Summer winding down

This has been a beautiful summer for the garden, and thanks to the mild temps I've been able to spend a lot of time out in it. Finally, I've been able to go out and really feel that I'm in a garden. There are still plenty of unfinished and unsightly areas for me to keep working on, but there are spots that are pure joy.

Now I'm trying to catch up on my blogging, which I'm sorry I neglected, because I've had so many great hours out there I can't count or remember them all. I have a backlog of photos to post, so this may be an out-of-sequence hodge podge for a while.

One of my go-to plant groups is Carex grasses. I have 6 or 7 species now, and orange sedges are one of my favorites. They grow in every kind of soil I have, and seem very tolerant of inconsistent watering. And nothing eats them. I was able divide a couple of my bigger ones this year, and every year I find at least a couple babies in the spring. Most of them turn out to be bronze rather than orange, but I have plenty of places to put them. The more sun they get, the more orange they show. The Bowles Golden sedges are happy where they get regular water and plenty of shade, and they don't seem to care about how soggy their site gets in the winter. I have quite a few bronze sedges; some of them were here when I moved in and they just keep going, and I usually get at least a couple new babies, just like the orangies.

Carex testacea, in morning light

Bowles Golden Sedge

Bronze Sedge

I found a new plant to love this year. Actually I had one, a Bergarten Sage, already growing in my Ruth Stout veggie garden, but this year I realized just how tough and versatile this plant is. It spreads slowly—mine is about 18" wide now—tastes great in cooking, and like the carexes, seems ready to grow anywhere, whether I take care of it or not. I bought four more of them and put them in various spots around the garden where I'd like to have a no-care ground cover. Where they get enough sun, they pop out with beautiful blue flowers in midsummer that continue to look decorative after the petals fall off.

Bergarten sage

I tried two other sages this year—they're so cheap—a purple sage I put into a mostly-shady spot where it won't get much water in the dry season, and the pineapple sage I put just outside my veggie garden, where I really didn't expect it to do much. It does get watered every other day there. Imagine my surprise when it got two feet tall and a foot across, and still has the wonderful light fragrance from which it got its name. I haven't tried it in cooking but I certainly will. I bet it would be wonderful in rice or curry. A friend confirmed that it grows beautifully in her garden as well, has for a couple years, and gets covered with red flowers in the fall. I look forward to that.

Pineapple sage embracing a small blue spruce

Just a couple weeks ago I went on an HPSO trip to Sebright Gardens in Salem, where I found this adorable little Pinus strobus "Vercurve". I'm positively silly about curly-needle pines and this little cutie will only get a few feet tall in 10 years.

Pinus strobus "Vercurve"