped out in a curve, with a stepping stone path through it. It was too difficult to maintain, so I've been reducing it over the past 6-8 years. I think this will be much easier to keep tidy.

Anyway, that's what's been blooming in my gardens during early June. I'll write another post soon about several of the other parts of my garden that are looking much improved this spring: my new front deck with pot arrangements, my tropical garden, and others.

I hope you have been enjoying beautiful blooms in your own gardens this June. Thanks for reading! -Beth