Canyon wrote:Wow, you've come a long way, baby! That bed looks fabulous!
I am in a similar zone to yours, so I'm curious about your plants. Could you list them when you have time - what are the purple, yellow, and white (shrubby) plants? Any of any color that you tried but did not thrive? Any in particular that you love?
I seem to also remember that you were trying raised beds in your back yard with chunks of wood in them. Update on how that is going?
Sure! The orange/yellow flowers are common coreopsis, and the red/yellow are blanketflower. I don't know the strain of lavender, but it was a more cold-hardy variety I bought at Lowe's. The originals are in the back yard and about 5' across. They re-seed readily and these in the front yard are transplants.
I have about five varieties of penstemons. A couple are hybrids, so I don't know the species. They really flourish here with very little supplemental water, and have been reseeding on their own.
The Greek Yarrow is starting to fade out for the year, but makes a lovely ground cover with the flowers only getting a few inches tall. The Tiffendel gold at the edge of the grass is also a nice groundcover, but fairly slow to spread. Not pictured in the sulphur buckwheat, which is really an excellent plant that needs no supplemental water, and holds it's flower stalks all winter, so it remains ornamental after it's done flowering.
For shrubs, I have fernbush, mountain big sagebrush, yellow rabbitbrush, Apache plume, sand cherry, mountain mahogany, purple sage and desert willow. I also have two shrubs from High Country Gardens that I'm unsure of the identity of. One is in the foreground of the last photo, and blooms bright yellow in mid-late summer. The other blooms late summer and extremely attractive to bees, but a nuisance in that it reseeds to much.
For grasses, I have Stipa gigantea, blue grama "blonde ambition", Idaho fescue, basin wildrye and the bluebunch wheatgrass. I haven't had any luck establishing ricegrasses or needlegrasses from collected seed though.
This year I also added some lupine, balsamroot and winterfat.