Some actual goings-on in my garden last season!

Aquilegia chrysantha 'Yellow Queen' columbine

As promised, here are some photos from this past spring in my decidedly non-photogenic garden.  And as with so many things here, I wish I'd photographed the perennial and herb gardens in previous years because this last winter (2013-2014) devastated those beds.  Two years of drought and an especially cold, long winter killed so many otherwise hardy plants... Once upon a time I had an impressive collection of culinary and creeping thymes, antique dianthus and angustifolia lavenders, but no more.  I am relieved now that I didn't burden myself with trying to replace them right away.  But I worry that the soils in our new home state won't be like the well-drained loess that I'm blessed with here and that the lavenders and dianthus especially won't thrive.  One of the few dianthus that did survive was the ubiquitous 'Firewitch'.  It's everywhere for a reason; it's tough and it's pretty and it's easy (it also smells yummy and the petals are edible!).

Dianthus gratianopolitanus 'Firewitch'

Speaking of scented and edible flowers, I do happen to grow a lot of them.  Some of them are obvious, like these pretty Sorbet series violas...

Sorbet violas

...and some are less obvious, because they're the flowers of biennial vegetables.  Salsify sends up gorgeous, tall flowering stalks in its second year.  Both the white (Tragopogon porrifolius) and the black (Scorzonera hispanica) have edible roots and shoots and scented flowers.  The scent of the black, surprisingly, is reminiscent of chocolate.  Chocolate-scented flowers aren't so unusual, there are a few others in my garden like Centaurea moschata suaveolens and Berlandiera lyrata (which has the most true chocolate smell of any of them, especially in the early morning, and the flowers leave behind beautiful seedheads).  Salsify flowers are also heliotropic, which means that their open flower heads follow the course of the sun.  In my experience, salsify flowers open in the morning, track the sun through midday and close by afternoon.

Scorzonera hispanica

Another one of my favorite scents in the garden is this little apple-scented Biokovo hardy geranium.  All parts have this wonderful, crisp green apple fragrance.  I planted it years ago in my herb garden, so it never gets as much water as it likes but it's still trucking along, spreading a tiny bit each year...

Geranium x cantabrigiense 'Biokovo'

I bought several irises from Old House Gardens over the past couple years, including the Blue Rhythm and Plumeri pictured below.  Old House Gardens is probably the best mail-order heirloom bulb company in the world.  They are so passionate about what they're doing and everything arrives so fresh and healthy...  It's hard to stop myself ordering more for next spring, and hard to imagine having to dig these new plantings up again so soon..

Blue Rhythm Iris

Plumeri Iris

Madame Chereau Iris

Yet another thing that I will miss about my garden (and throughout my property, actually) is the magical appearance of wild columbine.  It's exquisite foliage unfurls out of the ground in herald of spring and it's delicate flowers on tall stalks give color in the time between spring-flowering bulbs and spring-flowering perennials.  The crushed seeds yield a pretty perfume (although they are fucking hard to crush).  If columbine doesn't grow wild in New York I may have to rethink this whole endeavor.

Aquilegia canadensis

Amongst the other more common native plants that pop up in my yard (violets, plantain, milkweed, etc.), there is this very rare wild larkspur that appeared from out of nowhere a few years ago in an area that overflow from one of my rain barrels washed out..

Delphinium carolinianum

When I first began gardening on this property, Solomon's seal was the bane of my existence.  It was everywhere.  Everywhere I dug, it's underground rhizomes infested.  Those were wetter years, and the infestation has since come under control, thanks to drought and my eventually understanding that I should carefully dig up and remove the rhizomes rather than spading them under (oops).  Anyway, I've begun to appreciate the plant, and the year before last I bought a variegated cultivar.  It's edges seem to have been touched with a painter's brush; the variegation is so subtle and brilliant, and the stems are burgundy!  Here it is, tucked in amongst the wild columbine and fiddlehead ferns (yummy chickweed and lambsquarters beneath)...

Polygonatum odoratum var. thunbergii variegatum

My passion for herb gardening knows no bounds.  I want to grow and taste everything.  Anything fragrant and edible that might survive on a hot, dry slope gets tucked in.  By August it's overflowing, blooming and swarming with interesting insects.  This year was different in that there was more bare space than there had ever been..

variegated Salvia officinalis

Behind and beside the sage pictured above (and the little scotch rose in the back) there used to be about a dozen different varieties of thyme.  All of them (with the exception of a caraway thyme that you can't see from this angle) were lost over the long winter.  Elsewhere in the herb garden other thymes did survive, like my beloved rose-scented thyme...

thymes, hyssop, wild lettuce

Other plants that made it through the winter include these Transylvanian and native white sages and the little wild onions peeking through in the lower left corner...

Salvia transylvanica, Artemisia ludoviciana

... and the Egyptian walking onions continue walking all over everything else...

Allium cepa var. proliferum

That groundcover in the lower right above isn't an herb but rather an awesome little Veronica (speedwell) called Waterperry Blue.  It appeared to have a lot of winterkill but it recovered more than I expected, thankfully.  It has the prettiest blooms; in May and June it's covered with these little blue flowers...

Veronica 'Waterperry Blue'

This year I grew and fell hard for Fairy Bouquet Linaria, also known as Moroccan toadflax or baby snapdragon.  I bought one little pot of from Boyer River Gardens in Storm Lake and whenever I next have a garden I'm sprinkling these babies everywhere!

Linaria maroccana

I love them, but jesus christ they're difficult to photograph without a macro lens..

Can you see the linaria?  Hey, there's the patio!

It's a little obscured in the above shot, but beyond the linaria is an edible flower garden, with an understory of Mara des Bois strawberries.  Before the strawberries went in, I had some variety of silene in there.  Silene self-sows pretty infamously, but I hadn't seen any for the past two, dry years.  Then this spring, just next to a winterkilled Judy Fischer miniature rose..

unknown silene

I think it's time to sit quietly and carefully consider this juxtaposition of death and rebirth.  And strawberries.  Because isn't that what life is about?