This week the entire region feels like a garden with native and cultivated plants exploding with color.
It is easy to love your garden in May but this year, in honor of Mother Nature and in homage to Mother’s Day, consider extending the flowering season by learning how to grow plants all year long.
One of the easiest ways to add year-long color is simply to visit the local nursery at least once a month and take home something in bloom each month. This way you’ll have hellebores flowering in December and snowdrops in January with a dozen shrubs that add color for each month of the year.
A lovely gift for any mom or gardener is a book on the art of year- long gardening. Ann Lovejoy wrote the classic book for Western Washington back in the 1990’s entitled “The Year in Bloom.” You can still find this and other Ann Lovejoy titles on Amazon, but now two new books have taken the same idea with a different slant.
My Garden – A Year of Design and Experimentation
By Jacqueline van der Kloet Timber Press $40.00
The author may live near Amsterdam, but she is internationally known for her visionary ecological garden and this book follows a year in her personal garden where she has been growing plants with a naturalistic design flair for over 40 years. You don’t need to read a word to be mesmerized by the many photos showing how each area in her large garden changes month by month and what is planted, divided or pruned that month. Being from the Netherlands, the author’s design is heavy on the bulbs and her love affair with tulips means her spring displays are just ravishing. The images at the end of the book will inspire anyone to mix and match tulips and annuals as van der Kloet shares her most successful planting combinations. So much attention to detail pointing out the yearlong beauty of this garden will inspire gardeners no matter where they live.
Life with Flowers: Inspiration and Lessons from the Garden
By Frances Palmer Artisan Press $35.00
Gorgeous photography make this a worthy gift book but the author is more than a gardener. Frances Potter is a renowned potter and she creates in her home studio on the East Coast pairing flowers and foliage from her home garden with her unique and often whimsical containers. She grows a cutting garden to inspire her pottery work and takes the reader on a journey about incorporating flowers into your daily life. Rather than writing month by month, the author breaks the year into six specific growing periods. Winter includes forced bulbs and greenhouse flowers so even if you don’t have your own garden, you can enjoy creating indoor displays with these fresh ideas on flower arranging. One image shows pink azaleas paired with weeping bleeding heart in a porcelain glazed red bowl. Simple but stunning. The artist also includes DIY projects, practical tips and even recipes that incorporate flowers. This book is rich and varied but most of all it is beautiful.
Buying Plants for Mother’s Day?
Nothing could be finer than honoring a mom with living plants but after working at nurseries and florists my best tip for shoppers is to buy early or consider a gift certificate to a local nursery if you want to avoid crowds over the mother’s day weekend.
If you prefer to present a hanging basket, here are my recommendations:
Best hanging baskets for shade: fuchsias – with the red and white ‘Swingtime” variety the easiest to grow. Begonias – The large flowering tuberous begonias are a bit tricky but the more adaptable ‘Angel Wing’ or Begonia boliviensis are super easy to grow in sun or shade.
Best hanging baskets for sun: Ivy geraniums can handle full sun and have the advantage of repelling flies as well. (This is why you see them used in window boxes in Europe where air conditioning is rare and windows are left open.) Another plant for heat is Scavolea or Fan Flower with thick succulent -like leaves and a weeping form displaying blooms in blue, lavender and now white. A basket of Fan Flowers will please tidy gardeners as this plant does not drop faded flowers all over nor does it need to be dead headed like fuchsias and geraniums.
Marianne Binetti has a degree in horticulture from Washington State University and is the author of “Easy Answers for Great Gardens” and several other books. For answers to gardening questions, visit plantersplace.com and click “As The Expert”. Copyright for this column owned by Marianne Binetti. For more gardening information, she can be reached at her website, www.binettigarden.com.
