I finally bought my very own copy of Ken Druse’s latest book Natural Companions: A Garden Lover’s Guide to Plant Combinations and if you don’t have a copy yet, it’s worth dropping everything else – plant those annuals later! – to pick it up. (I ordered mine from my favorite local bookstore and beat feet to get it as soon as it came in.) Truly, you might never look at your garden and the plants in it the same way again. I appreciated Ken’s reminder to pick flowers and foliage to see what would look well together but Ellen Hoverkamp’s digital scans of those pickings are exquisite. And then Ken takes it several steps further to illuminate plants that not only look well together but go together in various other ways, whether they’re related by “blood”, color, place, habit, use, and so on and on for well over 200 beautifully written and photographed pages.

I don’t have Ellen’s patience – or her brilliant artistic eye – or her equipment – to ever be able to create such amazing compositions but I have already started to notice the garden’s own arrangements and natural companions with a fresh eye. Some of these combinations (related more by good looks and cultural requirements than anything more thought-provoking) were planned but I think most were either lucky guesses or pure wind-blown serendipity. (Mouse over for captions, click on for larger views.)

What combinations of plants go well together in your garden? Do you think about different kinds of plant relationships when you’re working on your garden’s design?

It’s game time here at Blithewold. Even though we’ve been planting steadily since … March (!) the biggest push starts now that we’re well past frost and are desperate to get everything moved out of the greenhouse. What we call “planting week” usually spans a month or more and starts with marathon planting sessions in each garden that never take as long as we imagine it will. We were set back by rain earlier in the week but a powerful crew of volunteers adjusted their schedules to work today and along with the Florabundas yesterday they got us over the first of several humps.

A good 400 annuals and tender perennials including dahlias, salvias, ageratum, helichrysum, zinnias and agastache went in the North Garden yesterday; Dan planted at least 40 tomatoes; and almost 600 cutting garden annuals like tassel flower, amaranth, and lisianthus, and tender perennials and perennials such as lavender, butterfly weed and “Rhody Native” mountain mint went into the cutting garden, herb garden and pollinator bed today. Today’s planting session was completed just in time for a drenching downpour – a half an inch in what couldn’t have been much longer that a half an hour – that watered everything right in.

We try to make the job as easy as possible. Gail, Tricia and I place everything the day before so that no one has to wait while we make up our minds about where it all goes. And mostly the planting is easy – the soil is soft, fluffy cake mix wherever we took tulips out and wherever we evict forget-me-nots and teasel seedlings that have fulfilled their duties as space holders/weed barriers. But it’s still a big manicure-wrecking job that’s hard on the knees and the back and we couldn’t possibly have gotten even a fraction of it done in the time it took without our amazing volunteers.

The more we plant the more space we have under the arbor for hardening off plants as they come out of the greenhouse. I’ll spare you uninteresting shots of empty benches but to Gail and me they are almost as thrilling as seeing our plants go in the ground one by one by one.

Will you spend any part of this long weekend planting? I hope you have perfect weather for it and well-timed downpours – at night of course after the cookout – to help settle it all in. Happy planting!

Now that the heat of April is behind us, we’re taking full advantage of the coolness and rain of May. The weather is a little backwards but we’ll take what we can get when it comes to planting weather. With a few days of rain in the forecast we were really thrilled to have a dry day today and a good crew to start putting in some of our cool-season annuals. We planted tassel flower (Emilia javanica) in what promises to be a stunning combination with annual campion (Viscaria occulata ‘Blue Angel’). We also planted calendula, Salvia claryssa (a diminutive clary sage), some pretty tough looking bee’s friend (Phacelia tanacetifolia), golden feverfew (Tanacetum parthenium ‘Aureum’), Virginia stock (Malcolmia maritima), ornamental kale ‘Sunset’, and honeywort (Cerinthe major var. purpurescens ‘Kiwi Blue’) among other various and sundry things I’ve already forgotten.

In some places we had to elbow a few volunteers out of the way – volunteer reseeders, that is. You might this this sea of teasel seedlings is horrific but I like to think of them as a really excellent weed barrier. Nothing can penetrate that mat but it was quick work to delete a few to make room for a new little border of clary sage. And with any luck that will seed itself around too.

All of the garden’s newest tenants will be happy to have cloudy skies and plenty of rain (fingers crossed) to help them settle in. And now we have more room under the arbor for “hardening off” the next batch of plants to come out of the greenhouse. Tender perennials like Mexican anise hyssop (Agastache spp.), salvias, porterweed (Stachytarpheta spp.), and geraniums (Pelargonium) are next on the list — although all of those might prefer to wait to go out after the rain has stopped. That’s alright because it’s also time to move out some of our container specimen like the camellias, coprosmas, farfugium, and sweet olive (Osmanthus fragrans). The shift is on.

Have you started to plant cool-season annuals yet?

We’re all – plants and gardeners – breathing a sigh of relief after our rain. It was a good soaking of anywhere from 2.5 – 5 inches depending on who you talk to. My bucket had about 4″ in it but I’m not sure rain gauges caught as much. (Some of the rain definitely fell sideways.) However much we got, we needed it and it must have put a dent in our drought. My fingers are crossed that we’ll start getting more rain at regular intervals, during the night and never on weekends…

The tulips did take a beating like I thought they might but I think they’re still quite beautiful, even broken. Nature is a drama queen after all, tragically lovely most of the time.

The rain came in the nick of time for planting, if not for the tulips. We just finished transplanting – raise your hand if, like me, you were madly dashing around your garden trying to get the last things divided and moved before the skies opened – and have just received our biggest order of perennials and annuals. The annuals will rest inside the greenhouse for a few weeks more until we can be sure we’re past our last frost date (I feel so badly for the people who got snow with this storm. How diabolical is it to go from 80 degree summer weather back to winter in the span of a week?) but we’ll start planting the perennials this week. Going into moist soil, they’ll have a much better chance of taking off quickly and thriving without us having to baby them along like we have the transplants.

Did you get the rain you needed? (Did you get SNOW?) Did you finish transplanting in time or will you do more now?

We were pretty worried this winter, when the oaks withheld their acorns, that the squirrels would eat every last tulip bulb. Thank goodness they left a few for us and our visitors to enjoy – it really was very generous of them. We’re all especially glad they left a few Akebono in the Rose Garden, and everybody’s other favorite, Miranda in the Display Garden. This is our second year for Akebono. We can’t get enough of that yellow rimmed in a pencil of red and dashed with green. Miranda, a new one for us, doesn’t even look like a tulip. More like a peony with flowers the size of cereal bowls and so heavy they’ve been snapping right off their stem. And their color is so intensely over-saturated that the only way I could get an approximate shot of it was to go out first thing on a cloudy morning.

I’ve heard a lot of visitors exclaim over the size of the tulips as if they’ve never seen anything like them. I have to wonder, since tulip bulbs come with everything they need right inside the bulb, and their showiness has little to do with how awesome our soil is, if most people buy inferior box-store and joblot tulips rather than ordering from reputable bulb companies. I can see the appeal of one-stop shopping but I believe everyone’s garden deserves better! We buy our bulbs from John Scheepers, Inc and they have a wonderful array of choices. I’m already thinking about next years order – while they’re blooming is the best time to take those notes, but we won’t place our order until the end of July. We might need more of a few of these…

This weekend we are faced with bit of a dilemma. The tulips are at their fragile peak and a potentially damaging rain is in the forecast. I hate for anyone to miss the tulip show but I have to hope we get a really good soaker. It’s been too long and I would sacrifice the tulips if April showers relieve our drought and bring us extra May flowers. Are you forced to pray for rain too?