Gertrude's Flower Garden Weekly Diary
7/30/99 - The terrible heat persists and it simply refuses to rain in South Jersey even though we hear of lovely rain falling to our west. This has two effects on my gardening. In the first place, it is too hot to work outside for more than an hour or two in the cooler mornings, and, secondly, I must spend an hour or two watering in the evenings. We are asked to only water after 6:00 p.m., and soon may face further restrictions. I am also trying not to remember what my water bill looked like the last time we had this sort of dry weather. T.S. Eliot said that "April is the cruelest month," but, for the gardener, July or August are more likely candidates.
During this week, I was able to get outside to do some work. I have mentioned the impatiens as the last of the "volunteers" that I move around my flower beds. (If you grow impatiens--busy lizzies, our British friends call them--you may have been able to deduce that their name comes from the way they scatter their seeds as soon as the least pressure is applied to the pods--they are "impatient" to propagate.) Most of the seedlings that I moved are from the shady, north side of our house. Some of them are actually in bloom--"impatient" to make seeds before the frost catches them. Because of the drier ground, I no longer simply pull up the little plants as I did with other "volunteers" earlier, but now use a trowel and remove them with a bit of dirt around their roots. I have planted them in our rock-garden which is risky, because if there is one things impatiens love it is moisture--forget fertilizer but give them plenty to drink!
Just today (Thursday), I worked for an hour or so in the large circular bird-bath bed. Besides trimming the long grass from the edge of the bed, cultivating any open patches of soil, and clearing with my trowel a little "ditch" around the bed, I worked on the flowers there. The planting of this bed is tall, blue balloon flowers (Platycodon) and blue salvia around the birdbath, and the shorter white star zinnias, interspersed with burgundy coleus around the taller inner circle. I tried to push back the star zinnias or to pin them back with a stake so that they didn't drape too far into the grass. I clipped the tops of the coleus since then threatened to hide the zinnias instead of providing a contrast to them. The flower of the coleus doesn't amount to much anyway (but it sure makes millions of seeds!), and they will soon bush out. Finally, I removed the seedpods of the balloon flowers, since they will continue to bloom much longer if I want seeds, and the new flowers look more attractive with the "deadheads" cut off.
The picture this week is of a clump of lovely perennials that I know as rose campion, but which are also called mullein pink, gardener's delight, and corn cockle. The Latin name is Lychnis conoraria and my Webster's unabridged dictionary describes them as "a European herb often cultivated for its attractive white wooly herbage and showy crimson flowers." Whatever you call them, they are a gardener's delight with their soft, fuzzy leaves and gay, happy flowers. They seed themselves easily and I find them in various flower beds; I move them around and give seedlings away to friends. If you don't have them, try rose campions. Their heavy bloom comes in late spring/early summer, but some plants flower into mid-summer.
8/6/99 - Gertrude's Flower Garden Weekly Diary
7/23/99 - Gertrude's Flower Garden Weekly Diary
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