Lovely as always Lynda.. Thank you for sharing.. your ahead of me by a week or two.. my geum, painted daisy and knautia macadonia are just starting to bud out.., my couple clumps of columbine (im defentily going to do a stand like yours one of these years!!!) put up some stalks and started flowering and I came back and something ate them.. we are having a very dry spring, and I think the grasshoppers seem to be feasting on stuff..

I'm impressed with your nomenclature as well, you are pronouncing Latin names spot on! I would hack those words, lol.. great job.

Silverkelt

Wow, Lynda, it's really pretty. Your 10,000 containers last year are paying off.

Were these all new gardens last year, or had you started some before that? I'm thinking if this is just their "creep" year, their "leap" year next year will give you real jungles!

Nice work.

Karen

Karen - Most of the plants there was WS last year. Every empty spot got filled in with this year's WS.

In Aug 2008 most of the garden was still lawn. I removed it that fall and prepped the soil in advance of last year's WS. This is the first year for many many things to flower. Each day is an adventure as something new blooms.

I do realize that this is creep year for about 2/3 of the plants, and sleep year for 1/3 of them. Should be nuts next year - that's when this year's 900 or so echinaceas will get creeping!

My big garden plan for next year will be hoeing the aisles clear and letting the plants fight amongst each other in the beds. Oh, and planting another 500 or so fancy columbine plants (not containers!) to scatter here and there.

Lynda

I've been trashing my columbines. The sawfly larvae stripped them several times last year, each time they tried to grow new foliage, and now they're back again. I don't want those ugly things so I'm letting the plants flower until the infestation gets bad, then I trash them.

Too bad, the flowers were pretty.

Karen

Something loves to eat my columbine,too. Today I found a beautiful tall bloom standing up from a spray of twigs. But, there were 25-30 little green catarpillars chompng away at the few patches of leaves left. They must be a larvae for a moth of some sort. But, any creature using my garden for reproduction will help to increase the diversity of wildlife I have frequenting the place.

It will be interesting to see what the sawfly larvae do here.

I don't use any insecticides, fungicides or other chemical intervention in my flower gardens. Japanese beetles do get knocked off of plants and plunked into "the bubble bath of doom" (jar of soapy water), but that's about it.

I don't even chase the voles out of my garden - it looks like we've worked out a peaceful compromise with them and now that the plants are maturing. They damage a few, but there's plenty left.

Our approach for flowers is to grow tons of plants, space closely, no mulch, well placed tending rows so all parts of the garden are in easy reach for weeding, let garden thug plants fight it out on their own, and let insect pests work out a balance with predators.

Of course, that means that some plants are just doomed to failure here. Hairy balls might be one of them. They were a great snack for hundreds of monarch caterpillars and then just tall twigs. If they were perennial I'd actually be quite content to leave them there to get savaged each year, but I do draw the line at sowing sacrificial plants every year.

I figure that since one the main purposes of the flower garden is to grow enough seed to flower up the rest of the 15 acres, if a plant species is going to cry, die, or just be a ratty looking food source for insects they are going to eventually get phased out anyway. I hope that the columbines don't go that way, but if they do I'll just enjoy them until they are history.

I do get a kick out of watching nature sort things out. But I'm also the person that's perfectly happy to let our goats make the decisions on how to landscape the rest of our land. I don't totally agree with their decision to eradicate about 5 acres of mature black raspberry plants, but they also took out the catbrier, poison ivy and multiflora rose. What's left is pretty cool, even if it isn't exactly how I might have done it.

One other thing that has turned out to be really neat about the front flower gardens - the tending paths are being used by a number of birds as grocery shopping aisles. Several sparrows, chickadees, and cardinals come by at various points during the day and walk up and down the aisles - selecting munchie bugs, seeds and greens as they go.

I wonder what will happen next out there!

Lynda