April Front Yard Garden Tour! :: Everything is Blooming and Gorgeous! :: Zone 9b Garden Tour

Hi everyone, Janie here. Welcome back to my garden. Today I'm in my front yard and today it is time for another garden tour. So I garden in Northern California zone 9b and here on my gardening channel I try and do a front yard garden tour, a backyard garden tour, and a cut flower garden tour every month of the year for this year 2022 just so that we can see the difference between my garden month to month to month as the seasons change and also I just love watching garden tours on YouTube and so I thought I would share my garden with you guys. So it's about mid-April right now and my garden is looking gorgeous. Here in Northern California sometimes we go straight from winter straight to summer. It just gets hot and it stays hot and I thought it was going to be like that this year because we did get up to the 90s for a couple weeks but then it's actually cooled back down and we've gotten a little bit of moisture a little bit of rain nowhere near enough to deal with the drought but enough that my garden has been pretty happy this month. So yeah so let me take you around and I'll show you what's going on with my garden and I want to start on the east side of my house where I have my cottage garden. All right so starting here on the east side of my house this is what I like to call my cottage garden and I just installed this earlier this year so it's just kind of getting going right now but I planted all cottage garden-y flowers including like delphiniums, necotiana, lupine, what else am I thinking, gladiolas, some verbascum, and more. And so I really want this whole side of my house just to be like an English country garden. Very informal, very casual, and lots of color. So it's looking pretty good right now. To start off with I have my gardener's supply company um is that what it is yeah gardener's supply lattice arch metal lattice arch and on either side of it I have my eden climbing roses that are actually starting to bloom out and look gorgeous. These roses are just from November. I planted them in November and they're actually starting to bloom out now. I have a of these new branches I think you call them basil breaks um that are looking really really good and then this gorgeous one right here isn't that amazing so beautiful so I am completely enjoying this um and I'll just train it up this arch all the way up and over and it should get about 10 feet tall over the next couple years so I'm hoping that in the end it'll just be a complete arch of eden climbing roses. So next to that I have another metal metal to tour also from kinsman garden supply and in that I have one of my plumbagos which is what I had in this garden bed before. I had about five plumbagos all the way down here and I cut them way way way back um and I thought maybe I could leave them in um and fit other and just keep them pruned and keep them trained but now that I'm seeing new growth already in April you'll see this one right here it's just they just are too crazy they grow too fast and I'm gonna have to take them out and I'm gonna have to transplant them. There's another one over here and I should have done this earlier this month however this month was kind of a weird month for me um I did have a pruning accident on my finger and I sliced my finger really bad so I couldn't do any hardcore gardening this month um so all this big transplanting is is just gonna have to wait for next month but that is definitely something that I have on my list that I want to get to. So I have the governor lupine just about to bloom right there you can see I have some lime green nicotiana I do have some delphiniums we also had a really bad windstorm this month that knocked over a lot of plants and that included my sunny sunny days sunny skies delphinium this is one of them this was another variety let me see if I can see the name of it from annie's annuals dusky maidens this one's dusky maidens um so that one's still looking good but I think it would be better if I staked it up so I probably need to do that over here I have some dianthus rose damai and then some more gladiolas and then you can see one two three more plumbago that I'm going to need to cut out I do have my peonies that are looking really good so I planted five bare root peonies one two three four five three of them came up and two of them were a no-go and that's okay I mean I've never really planted peonies before and it's a stretch in our zone but the three in the front look really good this one's a shirley temple peony this one's a bowl of beauty peony that's really doing the best and then this one right back here is a sorbet peony really good and then over here are my girls I have two girls ages six and eight they have this fairy garden right here and this has just become the hit of the neighborhood I will be on the other side of the fence over in my backyard and I will hear kids in the neighborhood just playing their hearts out with this fairy garden it's so sweet and so cute and all the parents stop by and say they absolutely love it so it's really sweet I think that my girls and I are gonna have to go to the plant store and get some summer annuals because right now we just have cool season annuals so that will be a fun thing to do and I think that I might you know it's been such a hit I might even just kind of expand it to this whole area won't that be cute so walking back over here through my lattice arch you can see I have these gorgeous bearded iris and I actually don't know the name of these bearded iris because they were here when I moved into this house they were over off to the left on the other side of my cottage garden and they had not been divided it was this massive clump that was just overgrown so I divided them all and planted them out right here and they look absolutely beautiful I'm really happy with them right over here hopefully you guys can see that the sun is basically going to set pretty soon right here we have a vertigo pennisetum from proven winners I planted this last March and here in zone 9b it's actually a perennial and this I'm guessing is going to get my height this year so five to six feet is my guess right now it's really early on I cut it all the way back and it has its new green growth right now but pretty soon these leaves will turn kind of like a purpley color and it will get so tall and so crazy and it like by the end of the season it looks like a monster it's really fun but it is a big big thing in my garden so I might end up taking it out eventually not this year I'm gonna leave it there this year but it just takes up so much square footage in my garden that I think eventually I'm gonna want this area for other things so right on the other side of the vertigo pennisetum I have some sunflowers one two three four five right there and these are part of my cut flower garden but they're actually part of the bonus planting not my regular so I have three succession plantings that I'm doing for my cut flower garden and it's a winter spring spring summer and then summer fall and in between each of those I have bonus plantings that I'm gonna put a couple cut flowers into my garden just while I'm waiting for the next succession to get up and blooming I have other flowers so this is part of one of my bonus plantings and these are buttercream branching sunflowers I'll put a picture up right now and I actually didn't direct sow these I tried to direct sow them and they just didn't come up I don't know what it is but I just don't do a good job direct sowing sunflowers I always do a better job transplanting them so I tried direct sowing these in this exact spot they didn't come up I got nervous and so I started growing some indoors um underneath my grow lights and on a heat mat and they popped right up so I transplanted them out here and then right behind me in this little garden bed I'm very excited because this plant right down here at the front this is a globe master allium and I got as a Christmas gift I got about 200 of these but they were delivered right around Christmas time when shipping was very iffy and it took forever and I think that they were stuck in shipping for way too long and they got moldy the bulbs got moldy by the time they had come to me so only a handful were not moldy I planted all of them anyway just to be just just to be safe and to take a chance and this is like one of three that I have which I'm really excited about so you can see the bud is just starting to come and I can't wait for them to grow right behind that I have my miscanthus cabaret and then right behind that I have my clematis armandia armandii snow drift that I actually um like trained up a little bit more I want it to kind of cover this whole part of the fence which is crazy because this was a cutting that I got from my neighbor like a tiny tiny cutting and I planted it last year and it's already that big so I'm gonna have to be pruning that back right over here is a beautiful flowering maple I'm pretty sure the variety is talini's pink um but I've lost the tag and I don't know what I did with that I did put a piece of wire going from I don't know my eve is that what you call it all the way down because these guys like to to climb and so I'm just going to kind of train it up like that so with the goal of having kind of like a wall right here of flowering maple all right there won't that be beautiful all right and just on the other side of my flowering maples I have my limelight prime hydrangea that is just starting to leaf out and look really beautiful this is a new planting as of last fall so it's kind of a baby plant right underneath that I have a couple of hostas I kind of moved these around this month but here I have two one two three somewhere of the Hans variety which is a white and green and then these are Francis Williams varieties which are lime and green um so I think that that uh along with the limelight prime and the flowering maple will be kind of a beautiful part shade to shade kind of vignette and I do need to mulch it so ignore that right next to that I do have this tiny tough stuff mountain hydrangea from proven winners and this hydrangea is supposed to stay pretty blue even if you have alkaline soil and we definitely have alkaline soil and I've actually put some soil acidifier on this plant but you can see the leaves they are kind of pink um there's a couple of them that have a tinge of blue this one over here um I don't know if you guys can see that but it has it does have a tinge of blue um so I'm gonna keep putting soil acidifier that one looks pretty blue um I'm gonna keep putting soil acidifier on it but I have a feeling that they're they're eventually gonna end up as pink blooms so that's okay I think it'll still be really pretty right here is my ivy espalier and this is the site of my pruning accident this month I was pruning it back and I was rushing trying to get it done and I just sliced my finger and four stitches later I have definitely slowed down with everything so you know you just gotta slow down especially when you're dealing with sharp objects so over here I have another limelight prime hydrangea right underneath that I have two Sarah Bernhardt peonies that I'm growing from um bare root as well so I don't know if these are gonna flower this year because these are in quite a lot of shade but we'll see how it goes I have a Wichita blue juniper right there that I absolutely love and then over here let me back up so I can show you guys this side all right so this garden bed I think needs a little bit of help this year so this is I think a I think it's a chambray blue super bina I found it at the store and I just threw it in there and I didn't really think about it but I really really love this color it's coming across as purple on my camera but it is blue it is a blue super bina so I'm hoping I can find some more of that because that will be beautiful I do have this um variety of dianthus that's very pretty it's just not I don't know I just don't love it I can't decide if I like it or not it is blooming its little head off and I don't want to move it and I don't want to cut it back while it's blooming so beautiful right here but I do think that I kind of want to revamp this area pretty soon I do have a white verbena this is not a super bina this is here here and then one over on the other side these are just verbenas that I got at the store just generic verbenas and it looks like this one has died and it looks like this one is about to die so um I think I just need to revamp this whole area this is a laurel padlam a Chinese fringe flower and then dotted around I have one of my favorite plants which is a Helen von Stein lambs ear that I absolutely love and then along the fence as well I have the mystic spires blue salvia that is starting to bloom out and it's looking gorgeous okay and over here is a little trio of pots metal pots that I did this month and it's looking really good um this big one is really starting to bloom out I packed it so tight and it's it's looking gorgeous starting off with the mystic spires blue salvia as my thriller and then for my filler I have nemesia that's not good I mean it's happy as as anything right now because the weather has been nice and cool but of course once it starts getting hotter it's you know it's not going to be very happy here but what will be happy is this common heliotrope right here and this is quickly becoming one of my favorite plants it's technically an annual here but let me spin you guys around over here I planted three of them you can see it has really dark foliage these I planted last year and I thought that they died from a couple of the frost that we had but you can see it's blooming so it is just the most amazing vanilla smell it's incredible if you guys have never smelled it I really really think that you guys should because it's just it's amazing it's I love this plant so that's going to be my filler once the nemesia is all done and then underneath I have some lamium for my spiller gorgeous in the watering can right here I have trailing lantana that's not blooming very well right now but I think it's just a little too cool for it over here I have some bacopa some purple sweet alyssum and then right behind here is a super bina sparkling amethyst that I transplanted from my backyard I cut it way back and so it hasn't flushed out again but it's about to I can see buds on it already all right so over here in my shade garden bed I worked on this bed this month as well I need to get going on this window box I planted some begonias and some caladiums from bulbs and they are just taking forever so I'm about to give up and just go buy some plants because I want some color here but that's okay we'll deal with that next month underneath here I transplanted a couple shade plants from my backyard from a garden bed that I thought got a little bit more shade than it actually does and oh my goodness this Francis William hosta has doubled in size since I've moved it here this big daddy hosta has almost doubled in size it is it's they're just so happy right here and then I did also transplant this ostrich fern so my goal for this garden bed is just to be a whole bunch of different colors of green you know like hostas and ferns and um you know have variegation and different things like that I think that will be really beautiful underneath here all right and here is my front door and the reason why I'm showing you this there's no plants here right now I will be planting in this little um vintage crock I want to plant some shade plants in that crock but the things I wanted to show you here are this guy and this guy they have been hanging out here it is a moth and somebody told me on Instagram you guys see that somebody told me on Instagram that it is a hummingbird moth and they are actually really fantastic pollinators really good pollinators so I'm leaving them there um because apparently it's like really good luck to have these and I have two so they've been here for about a week or two now and I'm I'm welcome stay as long as you like and I'm glad that they're here right now so I could show you guys okay so turning around you guys can see this is um my star jasmine and I planted this plant I think two years ago on Mother's Day and I am training it all the way along my eaves now there is a wire um that's kind of running along let me see if I could show you right here can you guys see that there's a wire right there and that is actually what I'm training the um the jasmine on so I'm I'm trying to keep it away from the eaves of the house just because I don't want it to grow in there but you can see that if I don't stay on top of it it starts growing into the house um so I need to get up there and I need to clean that and fix it but this guy is about to start blooming which is going to be amazing because when it does bloom you can smell it down the street it's incredible and I love it and I did get another one very slowly I did get another one and I put it there and I'm starting to train it up this little post right here so I just obviously I love this look this English like secret garden look where everything's kind of engulfing the house I just think it's so beautiful I would love to have one of those homes that's just covered with plants okay so you can see my crepe myrtle tree has finally leafed out I really don't like these trees when they don't have leaves I think they're kind of ugly but I think it looks absolutely gorgeous when it does have leaves it gives a little bit more shade and it just brings such a pop of green to my house so this garden bed right here I call it my crepe myrtle garden bed it is the star of the show lately this month it has been so beautiful it's just been blooming so well so to start off with I have this sparkling amethyst super bina right here I planted these last year some I don't remember sometime last year and they're just going crazy so it's just so exciting if you guys live in my zone I would highly recommend this super bina because it's normally it's an annual it's sold as an annual but it's obviously it survives in our zone and it's such a fantastic plant you can see right over there I have a white one I think this is called whiteout and it's just it's beyond happy so I have some geraniums common geraniums right here I don't know the names of them some new look dusty miller some foxtail ferns right there and then obviously the star of the show is my foxgloves these are camelot mix foxgloves I grew them from seed and the wonderful thing about these is that they normally foxgloves are biennials and which means that they bloom second season they just get foliage the first season and then they they don't bloom until second season however this camelot mix variety I got it from johnny seeds it blooms first season so it's incredible there's even some plants in there that are from last season and bloomed last season and they're blooming again this season the bees just love it there's bees all over them all the time and it just is so gorgeous I just love it so you can see it just brings so much height to this garden bed it's so beautiful I'm so happy with it I have my calla lilies in between those were also here when I first moved into this house and I divided them into two I would love to divide them into three but it just seems like a really big job right now and then hiding around I have a ring of bobo hydrangeas that's basically completely covered by the foxgloves and the calla lilies so I'll have to uncover those in a little bit another thing that I did do this month was I transplanted a lot of my cyclamen I had cyclamen in my kitchen window box and I just this is kind of like my cyclamen transplant bed and I just end up putting them out here and they don't look fantastic they're a little bit worn out you know what I mean but I did this last year with the darker pink ones and they thrived and they had a little bit of color all season long which was crazy so I'm not expecting that but these lighter pink ones I just transplanted from the window box and hopefully they'll take just like the other ones did over here on the west side of this crepe myrtle bed I have more of one of my favorite plants which is mystic spires blue salvia and this area is actually I would say part shade I wouldn't say full shade I would say part shade but you can see they are still blooming their little heads off they're still totally happy and that is one of the reasons why I love this plant is that it does so well in sun but it also does really well in shade so and I think it looks really pretty with the silvery blue of either the helen von stein lambs ear like I have it up there or right here I have it with my dusty miller okay and then coming back over to my main garden you can see I have my lemon coral sedum lining my walkway and I love that look however the one thing I don't like about lemon coral sedum is that it does bloom this time of year and it blooms these little yellow flowers that I have to say I don't really like and I tend to want to cut it back and when it is blooming I kind of think like gosh do I really like this plant here or should I should I change it for something else like a boxwood or something like that and you know it's just this time of year that I don't like it and so it's just something that I have to deal with I'll cut it back and then it'll start getting its chartreuse green color again and it'll look absolutely gorgeous so just off to the left of that I have more camelot mix foxgloves looking beautiful I do have some more mystic spires blue salvia and right behind that is some spanish lavender my osteospermum are kind of blooming out and I think I want to take them out this year just to have some more space in this area I also again don't really like the yellow color of these so it's just too much yellow with everything going on so I think I'm going to take those out and then I have to decide what I'm going to plant right there like I said this is more of the super bina this is um whiteout super bina whiteout from proven winners and then right up here this was another um limelight hydrangea right up on my pathway over here this is kind of sad these are afternoon white cosmos this was another one of my bonus planting but we had a terrible windstorm that just knocked over all of my cut flowers and I had just planted these guys out so you can see there are there there's a couple of them they're still standing but most of them are kind of laying flat on the ground so I'm gonna let them go for a little bit and see what happens um but I kind of I kind of I'm gonna say this one's a loss I do have my verbena de la mina I think that this plant is about done it on the other side it looks absolutely gorgeous but for some reason on this side where I see it most of the day it's looking really scrubby and kind of half dead so I think that this plant is done and then I'm thinking I've been talking to my girls about maybe for Mother's Day going to pick out a plant to put right there over here on the other side of the walkway I just installed my dahlias so I'm planning to put let's see I think I have 13 or 14 dahlias that are going to go all along this uh black fence and the reason why I decided to put them there is not only because it's the highest part in my yard and I think it'll be like a beautiful like focal point for my yard but also I have this black fence that I can um hook the dahlias to and then not have to worry about staking them okay so moving along this way all these little grassy things right here these are gladiolas I planted all these from bulbs last year and these bulbs I actually got from the dollar store so they're this beautiful bubblegum pink color very pretty and I'm planning to use them in my cut flowers this year down here more bearded iris that's just about to come all right I am on my lawn right now I just came up and over those stepping stones right there and I wanted to show you guys this I didn't do a video of this or anything I just came out because I wanted to get them in the ground uh these are some poppies I don't remember the names of them but I'll put them up on the screen right now and then I also have some uh bells of Ireland right here so I'm going to use these as more of my cut flowers and it was just a blank space that I had and so I wanted to fill it up with something for now so once I cut those I will take that out and I will put something new in and that's something I really like doing for my garden as I just like kind of I don't have a lot of space so so keep you know when I keep changing things it just keeps things really interesting and allows me to try new flowers that I haven't tried before and I love that so coming over here here is this homestead verbena and hopefully you guys can see this amazing amazing purple color I love this verbena I'm telling you verbena super venus they do so well in this yard in in my zone um so that is beautiful the lavender is kind of squashing it last year had a lot more area for it um so I'm definitely I definitely have to cut back the lavender but the lavender has just bloomed its little head off and the bees are so happy can you see that look at that they are so happy right now so I can't bring myself to cut this back at this point I'm just gonna leave it and then I will I will share it way back as far as I can and if I can't share it back enough I'll just kind of start over which is a really common thing with Spanish lavender it just doesn't last that long at least for me and so um it's pretty easy just to start a new plant actually let me show you guys over here I found a volunteer lavender in my lemon coral sedum you see that I didn't plant that isn't that funny so I have no idea how that got there I do have my shasta daisies they are starting to bud up and bloom and then I have some liatris and then some more purple gladiolas that I'm really excited for them to start coming and then here's more of that beautiful sparkling amethyst superbena okay so stepping back you can kind of see a overview of the yard you can see in my front annual border swoop which is the swoop right here in front of the lawn um I have cut back my daffodils and now I just have the pansies left and I am planning to plant supertunias and a couple other things in this garden bed and I do have them on order and they should be coming this week I hope so hopefully the next front yard garden tour you guys will see my annual plants all planted up in this area but I do have to say the pansies are looking gorgeous it's a little bit sparse for me I usually like it a little bit you know more color in this area but it's still it's beautiful regardless okay so coming over here I just want to show you guys another uh globe master allium bulb that's starting to go I've never grown these before so I don't know if those are just too short um I just don't know they just don't look quite right uh but I'm just gonna keep watching them and then right here I have my purple hyacinth bean I also have one over by my um my girls fairy garden and I'm just training it up around the sign that I have because I think that that will be really pretty if we have the purple hyacinth being kind of trained all the way up that um and maybe it will distract people from the sign more of the shasta daisies right here more right here okay so there's a little bit of an overview of the front of my house it's looking very beautiful right now I think the only thing I haven't shown you is my cut flower garden which is over here on the other side of my driveway so let me take you over there all right so here's my cut flower garden it was looking so beautiful honestly it still is looking beautiful but I had way more blooms than this um until we had that crazy windstorm that knocked over a giant tree across the street and it just flattened all my plants so I made this big beautiful bouquet of everything that kind of got knocked over um but now things are just kind of starting to come back so over here I have bridal pink snapdragons right there and those are absolutely beautiful and then somehow I don't know how I did this but these are madam butterfly ivory snapdragons which I absolutely love they're one of my favorite cut flowers but I wasn't planning on planting these so somehow I planted those but that's okay then over here I have magic fountain mix delphinium I have already cut a couple blue ones oh here's a blue one I didn't even notice that isn't that gorgeous look at that color of blue so I definitely need to stake these up and you can see what the wind did to my bachelor buttons they kind of just all got knocked over um so I just I don't know I got to come out here and I got to fix all of them I have my uh florist blue boy larkspur that is just about to start blooming look at that isn't that beautiful oh I can't wait and then my sweet peas are going crazy absolutely crazy so I just cut every single bloom off of here for Easter which was just last weekend and now it's completely full again so I love sweet peas these are fall planted in my zone in zone 9b I think if you plant if you sew your sweet pea seeds in the spring it just gets too hot too quickly and they just won't grow as much so these were fall planted and then they just sat out here in the cold winter and they were perfectly fine perfectly happy and then once it started warming up you can see that they're just crazy and there is like a little teepee under there but you can't even tell so let's see over here I have my boupleurum that I'm gonna have to start cutting on and using for greenery which is perfect for greenery um let's see this is my rudbeckia it's not quite ready yet but I'm just gonna leave it there same thing with my oralea something is going on with my oralea look at this one that one died that one died I don't I have no idea what's going on they're just randomly dying um yeah it's like not too hot maybe they're getting too much water or something I'm not totally sure and then over here I just took out this month I took out my anemones and then I also took out my ranunculus and I replaced it with um I'm blinking right now lavender aster these are lavender aster and then I also fit in my mountain snow euphorbia right here and I had very poor germination on these um and somebody asked me if this was a stretched seedling and I honestly have no idea I don't know what a mountain snow seedling is supposed to look like so I have a couple shorter ones like those and those and then I have these really tall ones and a tall one back there so it's just a trial I'm just you know I'm just having fun with it I'm I'm not totally sure what I'm doing but that's part of the fun of gardening and then last thing I have right here is my lemon basil which I'm going to use as a filler as well and then the one last thing I want to show you guys is one more bonus planting that's right over here okay so this little area I planted a star jasmine that's taking a very long time to start growing I have like no growth but I also do not have much sunlight right here so I'm just going to be very patient with that and then right in front of it I have this little space right here and I actually put in my tall blue planet ageratum ageratum I don't know how you say it but another bonus planting and that plant can actually take a little bit of part shade so it'll be perfect with the spot you can see I have a couple hostas right there and ferns so it does get sun especially kind of at the tip right here of this triangle but not a ton of sun so I'm excited to have those there and I think I will just leave those in all season and then cut from those all right so I think that that's going to be it for my front yard and cut flower garden tour for April it's so funny as each month goes on there's more and more stuff to talk about and I feel like that I'm just trying I'm just talking as fast as I can to try and fit as much as I can in a decent amount of time so that this video isn't an hour long so I hope you guys enjoyed this I hope it was motivational for you and I really hope that you guys can see I do not have a big property it's very small it's definitely less than a quarter acre it might even be less than an eighth of an acre it's just a little suburban lot I live in Davis California and I just want you guys to see what you can do in a small area and what you know what you can add in and one of the when I think one of the best things that I think you can do is to keep turning it over so don't be afraid to pull out a plant and put in a new plant or try something else and it just will you know you'll figure out what you love in your garden and you'll enjoy it at the same time so if you guys want more videos like this want to see more videos please consider subscribing I would really appreciate it and I hope you all have a chance to get into your garden today