What's Blooming in My Flower Garden?
This year, everything seems to be blooming earlier in the gardens - my flower garden is bursting with so much color and life.
The perennial flower cutting garden is located just outside my main greenhouse at the foot of my long clematis pergola. My gardeners and I spend a lot of time caring for this garden - carefully placing and planting each specimen. Right now it is already showing off many lupines, poppies, columbines, irises, dianthus, alliums, peonies, and more. Such a gorgeous welcome to summer this Memorial Day Weekend.
Here are some photos, enjoy.
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- My large flower cutting garden, which measures 150-feet by 90-feet, is growing more and more lush each year. I wanted the plants to be mixed, so every bed is planted with a variety of specimens. Every row of flowers is interesting and colorful. Right now, we have so many lupines!
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- Lupinus, commonly known as lupin or lupine, is a genus of flowering plants in the legume family, Fabaceae. The genus includes more than 200 species. It’s always great to see the tall spikes of lupines blooming in the garden. Lupines come in lovely shades of purple, pink, white, yellow, and even red. Lupines also make great companion plants, increasing the soil nitrogen for vegetables and other plants nearby.
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- The leaves of lupine are grey-green with silvery hairs. They are palmately compound in groups of nine to 17. Leaflets are two to five inches long, and up to an inch wide.
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- I grow so many alliums here at the farm and they continue to bloom so beautifully interspersed with other blooms. These easy-to-grow bulbs come in a broad palette of colors, heights, bloom times, and flower forms. They make excellent cut flowers for fresh or dried bouquets. What’s more, alliums are relatively resistant to deer, voles, chipmunks, and rabbits. This allium is ‘Globemaster.’
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- ‘Globemaster’ is one of the biggest alliums. Small, silvery purple florets form stunning eight to 10-inch flower heads.
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- We continue to plant more and more flowering plants in this garden. Here is Brian planting Baptisia I recently purchased from this year’s Trade Secrets. When planting, always remember to tease the roots to stimulate growth before putting into the ground.
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- Baptisia produces loads of sturdy spikes filled with rich pea-like blossoms that emerge in mid to late spring.
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- The showy terminal flower spikes are followed by inflated seed pods. The pea-like flowers are attractive to butterflies and other insect pollinators.
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- This is Baptisia ‘Carolina Moonlight’. This plant produces loads of sturdy spikes filled with rich buttery yellow pea-like blossoms that emerge in mid to late spring.
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- And here are also lots of gorgeous poppies blooming everywhere – those colorful tissue paper-like flowers that look stunning both in the garden and in the vase. Poppies are flowering plants in the subfamily Papaveroideae of the family Papaveraceae. They produce open single flowers gracefully located on long thin stems, sometimes fluffy with many petals and sometimes smooth.
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- Poppies are attractive, easy-to-grow herbaceous annual, biennial or short-lived perennial plants. Flowers have four to six petals, many stamens forming a conspicuous whorl in the center of the flower and an ovary of two to many fused carpels. The petals are showy and may be almost any color. Poppies require very little care, whether they are sown from seed or planted when young – they just need full sun and well-drained soil.
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- The plants typically grow to about two feet in height forming colorful flowers during spring and into summer.
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- Oriental poppy blossoms, Papaver orientale, last only a week or two, but during that time, they provide one of the high points of the gardening season with its bold colors. The flowers appear to be fashioned of crepe paper and can be more than six-inches across on stems up to three-feet in height.
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- Iris flowers can begin blooming in late winter to early spring. A range of varieties provide extended color in the flower bed. Iris care is minimal once the growing iris is established. I have many iris cultivars growing in the garden. Iris flowers bloom in shades of purple, blue, white, and yellow and include many hybridized versions that are multi-colored. Iris × hollandica, commonly known as the Dutch iris, is a hybrid iris developed from species native to Spain and North Africa. The bulbous iris has narrow linear green leaves and bears largish blue to yellow to white flowers.
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- Anyone who visits this garden admires the bearded irises. These flowers get their common name from their blooms, which consist of upright petals called “standards,” pendant petals called “falls,” and fuzzy, caterpillar-like “beards” that rest atop the falls.
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- The columbine plant, Aquilegia, is an easy-to-grow perennial that blooms in a variety of colors during spring. With soft-mounding scalloped leaves and delicate blossoms nodding on flower stems, columbine is ideal for borders, cottage gardens or naturalizing wooded areas. This columbine is a rich, dark purple with white tips. The bonnet-like flowers come in single hues and bi-colored in shades of white, pink, crimson, yellow, purple and blue.
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- Here is a white columbine flower. On this, bright apple-green foliage forms under the tall stems bearing pure white flowers and short curled spurs.
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- Here is a perennial poppy commonly called Moroccan poppy. Papaver atlanticum hails from Spain and Morocco and shows off soft apricot-orange, semi-double three-inch flowers.
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- Dianthus flowers belong to a family of plants that includes carnations and are characterized by their spicy fragrance. Dianthus plants may be found as a hardy annual, biennial, or perennial and most often used in borders or potted displays. There are numerous types of dianthus – most have pink, red, or white flowers with notched petals.
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- Here is another dianthus – very different with its fringed blooms.
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- Lady’s mantle, Alchemilla vulgaris, grows along both sides of the path of my cutting garden. It is a clumping perennial which typically forms a mound of long-stalked, circular, scallop-edge light green leaves, with tiny, star-shaped, chartreuse flowers – they’re so pretty.
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- And, among my favorite flowers is the peony. The peony is any plant in the genus Paeonia. Peonies are considered rich in tradition – they are the floral symbol of China, the state flower of Indiana, and the 12th wedding anniversary bloom. The peonies are stunning this year – wait until you see the herbaceous peony bed filled with large pink and white flowers. What flowers are blooming in your gardens?
Martha Pins
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