My Half Acre of Paradise

On Friday, I planted all my California poppies (which are late this year, so I hope the heat doesn’t kill them), some dianthus, iceplant, verbena, and some of the geraniums. I focused on the side of the main front flowerbed and the bed along the front walkway. In the big flowerbed, I also sprinkled some seeds for African daisies, Cherry Profusion zinnias, and some yellow single-flowered marigolds (was it ‘Lemon Gem’?).

By the walkway, I dug out the asters and chrysanthemums that have grown there for several years. Dana has been tired of those flowers only showing up in the fall, with only green growth in the summer. I put some of the geraniums in there, along with verbena and dianthus.  I also scattered seeds for ‘Jaguar’ marigolds (a small, single-flowered type with marks of red on yellow petals) and purple alyssum seeds.

Also, I noticed that some black aphids are attacking one of my cherry trees and causing some new leaves to curl up and get sticky. I need to spray pesticide right away, but I ran out of time this weekend.

Today, I planted some lily bulbs and a dozen or so Rudbeckias I grew from seed. The lilies are a little late getting in the ground, but I hope we still get some good blooms from them this summer. I bought five bulbs of each kind at Wal-Mart about a month ago. They are:

• Stargazer - an Oriental hybrid that gets 40″ tall with purple-to-pink petals that fade to white around the edges, and
• Sugar Jewel - an Asiatic hybrid that gets 24-36″ tall with lavender blooms.

These are planted behind the Crabapple tree that is in the main flowerbed in front of our house. The Rudbeckias (Black-Eyed Susans) are also in that spot. These are the ones I called my Most Valuable Annual last summer.

I also had 28 small bulbs of a plant called Acidanthera, a part of the Gladiolus family. They get 18″ tall and have white flowers with dark brownish-purplish centers. I didn’t realize when I got them that they were a type of Gladiolus, which means they are not hardy in this climate zone. Hopefully they’ll perform well this summer, since that’s all the time they’ll get in my garden! I planted those under the birch tree by the gate to the backyard, a tough spot for most flowers, since the birch roots suck all the nutrients and water out of the soil there. I’m hoping that since bulbs have a lot of energy and nutrients stored in the bulb, they’ll perform well there despite the tough conditions.

I work a few blocks from Temple Square in Salt Lake City, and I always enjoy taking a camera with me to work this time of year. All of these shots were taken on May 2nd around the Joseph Smith Building and the church office building. I saw a gardener there who told me that the tulips and spring flowers were going to be removed starting on the 5th. It’s time to plant all their summer flowers.

I think my favorite of all these is the one above with the backlight shining through the pink tulips. But it’s all quite beautiful. What a civic treasure we have in Temple Square!

These are Prairie Fire Crabapples in my front yard — two of the coolest trees I’ve ever had! I love their display in April and May. It seems like their bloom season was too short this year, and it might have been the dry weather we had and the fast rise in temperature last week. All the blooms started to shrivel up this week, and I think they’ve usually gone stronger into May. The top photo was taken on April 28th, and the lower one was on April 20th, so the blooming was strong for something over a week, but it didn’t seem long enough.

I’m also growing some Japanese maples from seed, and this is my first attempt at doing it. These are from seeds off my red Japanese maple in front of my house. I had to put them in the fridge for a few months to “stratify” and then plant them. I have nine of these babies right now, and I’m looking forward to seeing how fast they grow!



Also, I thought I’d get a jump on some Zinnias by sowing them inside rather than direct sowing in May. These are seeds from my Profusion Cherry Zinnias from last year. They may or may not come true to color as a hybrid. I’ll try to remember to post about how they came out later this year.

I now have about 250 flower seedlings growing, with most of them hardened off outside (although I brought them back in the basement Wednesday night because of the cold storms this weekend). Most of what I have here are:

• Dianthus deltoides ‘Brilliancy’ — a relative of carnations with purple flowers
• Delosperma cooperi (cold-hardy iceplant with purple flowers)
• Rudbeckia hirta, the annual kind of black-eyed susan flower
• Eschscholzia californica, California poppies — these are the ‘Summer Sorbet’ variety, which is pink-to-red (if they came true from seed I collected last year)
• Annual geraniums (pelargoniums) — a pink kind from cuttings off a flower my daughter received as a gift last year and the ‘Apple Blossom’ variety from Park’s Seed
• Lavatera tauricensis from seed off my own plants (see this earlier post with photos of the flowers)
• Gaillardia grandiflora — cuttings from a yellow-flowering specimen in my yard last summer
• Oenothera missouriensis — a low, yellow form of evening primrose (not as invasive as the pink ones), from cuttings off my plants las t summer
• Hibiscus moscheutos ‘Blue River’ from seed exchanged on GardenWeb
• Verbena x hybrida ‘Imagination’ also from that seed exchange
• And only two seeds sprouted of Heliotrope arborescens, which also came from that seed exchange

I found that my seedlings stopped growing at a pretty small size while left under the fluorescent lights in the basement. I don’t know if it was the lighting not being adequate for further growth, the Jiffy mix seed starter soil being too sterile, or the temperatures being too cool in there. But after planting them up in these four-inch pots with a potting mix and putting them in the sun for part of the day, they are growing well. The verbenas, iceplant, and dianthus are particularly responding well to the changes.

The hibiscus seem to be struggling. The seedlings are a little yellow and aren’t growing much. I hope they take off soon.

Here are a few more photos from the tulips in my front flowerbed. My girls really like those ones that look like jesters’ hats. I hope these all come back well next year; I should also add more to the bed this fall. These photos were taken one week ago, and they’ve started to decline since then.