Cold Climate Gardening

The double colchicums, which are later blooming, are at their peak:

'Waterlily' colchicum blooms late enough for me that it is sometimes ruined by freezes. Never been very floriferous, either.

Colchicum autumnale 'Alboplenum' is very floriferous and looks fantastic growing through dark foliage.

The larger colchicums, such as 'The Giant' or C. speciosum work well at the base of shrubs.

Here's a closeup of those colchicums in the lilac-forsythia hedge.

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The growing season gets a slow enough start around here that many annuals don’t really strut their stuff until September. This is a real liability for the frost-sensitive ones like cosmos. I learned to seek out early blooming varieties because the old-fashioned ones often only had two weeks of bloom before shriveling in the first frost. On the other hand, many of the spring bloomers, enjoying the return of cool evenings and plentiful rain, make a comeback. This includes pansies, foxgloves, mountain bluets, and catmint.

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A lot of the plants from last month are still blooming, though most of them look a bit weather-beaten and are past their peak. Goldenrod, asters, and Joe Pye weed are starting in the fields. A careful inspection of the wooded hillside reveals the first flashes of red. I’ve always maintained that, for cold climate gardeners, autumn really starts in the middle of August. I suppose you could just as easily say that cold climate gardeners should start their “fall” planting in late summer. But it’s time to start thinking about it, that’s for sure.
Photo Gallery
Click on any thumbnail for a medium image, and click on the medium image for an even bigger one, if you want to see detail. If you click on the first thumbnail, you will be able to go through all of them without coming back to the main post to click the next one.

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There is a lot in bloom right now. A lot. I had to make two columns on my sheet of paper to list them all. I thought it would be a good time to test the gallery feature again. Linda sent me a template that helped me get the gallery feature working better. When you click on the first thumbnail, you are taken to a medium-sized version of the image that has additional description. Below it, you will see thumbnails of the previous and next images in the gallery. Further down the page, you can comment on the image if you wish. Or come back here and comment on the post. Or do both. I love comments!

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Reading Carol’s description of her plant cataloging project got me thinking about my own efforts to organize my records. When I first started gardening, I used some large index cards to catalog all my plants. I entered the same info Carol did, but didn’t include the plant tags. On the back of each card I entered the date of first bloom and date of last bloom.

Somewhere along the line I stopped adding cards.

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Poppies, peonies, and iris: the three Grandes Dames of June
In a cold climate, the gardening season is shorter and more compressed. By the time the spring flowers get going, boom! it’s summer. Consider this: on May 29th we had our last frost. The next day it hit 80F (27C), which we reckon to be summery, and a mere nine days later it was 92F (33C). So anything you wait until danger of frost is passed to plant gets hit with summer before it knows which way is up. That doesn’t happen every year, but it shows why we often have what other people consider spring flowers blooming with summer flowers.

Around here, there are three flowers synonymous with June: Oriental poppies, peonies, and several kinds of iris.

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Variegated bulbous oat grass, sweet white violet, and a bit of ‘White Nancy’ lamium in the lower left cornerBecause of the warm April, a lot of the daffodils that were still blooming last year are done for this year. This is the “gap” time between the early blooming spring flowers and the big June extravaganza when all the experts say I should have lots of tulips blooming, but I don’t. I love tulips, but they prefer better draining soil than what I’ve got, and the plentiful rodents like to eat them. Instead, I seem to have a lot of green and white vignettes, such as the one above, and the one below.

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