Garden Renovation: Old Plant Friends Invited Back

I’ve been renovating my garden for the past couple years… it had become forsaken and neglected during the press of family obligations. Even though one of the early garden blogging pioneers, my garden blog had languished, as well. But this year, 2008, both blog and garden have seen a flurry of effort from me, and the garden, anyway, is showing progress.

Pinks come and go for me, Dianthus ‘Bath Pink’

Like gardening in general, I’ve seen fads and fanaticisms move across the horizon of time in the garden world, and that is just in the spread of my own thirty year experience. That is why I take such a open-minded approach to garden opinions (probably the only thing I am so open-minded about!) There is the macro history of gardens, and the micro-history. Within my micro–history I have taken up the view of some long forgotten garden writer who said that the old fashioned flowers and the trite combinations have their virtues. I believe that, and so long as we don’t mindlessly follow ticky-tacky garden designs there is nothing wrong with red geraniums, blue lobelias, and white alyssums. So in my own renovations, I’ve been buying old favorites which had faded from my gardens over the years.

There are still many which I hope to put into place, but here are some I bought this year… all stuck into the few places prepared for garden success. I’ll move things about for design after the plants flourish- little worse than a weak and suffering plant.

campanulas, Campanula persicifolia, Campanula carpatica, Campanula portenschlagiana

foxgloves -Digitalis purpurea and trying ‘Mertonensis’ for the first time
Gaura lindheimeri which never survived more than one season, but I’m trying it in a different place
a rosy colored threadleaf coreopsis – the old one, Coreopsis verticillata ‘Zagreb’, I managed to keep by placing a start somewhere other than the original border
hollyhocks
caryopteris, a different, newer variety ‘Dark Knight’
lupines. I hadn’t planted these since I moved from the old house more than twenty-five years ago ; now I have a bunch
Shasta daisies