Scanner art by Craig Cramer, gardening & more
Herbaceous perennials I grow.
Surfeit might be a little strong. Let’s just say there’s purple everywhere I look this time of year. Click images for larger view.
Coneflowers, of course.
In the front gardens, purple clematis amongst the goatsbeard and wild grape, and hosta flowers. (They’re not just for foliage, you know.)
Hibiscus moscheutos in the wet garden, dahlia in patio pot.
And the wetland is just loaded with Joe-Pyeweed. (I’m sure I’ll get around to my tribute to Eupatorium in the next week or so.)
Click on images (most of them, anyway) for larger view.
I had to step away from the screen at work this afternoon. I don’t do it enough, but I took a quick spin through Minns Garden — a lovely garden right outside the Plant Science building at Cornell University. I was moving faster than a stroll and paying more attention in my head to what needed doing back in the office than what was going on in the garden. I actually got three steps beyond these alliums before doing a double-take and going back for a second look.
Unfortunately, no tag. So I can’t give you a variety name. There were some other interesting alliums on the other side of the garden, too:
More midsummer highlights in Minns: Anemones. Boy I’d grow a lot of these if it weren’t for the deer.
And the potted bananas, which are getting huge. (They’ve overwintered a few winters in the greenhouse. But I’m not sure there’s room for them this year.)
OK. If you’ve read this far, you’re probably wondering about the technique on those alliums. Cut a small hole in the center of a paper plate and a slit connecting the hole with the edge. Slip it around the stem of the allium to catch the drips. Shake the can well and spray. At least that’s what this year’s garden tenders told me they did.
This is the first time that I’ve had this pink Filipendula flower. It’s been in the ground a couple of years from some pots leftover from a local plant sale. (The deer have nipped off the tops before flowering in previous years.)
It goes close to 6 feet tall. So I’m guessing that it’s Filipendula rubra ‘Venusta’, but there are others that fit this description.
It’s in ‘the wet garden’ along with monarda, eupatorium, veronicastrum, Verbena hastata, Â tradescantia and others that appreciate the constant and sometimes excessive moisture.
There has been a lot of discussion about PhotoShopping images on several other blogs. I did fiddle with these a little. But I was amazed with the differences in bloom color in these evening shots depending on the angles — backlit vs. sun over my shoulder vs. shooting perpendicular to the light. Â The differences in my raw images were even greater than I’d ever see when fiddling around with the images in PhotoShop.
More pix …
Back in May, I posted about my friend Marguerite and the business she and her partner run. (See Motherplants: Where green roofs are born.) About a month ago, I swung by a site in Ithaca where she was working with a group of volunteers to prep planting units for a living wall.
Marguerite instructed the young and old alike who turned out on a hot day to transplant sedums and other living roof plants from flats into plastic wall hanging units.
Originally, the plan was to install the planting on the roof. But the required retrofitting to beef it up enough to hold the extra weight proved too expensive. So Plan B was to locate the planting where runoff from the roof will run over the plants.
The planted units were laid flat to root thoroughly and then hung a few weeks later. (See finished wall below.)
While I like the idea of green/living roofs, I don’t see too many homeowners diving in. I like the idea of trying it out on a small scale, like these doghouses I shot at Marguerite’s place or this garden shed, birdhouse and other applications blogged by Melissa over at her Gardenshed Hall of Fame website.
For more info about green/living roots, visit the Motherplants website.
I’m actually early to the party this time. With rain headed our way, I thought it good to go ahead and do this month’s scans. Click images for larger view. Apologies for lazy nomenclature and mis-IDs.
Update [7/15/2007]: As Layanee and Carol both pointed out, there’s a big article on scanning in the latest Horticulture (which has been sitting in my huge stack of unread gardening magazines). It’s by Ken Druse, so you know it’s gotta be good. (Print’s not dead. Sign up for a free issue of Horticulture.)
Monarda, Asian lily, sedum, spiraea, lychnis, Rosa ‘Cuisse de Nymphe’, allium, daucus, stachys (the other one), Scotch thistle.
Astrantia, viola, sorbaria (about to pop), verbascum, sedum, that weed that looks like fried eggs, digitalis, Verbena bonariensis, Verbena hastata, coneflower, teasel, rock garden campanula?, wild composite (aster?).
Digitalis, Asian lily, allium, astilbe, monarda, sorbaria (popped), astrantia.
