I moved my “Home Depot planter” onto the new patio. Notice how its verticality is echoed by the lovely nursery cans and Kangaroo yard waste container in the background. 😉
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A Closer Look
A closer View of the “Cheryl Chair” area. The Cheryl chair is so named because my friend Cheryl gave it to me one day when we were junk hunting for things like seatless chairs. I was describing the kind of chair I’d love to find and she said she had just the chair at home! Now that she sees how pretty it looks planted, I think she wants it back.
😉
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The Fun Part of Landscaping… Plant Placement!!!
My first big batch of plants was delivered yesterday from POW Nursery. I was glad to have met their minimum for free delivery. As is my way, I selected plants not according to a predetermined list, but by what caught my eye, looked healthy, and by what seemed like a good price.
As long as I stick to the rule of using even numbers of plants for formal, symmetrical arrangements and odd numbers (3+ plants is my usual minimum)for informal plantings, I can have a little fun with what I’m buying.
Another trick for successful “spontaneous landscaping” is to bring flowers from your garden to the nursery so you can see what looks good with what you’ve already got.
Sure, I make fantasy lists of plants I’d like to own, but on my nursery jaunts the thrill comes from discovering something I hadn’t anticipated buying.
This batch of plants included 20 green hopseeds for a possibly temporary eyesore screen (the fence) and privacy screen (neighbors’ 2nd story windows) while slower-growing sasanqua camellias (which I haven’t found yet) fill in… and out… and up. My other acquisitions were mainly fun perennials (lavender, coreopsis, sedum, penstemon, daylily, echinacea, etc.) and a jasmine vine.
Right now, the plants have been placed but not planted. Placing plants is another fun, somewhat intuitive part of how I garden.
Almost forgot… I also got a saucer magnolia! I looooooooovvvvvve deciduous magnolias and am so happy to finally have one. It’s M. x soulangiana, which is a classic. I’m also gonna try squeezing in one more smaller-growing cultivar with darker petals (an M. liliflora cultivar, probably).
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Plant a Chair
Pansies, osteospermum, purple sweet potato vine and heliotrope are the new inhabitants of my chair planter.
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Mail-order Citrus
By the way, part of the reason I ordered directly from Four Winds by mail-order was to evaluate the quality of their mail-order service.
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Four Winds gets an A+. The trees came quickly by UPS, were well packaged and are very, very healthy! One even had (until I… oops…knocked it off) a huge orange on it! These folks know what they’re doing. And get this… the trees came bare-root! They were packed in sawdust! How often do we see bare-root citrus, right? Also, all six trees were ingeniously packaged in 2 boxes no bigger than about 6″ x a foot x 4 ft. total (boxes were taped together).
I probably could have saved a few bucks by buying from a local retail nursery selling dwarf citrus, but I had a feeling I’d have to hunt around for some of my 6 varieties.
Ideally, you want to plant citrus in spring so they’ll have longer to establish before a potentially frosty winter… but I don’t mind keeping an eye on them this winter. I want to pick fruit!!! Grow, trees, grow!
Angela’s Stock Photography
