This really made me smile, it was wonderful. If nothing else, I don't feel quite as inadequate when the cast-iron, drought-resistant what's its name shriveled up and died two weeks after its arrival, ditto the lavender and half a dozen other victims. And darn it, I did everything right and they couldn't have cared less. Oh well, reason for one more trip to the nursery, my home away from home.

Thanks for the great posting. It's gardening life as it is, not the stuff our dreams are made of.

Ingrid

My face is aching from the big grin that started at the top of your post and lasted down through the bottom. Yes, I know exactly what you mean!

Rosefolly

My niece was planning her new back yard. She was advised by a "landscape professional" that she should plant no more than seven different varieties of plants. When I suggested that a little more variety might be nice, she hissed "you probably have a HUNDRED different plants! I don't want a garden like yours!!!" Well, I have sixty different roses, which is really not much - I went home and counted, and found at least 250 different plants in my back yard before I got distracted, having found a place where I could tuck in another new plant or two. I'm a specimen gardener, and I'm proud of it! Although I really think of myself as "a gardener's gardener" - someone who is interested in plants, not landscape effect.

My niece's back yard looked very nice, even though there was nothing there that interested me. She can hardly stand being in my back yard - it just feels like a place that clamors for work. To each his own.
Anita

"I have a garden, it's crammed with plants, and - no - I don't have a garden, I don't bother with landscaping."

Then what is it? Well, a private arboretum describes what we have.

Joe, I think you've got it.
I took a little walk through this new park in town. The city spent a bunch of money on it.
There they were, the seven plants times 100, all tucked into their perfect bark mulch beds with the swell brick paths leading to the picnic tables.
The hybrid tea rose which came up every year with no care from anyone had been taken away.
Somebody's got to hold up the planet. You take those people who stuff those wild grasses into pots. The grass is supposed to undulate and sway on the prairie for miles. It is not supposed to droop out of a pot.
Over at Walmart they've crammed stiff chunks of tall grass in stiff rows surrounded by you guessed it, gravel. It recalled the abandoned city lots of my youth.
Seriously, I must reform. It takes two days a week to water all the stuff around here. I even own a copy of deadly nightshade.
It wasn't my fault. It just came up on its own. It's swashbuckling if babysat-BUT......
Ingrid, this old lady taught me to mulch the lavendar in the fall to get it through the winter. However, you don't have any winter. It might be the same problem, though. Dry air and wind.

Now I know the name of my affliction--Specimen Gardener, LOL! As diseases go, it is quite tolerable--even enjoyable most of the time.

I try to do a landsacape, but it turns into a specimen garden every time. I like it much better that way - don't think I could live with just a few types of plants.

Yup, me too. Once upon a time, I tried hard to re-do my perennial bed following the landscaper's rules of grouping & repetition - it just didn't work for me. I just couldn't stop plopping in the latest plant from the garden center (and of course, I only ever buy ONE because I need to see if it makes it through the winter before I invest more)...and somehow, there's always a new plant to try instead of going back for more of what I've already got.

As to roses and those Austin recommended "groups of three" and beds of all one type - well, I'm an unabashed rose specimen gardener and proud to be one. :-)

Thanks for the chuckles, Kaylah.

Gertrude Jekyll chided us to be "selectors, not collectors."

What does she know?

Good luck with that Aruncus (your False Spirea). We use it for roadside plantings here... Stands up to -25F winds, snaow plows, 100F heat. It's your plant-for-life. Don't anger it, or you'll be sorry.

Isn't Aruncus goats beard? Here's a picture of the monster bush. Mine has been chopped down to four sticks to start over.
The flowers stink. People walk up, stick their nose in one and say Pewwwww!
I remembered the latin name-Sorbaria.
By the way, I've been meaning to post a picture of Hallie's rose. Your description of Hallie's rose is kinda different from mine-pink cabbage rose, ten foot tall. So I wondered if somebody else gave you a rose that year and you got confused.

Here is a link that might be useful: sorbaria

Yep, kaylah, you are right. My post referred to goatsbeard, yours is false spirea. Both plants look similar and spread in a rampant way. But it's the flase spriea that lines the highways here.

It was Wendy of South Dakota who sent me that rose I posted in June. I never got a cabbage rose that I recall. But I do have the eglanteria. I razed it with the chainsaw again. It was over eight feet tall. Now it's three inches.

Confusion is my natural state. Life's an adventure when you're perpetually flummoxed.

What?

Brag, brag, brag. Three years to get my eglanteria to 8 feet here. Two weeks there.
I'm fine.
My children are over there running around. Went to the zoo, Mall of America. They said there was a terrible rainstorm last night. Everybody who sees that funny green line that starts right at the Minnesota border thinks you guys are pulling something.
Here's what's going on here. It's not nice.

Here is a link that might be useful: smoke dump revisited

The rain was welcome here -- got an inch -- but just to the north were straight-line winds (85 mph) and golfball-sized hail. All this was over a large area.

What are you guys burning over there? False Spirea? There was so much smoke, the westerlies it blew all the way here. It was hazy for a couple of days. Nice, orange sunsets, thank you.

An inch of rain? A flaming inch? You could not of had a half inch?
We are not burning anything. The Feds are taking care of it on the cheap side.
That is them, and those.

I know there are folks who have gardens that look like highly regimented military troops -- everything equally spaced, equally sized, color coordinated, growing at the same rate and at the same time. The gardens wear uniforms, lol. The only variation is from year to year -- whether to plant pink begonias or red begonias equally spaced between the matched sets of hostas. :-)

There's nothing like plant chaos to show you the possibilities.

Different strokes for different folks. I understand that some people can be visually over-stimulated, and require more organization from the placement of plants so that they can process the visual input without overloading their visual cortex.

Not me. I'm a "specimen gardner", which is shorthand for "experimental, likes variety". :-)

Ok, that's a bit too hard on the other half; there is a place for predictability. And, once in a while someone does something really imaginative, even if it's a little too perfectly orchestrated. It's much harder to do organized with flair than it is to do chaos and hope for the best. Around here, the organized gardens (I don't know if they can be called "gardens") tend to be very boring.

But the soldier gardens that are well done -- something you don't see a lot of -- are truly a sight to behold and very inspiring.

I love that line! "...there is nothing like chaos to point you to possibilities!!"

It is going on my list of cool quotes.

I've seen a soldier garden. It is about to come down. At a local trailer court in town, somebody planted a row of fir trees behind each row of trailers back in the 60's. They are quite large and lovely now. They are in front of the majestic canyon view now.
Yellowstone Club bought up the trailer court, booted out the tenants. They got paid three-fourths of the commercial value of their trailers or less. The alternative was nothing. There was almost nowhere for these trailers to go.
These doggone trees are in the way of the mansions and the view.
There are so many of these rows of trees that when they go, I suspect it will change the climate of the town.
My favorite soldier garden is a wheat field. "How I love to listen to the wind in the wheat."
Like the little Prince, I've got a little rose in a pot, Madame Isaac Perriere. I never liked the color in the picture, but she came very well recommended. So I got one. She is the lady of roses, I think.
She sits on the porch, looking at the ash-leaf spirea sticks, wondering.
My ten hydrangeas which are supposed to live through the winter and bloom on old and new wood which are an Endless Summer clone for three bucks apiece (David or Donald Wyman, I think they're called) are coming in the mail today. They are going to be a border along the path which runs by the front of the house after I get it fixed up with my fossil stones.
What I'd love is Austrian Copper to make the purple, and white hydrangeas pop but it would never bloom at the same time.
I I am pretty sure they will be purple because the PH of my soil is neutral.
I hope I can get it done before I get sick from the smoke. Takes about two weeks to get sick from the smoke.
The smoke is not as bad as it can get. You cannot see the mountains at all, but the streetlights are not coming on in the middle of the day.
The Forest Service is in desperate straits. The local editor pointed out that they cut this year's budget to pay for last year's fires. Last year, fires consumed 45% of their budget.
They end up letting it burn until somebody in D.C. is convinced that no rain is coming. Some fires are being "Event-managed." That means rain.
If you have a big pickup and nothing to do, you can get $25 per hour, plus mileage, plus a rental fee for your truck ferrying supplies to the Wicked Creek firefighters.
If you have fire-fighting experience and can prove it, you can get $50 per hour.
Yeah, the possibilities of chaos. I like the ring of that, too.

Kaylah,
What a great post! And Cactus Joe, I agree with you. At some point you have to admit to yourself that you are not doing this thing as a public service, to beautify the world. I am doing it because plants are entertaining in a way no electronic toy or inanimate object can ever be. They are like little magical bundles - similar to fireworks, which I also can never get enough of. You put them in the ground (or in the case of fireworks, light them), apply some magical potions, chant a few incantations, and WOW!!! They do a beautiful and totally mystifying magical trick. What living things are capable of utterly transcends our ability to understand. We can only kind of grasp at that power and tweak and manipulate. But we can never create it. It is a fundamental, elemental energy that we can play with.

I've tried - as I'm sure many of us have - many strategies to justify this obsession. My latest (due to a recent expansion of cultivable land) is to actually create palettes and scenes that please the non-gardener type. Only using plants I like, rather than "landscaping" plants. So, instead of having 75 different tomato varieties because each one has interesting characteristics, I am trying to restrain myself and plant for production - to please others. This reduction in tomato diversity is offset by increased species diversity. I need a smashing flowering plant for late summer - how about dinner plate hibiscus? Those impress people. Instead of buying one exemplar of each type, which is how I used to garden, I will (try to) stick to a limited palette that will mesh with the overall "landscape" design I'm trying to implement. Let's face it, having every plant you want would mean having every plant. But once you reach a certain critical point, you have more than enough plant material to create pleasing landscaping patterns, with a little careful editing. At least, that's what I'm trying to tell myself these days...

Robin, you have put your finger on it. What's my husband's favorite? Marigolds.
Available plant material-I'm guessing five hundred, all stuck somewhere they shouldn't be messing.
Not one marigold, though I used to grow a lot of them.
Why don't I get rid of the galloping ash leaf spirea, so messy and meddling?
Because the children are fond of it. It is the family bush from hell. Sometimes it got so rampant one had to crawl under there to get in the house.
The hydrangeas came today. They arrived in fine shape. I took them out of the box and gave them a drink of water.
Half an hour later, they had gone limp.
I rushed them to hospital, soaking in cold water, then planting them in a wheelbarrow.
Some have started to come out of it while others are completely fried.
Is it the lack of humidity?
They were bare root and covered in that stuff which I think is supposed to retain water.
They are very nice little plants, but they sure hate Montana.

'Endless Summer' is really a water plant. You must keep the soil so moist, it's almost wet. Direct, hot sun wilts it, too. Mine refuses to turn that lavender color despite the soil treatments I give it. So it's 'Endless "Pink' Summer.'

I also understand you must coddle it for three years before it takes off. Mine dies to the ground every year, its third one in the garden.

Get yours to a shady spot, prontissima!

I should have had a clue when I noticed the nursery people had theirs in a tent.
I believe they need refrigeration. You know how you buy a hybrid tea at the store, get it out of the fridge, and it won't take in water?
Then the neck goes limp.
The spot I have is sunny until about 11 AM. This is the most bonehead stunt I have ever pulled.
It is exactly like taking a parenting class where you have to pack around an egg and pretend it is a baby.
Three of my hydrangeas look like cooked spinach.
By the way Wyman is a lilac. This hydrangea is named David Ramsey, named before Endless Summer. It is unpatented and supposedly has the same DNA.
Now my summer is truly going to be Endless.
Well, Class, what have we learned here?
1. Try planting for others. Do those clashy marigolds hurt a thing? No.
2. A Specimen Garden is nobody's business but your own.
3. Do not buy those hydrangeas unless you live in the Pacific Northwest.
4. Never plant an Ash leaf Spirea which needs shade on the front of your house.
5. Male hollies must only visit their wives once a year.
We had a case of Event Management last night. Air's cleaned up, nice and cool. The EM(rain) is headed for Minnesota now.

"Event Management" = we don't do anything to make it better. That phrase probably has a wide range of applications.

Here is the tragic consequence of the hot, dry weather in Montana:

Here is a link that might be useful: tragedy

I think the term we are searching here on gardens that are more or less just one flavor is homogenous. In suburban Walla Walla, WA where I was last weekend virtually everyone suffers from it. I should say there were some stunning landscapes out there. Really take your breath away. But those I really gravitated towards were the ones that had lots of pots with tons of color. I know in my yard it is one plant at a time until I get a feel for it. Then I can buy tons more.

If that's bad then so be it. I have heard no complaints from my cats, the birds, racoons or frogs that occasionally make their home there.

Kate

For 24 hours I have puzzled over these hydrangeas. They came out of the box looking fresh and lovely. This morning I had some of them fluffed up but tonight they are hanging over again. They are in a wheelbarrow full of soaking wet mud in the shade.
I cannot understand why they did not wilt in the box, except for one thing: it was dark in the box. Does one need to grow these things in the dark, like a mushroom?
We had more EM this afternoon but the effect was worse than nothing. A lovely cool wind is taking this storm over to Minneapolis. We got a sprinkle. It is predicted to drop 1-2 inches on John's house.(Lake effect.)
The lovely cool wind is driving the fires. At the west end of the valley is a big mushroom cloud and at the east end it is billowing up out of the Trail Creek area. That is a new one.
Mike, all of the rivers are closed because the fish are dying from the drought, I think.
It was 100 degrees every day in July and hit 105 a couple of times. Maybe one rain. The rains caused the fires, with lightning strikes.
We broke the old record every day. Some of the previous records were set during the Dust Bowl era. The Weather Channel is posting these records every day under Severe Weather Alert.
I got quite interested, reading up on 1936 in the US.
Most of my life, it was a big deal if it hit 90, occurring maybe 1-3 days each summer.
There are many weather signs that maybe things are about to change. Not much snow last winter, but a nice wet spring. Most of the Canadian honkers have disappeared, which means the jet stream has shifted. We never had them until the last 15 years. People went to the Dakotas to hunt them.
Kate, homogenous thinking does drive most people, except for their own peculiarities. That's why there's a bagpipe player in our neighborhood who thinks he's John Wayne.
I am going to go apply some more EM to them hydrangeas, but I think it's a lost cause. I need a vote. Chop em?

Montana makes the news here. CBS had a report on the drought and the effect it was having on the fires. NPR had a segment on the effect it was having on the rafting and fishing business.

Don't toss the hydrangeas (even the name has 'water' in it) .Just put them in a shady, cool place if you can find one. I place near a hose.

Need more geese? PLEASE take ours. They're everywhere here. Dopes feed them in the park, then motorists run them over when they try to cross I-94. There are so many in Rochester's lake, it never freezes in the winter.

Rain clouds hover tonight. For once it is cool. I hope we get the rain.

Here is a link that might be useful: Drought in MT.