This is of course, totally backward. You’re supposed to plant the trees and shrubs first to serve as the bones of your garden, and fill in with perennials and annuals. That’s what I read in a book anyhow. As always, the best time to plant a tree is ten years ago.

So what did I come up with? The following is my list.
13 Buddleia davidii butterfly bush — all were labeled “Black knight” but I’m kind of doubtful.
5 Rudbeckia “Autumn colors”
2 Rudbeckia mislabeled as “goldsturm,” but they have deep chocolate brown on the inner ends of the petals.
7 Colocasia esculenta “black magic” elephant ears
7 Perovskia “longin” russian sage
19 Hemerocallis “red rum” daylilies (yeah the goofy name got me, but the flower is nice deep red, which I like)
3 Delosperma cooperi “ice flower” a cool ground cover from South Africa I’ve never run across before
4 Coreopsis “creme brulee” to fill the gap an existing bed of these (otherwise I prefer odd numbers)
3 Andromeda polifolia “blue bog” I’ve never encountered this, so I had to get a few
3 Salix integra “Hakuro Nishiki” dappled willow shrub
1 Ligustrum “Golden vicary” privet
7 Sedum “neon” these things bloom fluorescent pink
11 Weigela florida “pink princess” big shrubs–I didn’t realize how big they get
7 Nandina domestica Heavenly bamboo (it’s not bamboo, it’s a shrub)
3 Chaenomeles japonica “Texas Scarlet” flowering quince, kind of a viney shrub
7 Nandina domestica “Purpurea Nana” dwarf purple nandina, very cute
4 Euonymus alatus “Compactus” dwarf burning bush (I thought I grabbed 3, I prefer odd numbers)
9 Spirea “gold flame” awesome color foliage
2 blueberry bushes
7 Juniper ‘blue rug’
3 Cercis canadensis redbud tree
3 Potentilla fruticosa “Tangerine” an interesting hardy shrub i’ve never seen
2 Symphyotrichum novi-belgii New York Aster
3 Cotoneaster horizontalis
1 Magnolia grandiflora “Bracken’s Brown Beauty”
4 Ilex x meserveae “China Boy” “China Girl” holly
27 Pyrus calleryana “Cleveland Select” flowering pear trees (yeah, not a typo, I bought 27)

So that’s a fair bit of material. I averaged a couple bucks a plant for all that.

The pear trees are installed along the driveway in a single 400 foot line parallel to the fence. This will look impressive when they bloom in spring, especially once they get some size to them. I spaced them 16 feet apart, so they are fairly close and should just about touch at full size.

Here’s a pic of just one load of about 5:

lots of new material to work with

I parked most of the shrubs in nursery beds to give myself time to think through where to put all these shrubs. A lot of them get sizeable.

And here’s the driveway

400 feet of pear trees looks like this

I was on my way to cut some parsley and make a nice tabouli. I reached down and stopped short. I was infested with a plague of Monarch caterpillars. As pests go, these are stylish. But they still ate my crop, and they smell bad when you pick them up, and they are poisonous.

In the end, I just let them munch. The kids got a kick out of seeing them. we counted thirty. Some pioneering caterpillars were striking out in search of more chow because the parsley was utterly stripped. I’m sure very few of these made it. If we had some milkweed around I’d have moved them onto it. but I kind of held a grudge on them for messing with my tabouli.

elegant but uninvited aposematic dinner guest

he brought his crew with him

Clearly they also prefer the leaves to the stems. I’ve never run across a batch of them like this, and we used to grow milkweed when I was a kid just to attract the monarchs.

I got two expensive gallon pots from a big nursery and three less expensive gallon pots from the hardware store. All of them thrived this summer in full sun. These went into a new bed that got very little soil improvement. I did mulch it as I do all my beds with hardwood mulch.

(picture goes here once I find it)

These coneflowers drew butterflies like crazy. I love that, plus they just thrive on neglect. Mine are reblooming at the end of September. I just want to grow these up and split them and grow the splits up some more. If you’ve got sun this is a superb plant.

I went loking, and I could only find gallon pots at a big nursery. My usual sources didn’t come through. I bought two one-gallon pots of this, and theywere insanely rootbound. I had a terrrible time with these two, but babying them through the summer seemed to work.

Shortly after that I found some quart pots at the grocery store for three bucks each. I grabbed them all (nine of them). All of these did quite well and have sized up radically. Right now I’m just trying to attain the kind of quantities to produce the massive impact that the drift in the park has. My yard is big, so it’s gonna take a thousand flowers or so to get that kind of effect. Luckily, these babies flower profusely.

some of the quarts after a summer’s growth

These did great in the full sun, and I have all of that you could ever want. The ones I put in where they get absolutely no shade are the biggest and strongest. My two new beds are going in where there’s full sun, and completely exposed–very harsh conditions. But these plants are up for it, they’ve proven that to me this summer.

If I ever run into these on sale, look out.

Strictly speaking, this gal (she lacks the concavity on the carapace that would indicate a male) is an import, since I picked her up out of the road on the way home from work about a mile from the house. But after the kids had a chance to check her out, they set her free in the back pasture, which has the makings of good box turtle territory, and isn’t too far from where we found her.

the visiting box turtle

Sorry about the blur, but you can kind of see the pooch took quite an interest in the turtle as well. We got her released quickly. Ornate box turtles are the state reptile of Kansas.

Toads are pest eating machines. In a growing season, a toad can eat thousands of pests that would be eating your garden, making you grumpy. We are blessed with a small army of toads (and less than blessed by a large army of frogs, but that’s a different post).

The kids love it. We can reliably scare up a couple of toads. They have a lot of possibilites for entertainment too. We do toad races, where we draw a circle in the dirst and first toad that hops out is the winner. But the kids know they have to release the toads back into the garden, becuase they are doing heavy work.

That doesn’t mean they can’t feed a few nightcrawlers before they turn the toad loose though.

We get a good range of sizes, but the favorites are the little ones about the size of a dime. We have a lot of those. This summer we turned up one about baseball size hanging out under the brush hog. The one in the picture is about three inches, and spent the night in an empty aquarium. He got a good snack of worms before he was cut loose.

pest eating super predator

The pictured slime mold is a “young” one, still kind of soft and smooshy at this stage.

getting ready to make some spores!

Slime molds are awesome. They move. They go after chow, which for them means decaying stuff pretty much. The plasmodium is the name of the “fruiting” part, the big blobby messy thing that scoots around and devours bacteria and fungi and decaying goodies. They then get kind of crusty and fade from the vivid yellow that the youngster in my photo shows. Now you can call it an aethalium. If you disturb one or even squirt it with the hose, billions of spores come out, spreading the slime mold experience (if your lucky, to your neighbor’s place too!).

Slime molds are not harmful in any way. And you can’t get rid of them no matter how bad you want to. So embrace the awesomeness of slime molds. Hug a slime mold today.

(I can’t believe I don’t have any good aethalium pics. We had dozens of the things all summer long.)

So it quickly developed into a serious project. It took me a few days to correctly perforate the clay soil I had to work with. Why didn’t I just dig it all up? I didn’t think it through properly. I had just installed some new Hostas (in itself a hasty decision–the foliage looked awful on the one I was replacing, but the roots turned out to be huge, healthy, and robust). The better plan would have been to dig ot the whole bed to six inches, then fill with dirt that was amended heavily with compost. Maybe next time.

I destroyed several cheap bulb planters doing the first 350 holes. I finally found one that was heavy gauge metal with a welded handle that would hold up to the punishment of punching 3 inch diameter holes six inches deep in clay. I had to clear each slug from the planter barrel. This turned out to be an incredibly laborious planting.

perforated clay

On the bright side, using the planter allowed me to make a regular pattern. (I’d still do it differently though.)

Well, the madman of late October became the genius of early April. It all paid off handsomely. The 60-foot stretch of my front porch was three rows deep with huge yellow daffodils around Easter. I used up the remaining 100 planting in front of my sidewalk that leads to the porch, a single row running some 35 more feet.

a pretty nice display

very showy

There’s a little break in front of the front door to allow you to step into the yard without hoppig over the flowers. There’s a solid 4 inches of hardwood mulch on the bed, to help the little daffodils sleep soundly all winter long. I didn’t install the cliche “shh daffodils sleeping” sign though.

The Hostas are spaced 4 feet apart, so at maturity they will follow the daffodils with a showy foliage dsplay that should fill the 60 feet of linear space pretty completely. But that will take a couple years. My fault for removing the 2-year-old Hostas that were in there. What was I thinking? I just didn’t know they were so good till I removed them. Several removed Hostas have found new spots in my neighbors’ lawns where they are thriving, ready to divide next year. I kept a few too, but there were a dozen takeouts!

This bed took a large amount of preparation. I tilled in compost repeatedly. Substantial amounts of weed seed were tilled in along the way, unfortunately. I planted this out in the late summer (around Labor day) of 2005 with one gallon perennials bought at full price (gasp) from Ace hardware. Without really knowing, I selected mostly award winners.

Here’s the bed after being tilled. You can see the nice topsoil I had to work with. Adding the composted horse manure just made it better.

ready for planting

What went in was:
12 Salvia “Mainacht” (1997 PPA award winner)
12 Coreopsis verticillata “Creme brulee” (Improved cultivar of “Moonbeam,” the 1992 PPA award winner)
6 Coreopsis “Heaven’s Gate” (a pink cultivar that looks like a threadleaf verticillata)

Sad to say, the pink ones did not survive the winter. However, the rest came through shining. Chalk it up for the award winners I guess. But I started the 2006 season with a hole in the arrangement. I had planted the Coreopsis in “wedges” arranged to radiate out from the back corner. The Salvias were the background, which worked well due to their height. But if you can picture a quarter of a pizza, cut into three slices, someone ate my middle slice!

I went back to Ace looking for Coreopsis and came out with Gaillardia “Arizona sun” instead. These were tagged “blanket flower” but my sister-in-law referred to them as “goblins” which just goes to show why I like to use the species and cultivar wherever I can.

This spring the Coreopsis had coalesced into big clumps and the Salvia were grown to where they also touched. Pay attention to the recommended spacing, folks. Especially on perennials. The purple of the Salvia was striking–this pic doesn’t begin to do it justice.

the Salvia looked great in May

Anyhow, at the beginning of summer the Salvia was pretty much done blooming (but it was a knockout all through May) and the Coreopsis were kicking in to gear. This pic is from then:

the June 2006 look

I’m very satisfied with the Gaillardia. For a perennial, they sure rebloom for a long time. I have some blooms on them now in late September. And what do you know, it’s a 2005 All-America Selections winner. So my triangle bed is now full of exclusively award-winning perennials.