Getting Hotter and More Dry

The top photo of Terry watering hanging baskets today sums up a lot of our activity these past couple of days with our struggle to keep up with watering around the gardens. Each day looks warmer and hotter over the next couple of days although there will be a significant "cool down" by the middle of next week. We're way behind on precipitation too which has become challenging for us as we're running irrigation constantly. As we continue to plant new areas, we're making very sure to keep those new plants watered and are wary of getting too far ahead of what we can manage. A nice 2-3"soaking rain over 24 hours would be great and I wish I could order that up for our entire region. The second photo down shows the cheery little orange blossoms of the orange tassel flower (Emilia javanica 'Irish Poet') which is part of our orange-themed planting this year. Regardless of the heat today (86 degrees F), we had a nice turnout of volunteers. To the right is Joanne Anderson working in the formal perennial gardens. She and her husband John have been involved with the gardens since the beginning (23 years ago) and have done a great job maintaining their assigned garden and some peripheral areas in the formal gardens. Bev and Ron W. came in to plant in the sunken garden early this morning and by mid-morning, we had Nancy and Myrt continuing the planting of our "orange-themed" wall border. Everyone did a great job. Kay did some top notch weeding in the Nancy Yahr Memorial Children's Garden and moved over to the sunken garden to continue cutting back bulb foliage with Jenny. Maury ran some errands for us (gas run too, thanks!) and Dr. Gredler was in for some mowing. We also saw Chuck and many others today. To the left is a delphinium (Delphinium sp.) in the English cottage garden. Lynn, our assigned garden volunteer for that space, is including many of the old-fashioned perennials, annuals and vegetables in this garden and I think this will be this garden's most appealing year to date. To the right is the 'Nearly Wild' floribunda rose (Rosa) that is looking good in the formal French garden. This variety has a light fragrance and I've included it in my home garden as well for its toughness and flower power (single blossoms). In that same garden area is the Oso Easy Paprika rose (Rosa x 'ChewMayTime') glowing with orange blossoms. Further down is the powdery blue foliage of the 'Faded Jeans' spurge (Euphorbia pithyusa) that we'll be using in our white/silver/blue theme this year. I like the look of this foliage plant and we'll use it here and there.
I spent much of the early morning laying out plants for our incoming planters (Ron, Bev, Myrt and Nancy) and then headed to The Flower Factory to pick up our perennial order. I had a nice chat with Nancy Nedveck, co-owner of that nursery and she showed me some of their neat new vertical wall planters. I picked up our biggest order yet and am excited about including these plants out in the gardens. Marianne worked on more clearing of weeds and bulb foliage and helped me haul plants this morning. She also freshened up her cutting display. Marv and Terry ran irrigation, set-up and moved around many sprinklers and also did a nice job prepping three garden spaces for planting (rototilling and smoothing). The guys have some new tripod sprinklers which are really quite useful and easy to adjust as needed. To the right is the showy foliage on one of our three golden variegated pagoda dogwoods. This is the Golden Shadows pagoda dogwood (Cornus alternifolia 'W. Stockman') and while it's slower growing than the "straight", green-leaved species, it sure has some bright foliage appeal. To the left is the interesting foliage of the 'Dolce Blackcurrant' coral bell (Heuchera) that has a significant amount of silver overtone to the deep maroon foliage. We have a nice assortment of coral bells out in the gardens but haven't committed to trying to acquire all 300+ varieties (literally!).

Big John bounced between composting, planting containers (including our 10 culvert pipe planters!) and watering. Pat spent the morning clearing more weeds and bulb foliage and he did a nice job composting two areas. Jenny worked in a couple areas for bulb clearing, helped hand water two large garden areas and later returned to some clearing duties. I was pleased with all the work accomplished today but can't help but think we'd have so much more "traditional" gardening time if we were weren't watering so much. I've never seen our May lawns get so dry as we usually count on decent rainfall. I hope this wont be a dry summer. To the right are the white bloom clusters of the native arrowwood viburnum (Viburnum dentatum) which has later interest with blue berry clusters (great for birds) and a nice red fall color. Directly below is one of the loads I hauled out this afternoon. That double layer cart is handy and all the plants seen there will be installed in the formal annual sections tomorrow as we should have a good turnout of "planters." At the bottom is the bluish foliage of the 'Blue Shadow' witch alder (Fothergilla x intermedia).