A Good Soaking Rain

It's a jungle out there, already. The weekend soaking rain was a boon to me and all the plants. Now I need only stand back and watch them explode.
Ooops. Looks like they already have!
The iris is over for the most part and needs a good deadheading. Not to mention thinning out. I enjoyed a great display this Spring but now I need to find a second iris bed...maybe in Dave's Memorial Garden, (DMG) where I will also transplant the zillions of volunteer phlox.

This bed is the Pond Garden for lack of a better name and it has reached a degree of maturity, which came sooner than expected.
I tucked in some small plants which have now become too big for the spot. I am not complaining, but some decisions about who stays and who goes will have to be made.

The azaleas need this space, if they are to get as big as I hope.
The hosta here are definitely on the way to DMG to join a bunch of their relatives.
Now we are talking about getting a glider or swing for that spot, proving once again that we have become our own grandparents.








Shasta Daisies and Autumn Glory Sedum are huge and vying for supremacy. Altho it is not visible, there is a struggling hydrangea underneath these two. Poor darling.
I know I can save it, if I can get underneath these two monsters.



The foxglove has me so excited! One plant has twelve spires on it and has begun to bloom. I put this biennial in last year, in a different too dry and hot location and moved it in the fall. It seems to have found the perfect spot. So I bought two more plants and hope to make this a foxglove haven. Love them! Super tall plants like the larkspur are companion plants. They reseeded all over the yard, with a little help. I just took the seed pods and sprinkled them around the place. Wherever they show up is OK with me.
The red hydrangea which turned purple last year, is about to bloom. I doubt the purple will be returning, since I no longer have goldfish poop-water to encourage it. Disgusting, but it did make it blue. I don't mind the red-pink blooms, as I am on a pink streak these days.

 Here's what it looked like last year, in June!
Swoon!

I made a count of the number of hydrangea that I have collected...10! O my. But they are so dependable and provide such a show, and have removed all the bad memories of my non blooming Illinois plants, it's no wonder that I have adopted so many. The one on the left is the first plant I bought when we moved in, August 2007. It has been transplanted twice and is staying put now. It was blue, and looks like it may be pink in this soil/clay. In front are Kassandra Heuchera, which I got on sale at the end of last season. Five of them remained in their pots over the winter and I finally put them in the ground only a few weeks ago. What color would you call them? New leaves come up as a terra cotta color, and then the mature leaves are...a color with no name.











Dave is painting again. He decided to take off the previous six layers and was sanding and scraping all day Friday and Saturday. Now the new paint will go onto smoother surfaces. He has Winter, Spring and Summer paint clothes.



I went shopping for a new water feature pot and found the green bucket with handles, just like my red ones which I turned into planters. It is exactly what I wanted and was under $5. The hyacinth bean vines have begun to curl around the trellis support, all by themselves. Woowoo. This is just what I had hoped. If you look carefully through the trellis and down below, a white hydrangea, Blushing Bride, has big fat blooms on it already.
Chester accompanies me on my garden walk, barking at the school bus as it goes by.
More rain is expected for the next several days, HURRAY! The house needs my attention, desperately.