My friend Marcia brought back an image of a violet waterlily from her trek to Longwood Gardens last week. It was striking, so I had to fool around with it a little bit.
Click image for larger view.
Violet waterlily
Category: Water garden
Pictures and accounts of my water garden.
Marcia’s garden revisited
One of my first posts (Aug. 2005) was about the garden of my friend and coworker Marcia. She needed some environmental portraits shot for a feature about her on another website, so I stopped by for a quick visit a week ago. I couldn’t help but wander around and shoot some more pix after the portraits were done.
While some trees have been removed to let in some light and many small details have changed, the bones are mostly the same. From this angle (above, from a second-story window), it’s a well-designed flower garden with a vegetable garden in back separated by a fence. The new bed on the right was inspired by an article in a recent issue of Garden Design about a Charleston, S.C., garden (see “Southern Classic,” May 2008, image on page 39) that features a lawn area ‘pinched’ by beds at the far end to create some separation between different areas.
From the opposite angle (above), you can see the second face of Marcia’s layout: A functional veggie garden with some funky ornamentation.
This small water garden also provides some separation between the flowers and the food. You need to walk around it to get to the entrance arch.
This column provides a focus in the round bed in the center of the veggie garden, as well as being the anchoring lighthouse at the far end the garden’s axis.
One thing Marcia and I share it the love of the blue bottles …
…and funky ornamentation. (I’m thinking Les Quatres Vents only smaller.)
A closer view of the left border from above.
This nearly black iris came from a small iris farm nearby that went out of business last year. The rhizomes were free for the digging, but not labeled. (I got several buckets too.) Adds to the surprises in the garden this spring, waiting to see what the new irises are going to look like when they bloom.
I don’t know the name of this iris. But it seems like it’s everywhere. I’ve got some that are identical or very similar that came with the last house that I lived in.
Rhodie flowers starting to pop.
Our new pond
Monday afternoon I broke through some brush at the edge of the yard to cut some cattails for a floral design class one of our grad students was teaching. Lo and behold, I discovered the pond that El and I talked about putting in when we first moved here.
I knew the beavers were busy this summer. I could hear them at night plowing through the cattails back to the safety of water when I’d take the dogs out at night. But I had no idea how busy they were.
Their damn is probably 100 feet long and 4 or 5 feet tall at its highest point. It collects water from the small stream that runs behind our yard and the springs that also pop up in the area in and around the pond. There is a small lodge in the center.
From what I recall of beaver biology from my youth (hey, no snickers — I grew up near a small lake that had several beaver lodges), after a year of so, the young get kicked out of established lodges to go build their own. There are beavers in several areas of the wetland along the main creek. Guess it was getting crowded, so they moved up into our little branch.
I am planning to put some hardware cloth around the trunk of the willow tree down by the stream.  Beaver like willows, poplars and other species that colonize the flooded areas they create.
Water garden, Sunday morning
The water garden sucks this year. Major bubbles in the liner. Edging stones crashing into the depths. Herons got my best foot-long koi. The cannas rotted. But if you catch it at the right time of the day — and Sunday morning was magical — it doesn’t look too shabby.
Nor do the grasses. (More on that later.)
Name that flower
Here’s a blossom that I saw for the first time last night. Any guesses? If I was GardenRant, I’d have swag to give away to the first person with the right ID. But then I’d also have to be sure that I knew the genus/species/cultivar. This one I only know to genus.
It’s a little smaller than a golf ball, and I had to bend it up to shoot it. (The face naturally points straight down to the ground. If you’re stumped and want a huge hint, you can see the whole plant here.
Wikipedia has a great profile of the genus.