Continued Growth

Less than a week later, significant changes are already afoot. The indestructible Niobe clematis is starting to bloom. (it fell over last night, doesn't seem to care...), the Wigela is covered in blossoms, even with its weird leaning habit (I have tried to stake it to be more upright; anyway, the pverall effect is interesting and I can go with it); the whiskey barrel planter with its dianthus and ribbon grass is looking lovely, especially with the purple sage next to it, and the nasturtiums continue to come up from seeds. Also, the (pair?) of clematis that bloomed late last year seemed to really want to go up, so I moved it to where the Niobe was in previous years. BOY did it want to go up: it's climbed the trellis and is now looking for more places to go. Need to train that sucker.

A pic of the Million Bells haul from the BBG sale, along with a couple Zinnias I'm looking forward to integreating into some containers. Meanwhile, we're keeping an eye on the edge of the container that housed Million Bells last year, hoping the seedlings coming up are, in fact, more Million Bells. (They did reseed last year--FREE PLANTS!--so we're optimistic.) A zillion--or perhaps, we should say, "million" small seedings are coming up in various other containers, so we're keeping our fingers crossed on those. reagrdless, they appear to be something good, and not weeds.

The SECOND Triumphant Return of Lean & Green!!!

OK, so we kind of crapped out last year, even after promising to be better about posting. The good news is that this happened because someone actually paid us to design and install their garden for them. (Nick in Carroll Gardens! We love you!)

Anyway, that took up a lot of our gardening energy and time.(Altho that is not to say that the L&G homestead didn't look lovely. It did, we have photos--you know, a few--but that is in the past! New L&G horizons await in '08!)

The garden is coming back strong this year. A certain coreopsis did not return, and this irritates us. But the peonies, the clematis, the salvia, the bleeding heart, the lillies, the sedum, the wiegela, the veronica and more--even a rose--is in the house.

There appears to be a lot of self seeding action as well, which L&G is into for a variety of reasons: it takes things up a notch in terms of a challenge, plus, we're in a fiscally conservative period. But really, we don't have a lot of room for new plants, as our investments in perennials have really paid off. (Our upstairs neighbor commented that he was envious of our garden, saying he hadn't even started yet, and was surprised to learn everything he was looking at just came back on its own...)

So we're into the idea of seeds this year. We have started a seed/transplant lab, to see what we can actually get, and bought a bunch of seeds from Renee's Seeds, which we also planted in our client's garden. (Sweet Peas--which we covet, but are skeptical of--and some nasturtiums.) We're hoping some of the Million Bells we planted last year are self seeding, which would be fab, but we also spent a good deal of our Brooklyn Botanic Garden Member sale budget on several of these plants, which have taken center stage since we fired petunias. (Our mother recently confessed to buying some at the public market in Rochester. Buyer beware, is all we can say....)

We've said too much, and will post more recent pics soon--things have already changed, of course.

But in closing, I want to send a organic-matter filled shout out to my former fellow gardener Josh, who is toiling the soil at Proviplot in Rhode Island! (link to, uh, come.)