Garden Bloggers’ Foliage Day, May 2015

Posted on May 22, 2015 by Tina

Joining with Christina and Creating my own garden of the Hesperides, I’m pleased to showcase fab foliage for May from my garden today. We’re water-logged here in Central Texas and while I’m appreciative of the rain, I wish it would stop. Or at the very least, slow down a bit. My soil is heavy and wet, but my plants are happy. What I grow in my garden can take the extremes of Texas weather: from scorching hot, bone-dry summers to frog-drowning floods. Texas gardeners live with anything and everything.

The late May star of my back garden is the Heartleaf Skullcap, Scutellaria ovata ssp. bracteata, a cool season perennial which does spread.

A lot. But I love this groundcover. The flowers are a stunning violet-blue, appreciated by pollinators, especially bees. Its foliage is soft and beautiful–to view and to feel. An attractive gray-green, the leaves are thick, soft, and scalloped, while set opposite one another along a hairy stem.

Heartleaf Skullcap foliage is nice to touch, but imparts a slightly sticky residue and this trait is (supposedly) what makes it unappealing to deer. The bit of icky-sticky left on my skin when I pull up the plants at the end of Skullcap’s growing season is its most objectionable quality to me.

Skullcap is a favorite of mine: it waves a fetching blue/gray throughout spring and early summer and combines beautifully with many other perennials, each with their own interesting foliage.

Below, it contrasts with Purple Coneflower, Echinacea purpurea, and its bright green foliage,

…and here, it’s planted with tiny-leafed Pink Texas Skullcap, Scutellaria suffrutescens,

…and the maiden–grassy Miscanthus sinensis ‘Adagio’. Hiding underneath the Skullcap is a clump of Kelly green, aromatic, and fleshy Garlic Chives, Allium tuberosum.

A brighter, lacy green is found with Common Yarrow, Achillea millefolium.

This stand provides a nice backdrop for the Protector-In-Chief. Doesn’t he look happy and content?

This fun grouping fills in the northern, shady border of a little back garden bed.

It’s a mixed-bag of foliage characters, including white-stripey Dianella/Variegated Flax Lily, Dianella tasmanica ‘Variegata’, Katie’s Dwarf Ruellia, Ruellia ‘Katie’, and Columbine, Aquilegia. This particular Columbine is one of the natural hybrids of my A. canadensis and A. chrysantha. Photobombing on the far left is a containerized Yucca filamentosa, ‘Color Guard’ and some Iris straps, and spreading its succulence in the remainder of the bed is a creeping Sedum, probably Sedum diffusum ‘Potosinum’, though it’s a passalong to me from a friend, so I’m not positive of its identification.

And a bird’s-eye view….

Isn’t Columbine foliage pretty? Especially so, when adorned with raindrops.

This young Goldenball Leadtree, Leucaena retusa, glows in the late afternoon west sun.

Its fragrant, powder-puff flowers are done for the year, but the foliage will flutter in the breeze until the first hard freeze.

The happy pairing of the structural and evergreen Sparkler Sedge, Carex phyllocephala ‘Sparkler’ and white-blooming, herbaceous Four O’Clock, Mirabilis jalapa, is garden serendipity.

The ‘Sparkler’ sports jazzy stripes in the razor-thin leaves and paired with the Four O’Clock’s lush, smooth leaves–it’s a handsome combination.

There are many shapes, sizes, and colors of gorgeous leaves in gardens–mine and others. Take a look at the lovely Creating my own garden of the Hesperides and see interesting foliage from all over the world–and Happy Garden Bloggers’ Foliage Day!

Foliage Day, March 2015

Posted on March 22, 2015 by Tina

The Wearing of the Green

An apt phrase for March in Texas if there ever was one, with apologies to revolutionaries everywhere. No doubt this ditty was sung in the past week somewhere in Austin, Texas, but my focus is on verdant foliage in my spring (officially!) garden. With thanks to Christina of Creating my own garden of the Hesperides for hosting Garden Bloggers’ Foliage Day, spring has most definitely sprung in my home town. Let’s take a quick stroll through this Texas spring garden, shall we?

The columbines are flowering, but their leaves are lush during fall, through winter and into spring bloom time. This little one is paired with a passalong daylily leaf, emerged from winter dormancy, which won’t bloom until early summer.

And this group of columbines leads in a nice foliage vignette which includes a potted American Century Plant, Agave americana and Cast Iron Plant, Aspidistra elatior.

I grow only the native Texas columbines, the Aquilegia chrysantha and the Aquilegia canadensis because others will fry to a crisp in the Texas summer heat.

Engelmann Daisy or Cutleaf Daisy, Engelmannia peristenia, sports deeply lobed fuzzy, gray-green foliage.

The bright yellow blooms will accompany the foliage later in the season.

Lyreleaf Sage, Salvia lyrata, is attractive year round,

…and the foliage makes an excellent ground cover. I planted Lyreleaf as a groundcover in the area where my honeybee hives are located. The plants withstand moderate foot traffic and we can place our beekeeping equipment on the rosettes with little negative impact, as long as the Lyreleaf are not blooming or setting seed.

And once the blooms open, the bees don’t need to travel far for gathering nectar and pollen.

Glorious in burgundy rimmed foliage are the leaves of the Martha Gonzales Rose.

There are currently only a couple of roses open, but I love the color of the tender, new leaves.

Golden Groundsel, Packera obovata, is in full blooming mode, but its foliage demonstrates a bit of a split-personality. Most of the year, the plant acts as a low ground cover with ovate, serrated leaves hugging the ground. As the bloom stalks shoot upward to their flowering ends, the leaves along the stalk form lance-shaped and fern-like.

It’s a foliage twofer.

One of my favorite plants for shade/part-shade is the White Yarrow, Achillea millefolium. It’s always lush, elegant and beautifully spring-green.

I know many people suffer oak allergies and I am sympathetic to their sniffling and stuffed-headed misery, but the pollen tassels on the Shumard Oak, Quercus shumardii, are golden and gorgeous.

I look forward to seeing them every year.

This Shumard branch shows off its new chartreuse leaves,

…accessorized with a tassel skirt, amidst a background full of the stunning native small tree, Mountain Laurel, Sophora secundiflora. The dark green leaves of the Laurel are punctuated by clusters of the signature fragrant, deep purple blooms. Nothing speaks early spring in Austin like that pairing!

What foliage do you sing about this bonny March? Have a look at foliage from gardens everywhere by visiting Garden Bloggers’ Foliage Day and happy spring to Northern Hemisphere gardeners and a good autumn to gardeners in the Southern Hemisphere .

Foliage Day, February 2015

Posted on February 22, 2015 by Tina

Here we are on the cusp of spring–some of us closer to that cusp than others, but we in the Northern Hemisphere are all headed in the same direction and whooping it up as buds are swelling and leaves are greening. Those in the Southern Hemisphere–happy almost autumn to you! Regardless are where the gardens are planted, thanks to Christina of Creating my own garden of the Hesperides for hosting Garden Bloggers’ Foliage Day set aside for profiling and parading foliage–for this gardener, of the late-ish winter garden.

Blackberries. Yum. I can’t wait to make pie and cobbler, but also to pick the berries right off this vine in May. For now though, I simply appreciate the burgundy blush that winter’s chill left on some of the prickly leaves of the Rosborough Blackberry vine (Rubus, sp.), ‘Brazos’.

Opposite in the color and texture spectrum of the deeply colored and thorny foliage of Blackberry is this Heartleaf Skullcap, Scutellaria ovata ssp. bracteata.

This winter spreading, spring and summer blooming perennial, sports subtle gray-green leaves which are soft to the touch.

The morning sun backlit this pairing of Bamboo Muhly, Muhlenbergia dumosa and Cast Iron Plant, Aspidistra elatior.

I love the effect.

In the same garden, just down the pathway, I also really like this combination of Cast Iron Plant (at top), Sparkler Sedge, Carex phyllocephala ‘Sparkler’, and Iris straps (unknown variety).

All are evergreen and hardy, water wise, and lovely plants year-round.

And this fun combo includes tawny, crispy about-to-be-pruned-to-the-ground, Inland Sea Oats, Chasmanthium latifolium, graceful Giant Liriope or Lilyturf, Liriope muscari, snazzy Variegated Flax Lily, Dianella tasmanica ‘Variegata’, and lacy and lovely summer-blooming Yarrow, Achillea millefolium.