Summertime already??

I know most of you find that blog title totally nuts, but let me explain.

So I do landscaping for a living right . . . more specifically I work with flower displays for a living. So let me explain to you what my January is like at work.

Revising my order and working on sales for all of our early Spring flowers, ie Pansies, Tulips, etc.

Diving head first into Summer flower display designs, sales, and ordering. I spend half of my day looking at flower photos, working up ideas, and focusing on our summer plans. I work with bright colors, light, and all things tropical.

My office is a gray cinderblock room with bright flower photos and other photos all over the walls (because gray does not drive creativity). So I spend my day looking at summer and then walk out into the frozen winter to go home.

So in reality, I have no idea what season it is. Does anyone else understand my confusion?

Finally some Spring photos

Ok, sorry it has been forever, life is really crazy these days between work, Eric, and you know . . . just life for me in the Spring. Anyway, this past Sunday Eric reminded me that I needed to take photos of my Spring tulips to share with my sister Jennifer, so we took a few pictures and I thought that I would share. Cletus kind of likes them too :)

This is Cletus and I with my flower pots.



A new mix that Diane and I came up with of Blue Muscari, a funky mini daffodil and a faint little pink tulip. We both decided we loved it!



Just the house in bloom. Thanks to Eric for getting the lawn mowed so that it could stop looking abandoned. We had so much rain and I was just so busy it was starting to look a little scary.

I finally decided what to do with it . . .

Just in case you don't know me or don't know much about me, I kinda like the outdoors, plants, nice weather, that kind of stuff. So I am just a little bit excited about the coming spring. I am excited to see my yard come to life and to be able to start spending more time outdoors.

Anyway, so there is this spot in my backyard that I have been struggling with what to do with. It is a long narrow bed area that is up against my fence, just an odd spot so I killed the grass there last year and created a bed, but never got it planted with anything. But, I think that I have finally come up with a pallet that I like.

It starts with Solidago 'Fireworks' which is this kind of crazy yellow flowering perennial. Then mixed in the back with that will be the Stachys 'Humello' which I think was the subject of a previous blog post. I really like it if you can't tell. Them mixed in front of those will be these fun Echinacea 'Coconut Lime'. I really just love the form and the color. And planted with those to add that little touch of pink that I seem to really need these days will be Coreopsis 'Heavens Gate' which has dainty bi-color pink flowers.

All of these should combine to create a nice bed for me. I am going for a nice mixed/naturalized look. I am excited about the variety in color and texture. Once I get them planted and they start flowering this summer I will post a few pictures so that ya'll can see how it turns out.

I'm excited for this one . . .

With the arrival of March I am anxious for Spring. I planted a ridiculous amount of bulbs last fall but there is one that I am particularly excited to see in the next month or two when it comes up.

It is called Allium schubertii . . . I love alliums, but this one is a little different, and as normal for me I had to go with the funky one. These are planted in my front flower bed right by the front door. I am counting down the days till I get to see them.

But, alas it is still winter for 3 more weeks and then the Spring weather will probably be slow to come, but still . . . these give me something to be really excited for and something to look forward to. I planted a lot of tulips, hyacinths, muscari, and daffodils too, but I will share those with all of you when they come up in the Spring.

Is it pink or purple?

Quick background here . . . I have one of my full time seasonal color employees that works with me at my office and we collaborate with the two designers on staff a lot. We help eachother a lot by just talking things through and getting eachother's opinions. We work a lot with color and combining colors and just a lot of collaboration.

Anyway, today one of our designers was working on a project and had shown me a plant that I didn't really have any experience with. Well the lady that works for me is a perennial flower guru and knows them all. So they two of them were talking and we were pulling up pictures online and trying to figure out some others plants that would accent this one well in a garden.

The conversation got funny and I realized that anyone listening in would probably think that we were a bunch of loons. We were discussing how pink/purple this flower is. After a long discussion the consensus was it is more pink than a purple but more purple than a pink. Not fuschia, still purple, but a purple with pink tones and not blue tones. I am thinking that I might need to send a request to the people at crayola to ask them to come up with a nifty one to two word name for this color.

If anyone has any suggestions I would love to hear them.

By the way, the name of the plant is Stachys officinalis 'Hummelo'.

Glutton For Punishment

This summer has been quite a productive one for my home landscape . . . I somewhat started from scratch and for someone who works as much as I do and lives alone I feel like I have accomplished a lot.

On Friday at work Michelle mentioned that Midwest Groundcovers (one of our wholesale vendors that I have bought most of my plant material from) was having a cart sale in their retail section this morning. Which meant that you put everything you can on a cart and the total price is $75.00. Which comes out to be cheaper than my wholesale pricing even with my discount. So we decided that we would check it out.

Well I came out of there today with about 30 1 gal. perennials, two large shrub roses, and some groundcover. Sounds like a lot to plant right? Well the planting part is easy really . . . the labor intensive part for me at this point is prepping the beds to be planted. I have an area for about half of it almost ready to go, but now I have to hurry and get the other bed all done so that I can plant it in the next two weeks before it gets too late in the season. So that is where my next week and weekend and possibly further will be spent.

The somewhat depressing part is that so much of what I planted this year was done so late in season that I really didn't get to appreciate it . . . so next spring should be awesome.

What I forgot to mention that just when I finish planting all of this I will have the bulbs that I ordered delivered and then there will be planting all of those. Whew . . . this is gonna get tiring.

I'm a little annoyed

I am in Michigan for a few days for work. I left early this morning and got here and started looking at installations that I did earlier this Spring. Not a single site that I visited today has taken care of the material that we installed. I know that it has nothing to do with me, but I can't seem to help but to take this personally. I do my best not to, but when it is so many back to back, it kind of hurts a little. I jump through hoops for clients to make things just right for them and deal with all of their stupid quirks and then they don't even care about the finished project. At least not enough to take care of it. Days like today I feel like I care about the overall look of their site more than they do. I work really hard and feel like a little piece of me goes into each of these projects. Anyway, it was a little bit of a depressing day. I just hope that tomorrow is better and I see something that actually makes me happy.

Patience is a virtue . . . it pays off!

When I was planning the plant pallet for the bed that I planted in my back yard last month I was looking for a specific hydrangea that I really liked. But no one had it. All of my perennial growers were out and no one would have it until mid to late August. Being who I am I couldn't wait and just purchased another variety instead. Side note: I do like the ones that I ended up with a lot.

Anyway, so I was at Home Depot on Saturday picking up yard waste bags and fertilizer and decided to go and browse their shrub selection. And right there I found three of the 'Limelight' Hydrangea that I was searching all over for earlier this summer. And the real beauty of the situation is that they were on clearance so they were the same price that I would pay wholesale so I didn't feel like I was wasting money buying them retail (sorry to all of you who are forced to by retail).

I found some Privet that I really liked too so I brought them all home and planted them in another new bed that I had just finished prepping. So now I have that one started. I will post photos and a plant list when it is finished. I need to by some more plants and get it all done. Sorry . . . can't display that work in progress cause it kind of looks silly right now.

I just wanted to share my joy in finally getting what I really wanted.

My New Bed

I know it's been a while since I have blogged about anything, but give me a break . . . I've been busy. Work was crazy as always in the spring and I have been trying to get a few things done around the house. But I did finally finish one project . . . a new planter bed in my backyard. When I moved in there were a couple random small beds in the back yard, but other than that it was just not so good grass and weeds as far as the eye could see. I had to do something so I forced myself to get started on my own landscape . . . and actually doing some real landscaping and not just flower pots although I have plenty of those. I will post pictures of those later.

This was my starting point. It is an odd area of the backyard off the patio, but the gate between the porch steps and with the air conditioner. And to make things better there was a random little bed with two Arborvitaes and a Clematis in the middle. So I got started. First step was to buy the hot green marking paint so that I could mark out the bed and make sure that it was exactly where I wanted it. Yes, I know the easy way is with a garden hose, but that would not let me play with spray paint. Once I had the bed where I wanted it then came the round up. Gotta make sure that all of the grass and weeds were totally dead before I started to pull them out. Can't have grass filling it back in when I am done!! Then came the absolute brutal task of cutting out the sod by hand. It was tight spaces and not a big enough area to really use a sod cutter so the spade became my friend. OUCH!! I had blisters and my back hurt for days. Next step, was about 4" of compost. The soil was not so great so it really needed that layer of compost. Then came the planting . . . I had been thinking of what I wanted to plant for a while, then my growers didn't have everything that I wanted so I had to make some sacrifices. Anyway, the final plant list for this bed is Quick Fire Hydrangea, Knockout Rose, Allium Summer Beauty, Geranium Max Frei, Karl Foerester Grass, and then two flats of Apricot Cora Vinca (I had to have some annual flower space). In any case, that was my project for last week . . . now onto the next.

Another Reminder . . .

So I bought this house in November and at that point all of the existing plant material was starting to go dormant not to mention I was too crazy busy to care to look and see what it was. But as Spring approached I had a huge desire to do something with my landscape and to find out more about what was already here.

I love home improvement stores so I go all of the time, and every time I have to go into the garden center. As I have been looking at plants and bulbs I have had this huge urge to buy peonies. They are kind of an old fashioned flower, but for some reason I have this huge desire to have some. Then I realized it is because my mom has some and really loves them.

Anyway, my pleasant surprise this Spring was to discover that I already have some. There are two different ones in two different parts of the yard. They just started blooming and they are beautiful!

Aggrevation

Today I went to the Home Depot to pick up a couple of thing that I needed for the yard and was once again annoyed to see plant material available for sale that either not meant for this part of the country or out way to soon cause it's still too cold out for it.

I love home improvement stores, I can walk through one for hours. But they do the same thing that every garden center and nursery does, just worse. They tell people that they know all about plants and what they are selling, but the sell the wrong thing. Shrubs, trees and perennials that are not hardy in this zone. And my real aggravation right now is all of the flowers that they had out. It is early spring in Chicago. We are not going to be frost free for at least a month. They had large vegetable plants out, summer annuals, and perennials in bloom that shouldn't bloom till July.

I think that this is one of the reasons that most people feel like they can't grow anything. They buy the wrong material or at the wrong time and can't figure out why it fails. I just wish that some store somewhere would take the high road and set the example for everyone else and actually do the right thing for the consumer.

I have realized that this is also part of my aggravation with some of my clients at work. They ask why I don't have a lot of different options for spring and my answer is that spring flowers are quite limited. But when they go to the store or talk to lower quality contractors that will say anything for a buck, they see all of these other options and think that I am trying to force them into something or lying to them. When actually I am trying to do the right thing. All that I can really say to this is "ugh". I will just keep doing what I know is best and let people who insist on it learn the hard way. Sad really, but nothing I can do about it.