Spring Flowers: May 2020

It's another cold, rainy day here in North Alabama, with a cold front once again plunging temperatures well below average for this time of year. Every cold snap slows the warm weather veggies, but other parts of the garden have not minded a bit. Today we're checking in with the flowers and looking at what's doing well so far this first year at the new house.

First daylilies of the new year!

First up is the perennial I'm obsessed with, the daylily! We transplanted all of our Oakes Daylilies plants to the new house back in October and then bought some more earlier this year. I also brought over some smaller fans of the other daylilies I had at the old house, so there are quite a few daylilies in both the front and back yards. This week we had our first one bloom! A Stella D'Oro flowered in the front bed and brought some cheerful yellow color to the view. This powerhouse rebloomer is the daylily type you'll see at lots of shopping centers and public places because it continues to produce flowers all season long. It's inexpensive, easy to find at garden centers, and undemanding in the garden, where it shrugs off all weathers and grows in any kind of soil. While I like the Purple D'Oro better just for color, I was delighted to see the first daylily blooms of the season! Many of my other plants are forming clusters of scapes now, so I hope to have lots of blooms in the near future. Right now I'm only adding rebloomers to the collection so that the garden has more color for longer periods of time. I've got my eye on a few more additions from the current Oakes catalog!

Purple irises in the low ground bank.

The irises that we transplanted from the old house have also bloomed this week, and I'm pleased to see them coming along. Next year they will be stronger and have more clusters, but I only moved the smaller, younger plants from the old house and left the most robust clumps for the new owners (I sure hope they appreciate them!). I'd like to add more irises to our collection for next year; all of ours were accidental additions that came along with the free daylilies we first dug up from our friend's yard. I've come to like them a lot, however, and I'm looking to acquire some different colors and types when I can. Irises are especially good in a mix of daffodils and daylilies where they bloom after the daffodils and before the daylilies, extending the period of interest in the bed. We have several in the bank at the lowest spot along the fence, where everything seems to be taking the wetter conditions in stride. Later the irises will give way to the daylilies planted all around them, but there's plenty of room for both irises and daylilies to spread.

I had trouble with my dwarf sunflowers this year, mostly because little critters dug several of them up early on, but the few that made it are now starting to bloom. The little teddy bear sunflower is really cute! I hope the chipmunks don't come back and finish it off. The dwarf varieties seem fussier than the tall sunflowers and less eager to germinate, but the tall ones became magnets for squirrel raiders last summer, and I ended up having to cut them down once the rodents stole the heads and broke the leaves, leaving only tattered stalks behind. I might have to give up on sunflowers entirely and switch to something less like a rodent buffet, which is a shame because I love the big flower heads looming over the garden.

Salmon pink lily with three blooms.

 The pollinator patch is also filling in really well now, with tall spikes of gladiolus at the back, although my experiment with the low-growing variety of wildflowers is not nearly as exciting. I might stick with the original mix from now on, even though it has a lot of clover in it. Last year the pollinator mix grew with abandon and brought joy to bees and butterflies all summer. The rest of the flowers are a mix of previous hits and new experiments. Around the garden we can see liatris, mini glads, tall glads, lilies and other flowers making progress. Some of the lilies have already finished blooming, but several are still working up to their first flowers, and it has been interesting to see what colors we ended up with from the mixed bag we bought. The mini glads have been slower to sprout than the tall ones, and I think quite a few of them might not grow at all, which is disappointing, but I'm glad we hedged our bets with a bag of the tall types! In the fall we'll add more bulbs to the beds, taking into account which kinds the squirrels seem least interested in eating. It will take a few years for the empty patches to fill in as the plants spread, but eventually my cottage garden dreams will be fulfilled.

Remember if you're new to gardening during the pandemic that there are lots of online plant retailers who will ship seeds, bulbs, bare root plants, and even potted starters to your door. Holland Bulbs, Eden Brothers, American Meadows, Smokeys Daylilies, and of course my favorite, Oakes Daylilies, are all ready to set you up with all the flowers you could possibly want! You can also look for flowers at your local, independent nursery, where social distancing and safety measures are probably well established by now. Visit them early in the morning on a weekday if possible to avoid feeling crowded, and remember to wear your face covering and use hand sanitizer!