A thousand paintings in my garden

As on many other Sundays, I started the morning googling new-to-me artists and artworks, and found quite a trove of them. Looking at the great variety of locations and subjects made me feel that all the work my garden requires is like a great anchor around my neck, keeping me here working on it when I could otherwise be out doing plein air paintings and exploring beautiful places. Then as I was opening my back bedroom window, I looked down across my blooming red daylilies and geums to the billowing zebra grass just starting to show its warm-weather stripes, past the blue mopheads of the Nikko Blue hydrangea, to the soft cloudy light reflecting off the metal barn roof. I brought out my camera to take a photo, and ended up taking a dozen as image after image clicked in my mind as being so very paintable.

Daylily Apple Tart

I took back the words of my lament and ate them as quickly as possible, and laid my misplaced remorse at the feet of Mother Nature, as I resolved to honor these works of life in more, and hopefully better, paintings.

Jackmanii clematis in Big Apple Kousa dogwood

The now voluminous Nikko Blue

Mixed perennials with my new armillary

Satomi Kousa dogwood, the second tree I planted here

Daylily Chicago Ruby

Looking up through the Satomi

The Fairies' table

A wonderful summer

Grape arch over the Nikko Blue hydrangea

This has been the loveliest, mild-but-warmest summer I've experienced since I moved here eight years ago. The weather has been very obliging, not too hot, not too windy, not too cool—very dry, but that's no surprise. The heleniums are blooming, the daisies are passing, the crocosmias and some of the daylilies are still going, and the hydrangea blooms are maturing and starting to show their fall hues. The paniculata hydrangeas are in full bloom now, and my oakleaf one bloomed for the first time this year. The Pinky Winky has a dozen big blooms and even my White Dome has one tiny little bloom.

Phloxes watching over the veggie garden

I'm still moving things around that turned out to be too close, and I still have too many plants that I haven't gotten planted yet. But I made a few small improvements in the watering system, and there have been several days when I've been walking through one part or another of the garden and my breath catches because I can't believe how beautiful it is. The lushness of the plantings and the way so many of the plants just keep getting better and better seems a reward out of proportion to the effort I've put into it. I've been working on it the better part of seven years, but it's the plants that turn a planted place into a garden. If they didn't grow, or flower, or come back every year, or change colors in the fall, the garden really wouldn't be much. But they do, and because of that, the jungle and weed patches I used to have, are now a garden.

Merritt's Beauty hydrangea—the three darkest flowers in the
lower right show the actual color of these blooms

Best hydrangea year ever

Nikko Blue

We had such a mild winter this last time that none of my macrophylla hydrangeas got frostbitten, no buds dropped, nothing. They started growing early in the spring, never got nipped by late frosts, just kept on growing and budding. When June came, so did the big mops of blossoms, one on top of another, buckets and bundles of hydrangeas, everywhere I looked, in light blue, dark blue, white, lavender, violet, blue-violet, red-violet and purple. The ones shaped like big round mounds, the ones that were odd collections of previously frozen sticks—all were lush and lovely with blooms.

The Merritt's Beauty was one of the fullest ones, three years old and never frozen. Its buds first showed a combination of striking deep sapphire and white, then opened up gradually to a rich, even cobalt blue.

Merritt's Beauty

Many of them I have no names for, grabbed here and there at plant sales and clearance bins, even florist shops in department stores. The blue-violet one in the back I call the bigger-than-your-head hydrangea because a fully mature flower head is big enough for me to wear as a hat.

Unknown or unnamed varieties, early in the season with still normal-sized blooms

There's a long row of mopheads planted in the section I call the grotto, where the soil stays wet in the summer and there's little sun.

More unknowns

My grandmother had two big blue mopheads growing outside her apartment near the southern California coast; I first saw them when I was in junior high, and I'd never seen any flower that I thought was so beautiful. From that first sight, I wanted some. I never had a chance to grow them till I moved to Oregon, and as soon as I started gardening here I started buying them and planting them. I lost several during the hard freezes of '08 and '09, and it's a constant chore to keep them all watered during the dry season. More than once I've thought of how much easier my summers would be if I didn't have to worry about them. But they're so gorgeous, those great swaths of blues and purples, fading to green, blue-green, slate-blue, and mauve through late summer and fall, till they finally go brown and slowly fall apart over the winter—I can't imagine my garden without them. Even when the two-day hot, unrelenting wind came in August and crisped bits of all of them, I knew that next year—barring a really bad freeze—they'll all be back again, bigger and bluer and better than before. If we ever have a serious drought, I may lose all of them. But until then, I'll just keep loving them.

Hydrangeas and hemerocallis

My garden has a little slack period between the end of the rhodies and the beginning of the summer flowers where I never used to have anything blooming but the tiny flowers of the heucheras and the cool-weather grasses. This year my two Satomis stepped up and carried the whole weight of the flowering responsibilities for most of June, and now that they're finally starting to bleach out—and they've never lasted this long before—the hydrangeas are finally coming on board. The Nikko Blue is the first to look full, but there are purple and blue edges on expanding mopheads all over the garden.

Nikko Blue with Satomi fading in the background

I've been a daylily fan since I bought my first one, a big pot of Apple Tart, a rebloomer, about 9 years ago when I lived in that big state to the south. I wished for several years after I moved here that I had brought it with me, until I found one at Bloomin' Designs. I first planted it in a torturous spot of the worst clay and not enough sun, and although it got big enough for me to divide last fall, it hadn't flowered yet. I moved it to some less awful clay where it gets about 6 hours of sun, and both my little divisions are blooming this year. The original one I had before astonished me by blooming from early summer to October with just a one-month furlough in early fall, and although the season here may be  shorter, I'm hoping these little babies will like to bloom that much. I still can't get over the deep, chili-pepper red. Northwest gardeners may recognize the tiny, white, fresh Sluggo pellet on this one.

Apple Tart (with Sluggo)

My other favorite red hemerocallis is Chicago Ruby, which is equally deeply colored, but very slightly more towards a cherry red. It's not a rebloomer, but it's so beautiful that I look forward to it eagerly every year.

Chicago Ruby in light shade

Right next to Ruby I have a dark purple, Wayside King Royale, and for some reason that must be related to the mild, not-too-wet-or-too-cold spring, almost all my daylilies came into bloom at the same time. Usually only one variety will start popping at a time, but this year I have flowers up the wazoo right now, with just a few waiting till later.

Wayside King Royale

Another one I really love is this incredible yellow, Amazing grace:

Amazing Grace

The heavy substance of these blooms, the ruffled edges, and the bright clear lemon yellow color really is amazing.