Finding plants with interesting foliage is always a treat, but if they’re discouragingly expensive or too fussy to grow successfully, the thrill can go off pretty quickly. So these days, I turn first to seed catalogs to see what I can grow for myself before I start hunting through online nursery listings or visiting local garden centers. Here are a few of my favorite foliage finds that are easy to start from seed and easy to grow in the garden, too.
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Tags: Allium ‘Mount Everest’; Stipa tenuissima; flowers; bulb; grass; white; late spring; Hayefield; side garden; house; porch; steps; path; arch; arbor; mulch; 2011 |
It’s hard to imagine what garden blogging would be like if we didn’t have access to digital cameras for capturing images. I suppose there must be a few gardening-focused blogs that don’t have photos, but for most of us, including pictures in our posts is a fun way to record and share the highlights of our garden through the season, and to show off our favorite plants, places, and things. Taking pictures with a digital camera is so simple that it’s easy to end up with a ridiculous amount of images over the course of a single year. Unless you find some useful way of organizing them, though, all those image files aren’t much more useful than the dusty boxes filled with old prints and slides from our pre-digital days.
How exciting to get such an enthusiastic response to the offering of seeds in my last post! I have a little follow-up to do on that project, plus a few other miscellaneous bits of information that I thought you might find interesting or amusing.
When I first decided to divide my fall posts into flowers, foliage, and fruits, I chose to leave the fruits for last, figuring that I’d have several more weeks to capture the bounty of berries and seedheads. Unfortunately, the unusual cold and snow event at the end of October flattened much of the garden and meadow, bringing the 2011 gardening season to a screeching halt. That was disappointing, of course, but since then, a new twist to this topic has come to mind. I still have some autumn shots to share, but after them, I’ll reveal the new point of this post.
For the past several years, Dave at The Home Garden has hosted The Fall Color Project, giving bloggers an opportunity to share links to their posts on peak fall colors in their area. This year, I didn’t even have to leave Hayefield to find lots of showy autumn leaves.
