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Celebrate the Ever-Evolving Garden
There’s nothing to rejuvenate a weary soul like time spent in a garden. Death of one season’s plants yields to new shoots the next. Because I appreciate the ever-evolving nature of a garden, I choose plants, bulbs, bushes, and trees that offer visual interest in each season. Thoughtful planting generates an ever-evolving landscape of color, texture, and visual interest.
Pumpkins show orange and yellow, signalling the arrival of the cool season
The autumn garden has almost completely morphed into a winter landscape now. Pumpkin and tomato vines have been pulled out and perennials in the bee garden have gone to seed or been cut back. Winter offers little color in the garden except for the cape honeysuckle, white geranium, lavender florets, and early flowering bulbs.
Deciduous trees have mostly lost their leaves, however, the eucalyptus and the pepper trees here on the farmette remain leafy and green. The rains have come and a dusting of snow on nearby mountain peaks is in the forecast ahead. Foliage and blooms are mostly gone. It’s that time of year to cover frost-sensitive plants.
The pomegranates that were ablaze in golden color a few weeks ago have dropped all leaves. What remains is the lovely arching pattern of branches since I’ve trained them from bushes into trees.
Pomegranate leaves turn gold in the fall
The showy pink flowers over summer of the crape myrtle are a memory. Gone now, too, are the red-gold leaves of fall. What remains is an interesting gray-green bark.
Autumn leaves of the crepe myrtle create a spectacle against the blooming Cecile Brunner rose
The seeds from the giant yellow-orange coreopsis that stood eight feet tall and towered over zinnias, Borage, and rows of lavender have long ago been harvested. Also, my patch of lavender is flourishing. The plants have pushed out long stalks of purple florets.
Dark green shoots of bulbs are pushing up out of the earth where I interplanted them with chrysanthemums. I cut back the mums and they will reappear in the spring to flower again. This is the time of year that shoots of bulbs and rhizomes are birthing daffodils, anemones, tulips, hyacinths, and, to come later, lilies and irises of many colors.
Siberian scilla adds a lot of color for a small grouping of bulbs
In raised beds, shoots of fall-planted onions and garlic are now pushing up. The bees are drawn to the sweet scent of narcissus bulbs that have naturalized after being planted years ago. The Meyer lemon now has lots of yellow thin-skinned fruit and also a few early blooms.
On the dark days and nights of winter, white blooming plants stand in stark contrast to gray wooden fences and leafless trees. Honor roses, Iceberg roses, and climbing Sally Holmes roses have showy white blooms and may even have some this time of year unless they’ve been cut back. Winter-blooming gardenias and white geraniums have a quiet impact when grouped together in hedges, beds, or containers.
The “Honor” rose is an elegant white blooming rose that is spectacular under moonlight
With so many bulbs and plants available this time of year, putting interest into your winter garden is easy and contributes to an ever-evolving landscape.
Consider plants with gray-green or otherwise pretty foliage and colorful berries. Also plant trees with interesting bark colors, textures, patterns, or scaffolding shapes. When you think of plants for each season of the year, you’ll have a garden to nurture you throughout the year.
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If you enjoy reading about gardening, the keeping of chickens and bees, and other small farm topics AND you’d like related gift-giving, consider my Henny Penny Farmette series of cozy mysteries or any of my health, wellness, and spirituality books. All are available online and in traditional bookstores everywhere.
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What Could Be Easier than Growing Irises in Raised Beds?
Irises and roses make a lovely spring bouquet
When we first moved to the Bay Area from Miami, the heirs to the property behind ours gave us some bearded irises that had been planted in the 1950s by their parents. I recall the beauty of irises on my grandmother’s farm in Missouri. She called them flags.
For a lovely raised flower bed, plant other bloomers like cosmos, geraniums, pansies, nasturtiums, and marigolds with iris cultivars
Mostly colored in deep purples and blues, white, and pinkish-beige, the bearded irises have added an aesthetic appeal to our farmette that was mostly just a big field with a tiny house in the middle. We’ve planted them in the ground, along fences, and in raised boxes.
Easy to grow and maintain, the irises have become one of our favorite flowers. We’ve kept them going in our garden and they’ve rewarded us with many new rhizomes.
As we’ve continued to restore the farmette, we’ve built many four by six feet boxes for raised beds. The materials cost roughly $125 per box. We like them because we can easily control the soil (building it up with compost, manure, and other amendments), drainage, tilling, and weeds. Recently we decided to make irises the mainstay of a raised bed border.
We’ve interplanted citrus and bearded irises in this raised bed spanning the length of the front fence
Over the weekend, we built a long raised bed that extends the entire length of the fencing on the southwestern side of our property. In it, we planted lots of citrus trees, climbing roses, and irises. If you are thinking of doing something comparable, have fun choosing from among the hundreds of cultivars of bearded and Siberian irises.
Irises make a showy statement alone or among other plants
Plant them about three inches deep and a few inches apart in well drained, fertile soil. Irises need shade from the hottest sun and enjoy a deep drink of water, especially during blooming. I enjoy the ease of growing them in raised beds and love, love, love the magnificent color atop tall stalks when they bloom.