Cold Climate Gardening

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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Larkspur ‘Sublime Dark Blue’Ah, yes, Garden Bloggers Bloom Day has rolled around again. I always seem to have trouble finishing these bloom day posts on time. Even though I take photos for days ahead, the actual middle day of the month always seems to be a busy time. I should probably make it short and sweet, but making anything with words short seems to be difficult for me. I wanted to start off with larkspur, just to astonish all those Austin bloggers who seem to think it is a spring blooming plant. Are you kidding? Mine hadn’t even germinated for the April bloom report. Johnny’s is one of the few seed merchants that sells larkspur by color, and I always get this dark blue-purple to sow in the peony bed along with peony-flowered poppies, so there will be some color here after the peonies are done blooming. That’s the plan, anyway. Germination of both poppy and larkspur is always sporadic, and the poppies often look spindly.

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