Decisions, Decisions

.

One of the most challenging things about gardening is knowing when to give up on a flower bed.  You take great care in planning it and planting things you think will look good, but it just doesn't look like you picture it in your mind.  Our yard on the west side of the house is very narrow (almost non-existent).  The bed I put in is only about three or four feet deep.  I thought this would be a good place to put assorted daylillies.  Really nice colors too!  Yellows, oranges, reds, even a couple of white ones.  But they were so unimpressive, after going through seven years of pictures on the computer, I couldn't find a single picture of them! Yikes.

Last year's drought was pretty hard on the daylillies.  So I decided last fall that this year I would dig them up and put something different in.  I knew I wanted perennials, but the bed being so narrow had me stumped.  I kept changing my mind.  Then I saw what I had to have in a gardening magazine!


Echinacea 'Julia' PPAF, Butterfly Kisses Series!

Our house siding is cream colored (looks yellow!) so I thought these would be perfect.  So then I decided I couldn't put just those in.  There had to be another flower I could put in.  But the color had to coordinate with the pumpkin color of the coneflowers.

That's when I found this.  Perovskia 'Little Spire'.  A Russian Sage that only gets two feet tall!  Perfect!  So I ordered the 'Little Spire' from my favorite mail order nursery, because of course no one around here had such as thing.  Then I set about trying to find 'Julia'.  My favorite local nursery had it listed on their website.  Fantastic.  It was the first week in May so I hurried and got together my plant purchasing list and off I went.  Alas, no 'Julia'.  Their supplier was backordered.



The internet is a beautiful thing.  It took a few days, but I did find the elusive new coneflower.  And of course it was more expensive than I had planned.  But I had what I wanted.  Digging up the daylillies was a snap.  The drought had pretty much dried up the tubers, so I wouldn't have had any flowers this year anyway!

All the plants have adapted well.  I have filled in the bare spaces with pots of dahlias and a couple of little sculptures, but I have high hopes for my new garden.  And I plan to take way more pictures of it than I did of the poor daylillies!