News from the Garden

I am LOVING the way the yard looks right now! Granted, there are the ugly areas, the weedy areas, and the ivy/vinca covered areas where hard work continues, but there are so many views that make me smile. As with the camera, I just point my eyes toward the places I like and ignore the other parts! I think that's good advice for life, too, I'll have to remember that.

Here is the camelia garden.
I love how the Touch-Me-Nots fill in everywhere! Hmm...there is a pattern here...I think it is spelled "weedy."
The vertical stems in the foreground here are flower stems of one of my collection of Eriogonums (native buckwheats). I love the fat juicy stems that seem unrelated to the foliage below.

Here is another plant I love, Phacelia tanecetifolium (Tansy leaved phacelia). I love it because the flowers start out in a purple spiky ball and then they unroll to look more like this.
I also love them because the bumble bees love them!

Here is the long view of one of my favorite areas.
Move left just slightly and zoom in and you have this lovely view.
I love the tall yellow spikes of the mullein. Not a native, found at Payless two years ago, probably will need dividing this fall and the bees also love it--almost more than they love the purple native Penstemon spectabilis on the right of the picture.

In a less developed part of the yard I still can smile.
This was what I called "the bone yard" a couple years ago. If you want to see how it once looked, take a look at this post from June 2008 when I was first blogging. The picture is about halfway along the post, and is the one filled with logs from the dying tree that was taken out. Some of these plants are weeds (!) but it no longer looks like a big scar in the landscape. Notice also in that old post that the last picture is the same area that I currently say is my favorite!

p.s. Correction: The plant that I was so excited about as a native in my June '08 post is not a native buckwheat as I thought. It is a non-native weed called gnaphalium. There is a native version of it, but mine isn't one of those. I now try to pull these before they reseed. They aren't horribly invasive, though.