Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Purslane Purging

Nice shot above of Iochroma 'Royal Queen' with huge clusters of purple/blue trumpets. This is a neat annual but is proving to be quite tall and floppy. Staking will be required shortly but that is a small concession for such neat blooms. I'll keep an eye out for perusing hummingbirds. This annual is new to me this year and seems to have some potential in the full sun garden or in containers. Today was another nice day with 80 degrees and sporadic clouds. Larry worked all day on repairing a nightmare water leak that amounted to digging a grave-sized hole to deal with this leak. Janice was here and worked with Winifred to plant some gaps in the sunken garden and east entrance. Little Jerry mowed, pruned and cleaned up around the Japanese garden. Bill is out there as I type cleaning up paths and we were fortunate to have Mary, Roy, Kay, Heidi and Donna all weeding today. They focused on purslane and were distraught to see that someone else had hoed (spelling?) up a lot of purslane and left it on the ground. Purslane will re-root and continue to grow if left there so they spent hours cleaning up the mess from another well-intentioned but ill-informed weeder. Regardless, our anti-purslane progress continues. Barb and Bev came in and weeded and planted in the Azalea/Rhododendron garden. They do nice thorough work. I'm continuing to work on lists and getting everything in order before vacation and did some watering as well. I'll do one more post tomorrow afternoon but will then sign off for 10 days. I should have some nice images from the Colorado State flower trial garden, Denver Botanic Garden and hopefully some other botanical stops along the way. Nice shot of our English cottage garden containers below. Note the wooly sage (Salvia argentea 'Hobbit's Foot') in the foreground. What a real textural plant (both visual and tactile!).

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