Weekly Garden Tour / Turning Hydrangeas into Trees, Ranunculus Blooming, Best Perennial Cut Flowers

Good morning, friends. How's everyone doing today? Grace and I are really excited for our weekly garden walk and talk. Now, when we first started doing these walk and talks, we said we were going to do them in April and May. We've come to the end of May, so I'd like to know if you would like to continue these weekly Saturday informal garden tours, or if maybe you'd like to stop and see some different kinds of content on Saturday. I'm really glad to be filming this garden walk and talk this morning because I'm working on a special project. Unfortunately, I can't tell you all the details until April 2025, but what's going to be happening following this video is that I'm going to be cutting more branches and blooms from the garden than I ever have before and putting something special together. So we definitely better do our garden walk and talk so we can see all these flowers before I cut them. So since the last time you saw the garden, Grace and I have been working really hard. We've been limbing up a lot of our trees and shrubs for a couple of reasons. I want to make room for a lot more perennials that are good cut flowers. I want to get some more airflow into this garden, some more light, and I think especially these three limelights that I have in the main flower walk, they have just gotten so big and bushy. It was time to turn them into trees instead of shrubs. So you can see I've started to limb them up here, started to underplant them with some Storm Cloud Amsonia, and what I did right here in the entrance is I did Storm Cloud Amsonia, saving Grace, and then repeated that in this big swoop that I'm standing in right now. I'll show you that, a better view of that, on our way back around. So let me step out of the garden for you so we can take a little tour. I love, love how the Ninebark is looking right now. You know, it gets those gray blooms and they're kind of a white, light pink color, but then they fade to this beautiful bronze, and I love the way that looks. I'm going to be cutting lots of branches from that Ninebark today. The Pinball Wizard Alliums are still hanging on. The Alliums, aside from Ambassador, are starting to all lose their color. I would anticipate that by the time we get to the next garden tour that they would all be green. I decided to put some Ranunculus in the border, and this is a Beef Pickety, pink-white. They're all a little bit different from one another, and I really love the way that looks. On the back panels, you can see that the False Hydrangea Vine has started to climb up the trellises, and you can see, uh-oh, we have some Bindweed. I feel like I weed Bindweed about every 30 minutes, and it just continues to pop up everywhere. Here we have some more, a Beef Pickety, pink-white Ranunculus, underplanted with a Creeping Campanula, Lamb's Ear, and also there was some Gems in here, but they pretty much faded at the moment, but aren't these Ranunculus beautiful? Grace is by some of our Foxglove, and you can see I've started to put in some other perennials as well. Here we have the Firefly Fuchsia Yarrow, which is starting to put on bloom stalks, and I think I've planted four right here. Once again, interplanted some Saving Grace all around these newer perennials, so I have a really nice dahlia show, I hope, and these Foxglove have started to fade, but wait until you see the driveway garden. The Foxglove over there are just fantastic. Let me show you this gorgeous Peony and Bloom over on the right side before we head over to the raised beds. This is Dr. Alexander Fleming, and isn't that an amazing peony? Don't you want to just grab a spoon and give it a taste? This is a flower that I feel like you have to describe as delicious. Would you agree? Lots more perennial plantings over in this area, which I'll talk about soon, and here's a look this way to the hydrangea room, where we have the sensational Honeysuckle and Bloom. I'm never really sure what path to take for these garden tours because there's a lot to take in on either side of you. I want to make sure and point this flower out because I mentioned it in a previous video. These are the Mardigon Lilies. These smell so good. This is the best smelling flower, probably even better than sensational Honeysuckle, and they're so dainty and sweet. Watch out for the pollen on these. They stain a lot, but still worth cutting some and bringing them inside. They're just so, so beautiful. So I have a few on the stone rug, a few over here also, and next week we're going to have a really nice sweet pea show. I have sweet peas planted everywhere, even all along the fence line, and I haven't even showed you that yet, so that'll be really fun and exciting next week. So I just recently put in this ornamental oregano around the deck, and that'll grow and eventually touch the deck, and I feel like the spacing on this looks a little bit funny at the moment, but when I researched them it said they get quite wide, so I wanted to give them enough room to spill onto the deck without taking over the deck, so that's why they're spaced in this kind of wide manner. It looks a little bit funny right now, but hopefully in three years it'll really start to make sense. Now in this bed we have what remains of my Ranunculus. So once again, this is Ranunculus of the Pickety, pink-white. This is so beautiful, isn't it? Each one a little bit different. It's like they all have their own personality, and I've started to come through this bed and plant in some dahlias just in between the Ranunculus, because my hope is to stop flipping so many beds and to just have each bed transition on its own. Every single dahlia that I left in the ground this year came back, so I think I'm going to leave all my dahlias in the ground this year with the exception of Saving Grace and Martha Miller. Martha Miller is right here in the corners of the bed. Saving Grace is all throughout the borders, but aren't these beautiful? And it looks like we have a nice cool week, so what I'm going to do today is cut all of these. So we'll cut the bed completely clean. We'll come back in a week and see how many stems we have left. Which one of these is your favorite bloom? This one. Man, that's gorgeous. All these corms are from Longfield Gardens. You can see this dahlia here, actually three. One, two, three dahlias. This is Sharing Grace, the collection of seed that I'm working on. Amazing. I think these ones are Aviv Pickety Red Yellow, once again from Longfield Gardens. All my bulbs and corms, tubers, rhizomes, what have you, they're all from Longfield. Amazing, amazing color on this. It looks like the flowers are on fire. Each one is more beautiful than the next. Impossible to pick a favorite, would you agree? So let's see how this works out with these dahlias, ranunculus, and forget-me-nots working together in this bed. But just with how much I'm working on some other things, I need to do a little less flipping of these beds back here, at least for this year. So I'm doing a lot of experimenting with interplanting. A few pinks in the mix, but not too many. Here's kind of a pure yellow, just a little bit of red on those petals. So what do you like? Do you like the red yellow better, or do you like the pink white better? I feel like it's very hard to choose. So why don't we kind of walk backwards so you can see what it looks like from back here near the library. I don't think I have anything too exciting going on in the raised beds at the moment. These are four raised beds. We just have our mix of lilies, sapenaria, and nigella. Then I have tomatoes and peppers, and I have dahlias and basil, dahlias and lettuce. Grace wants me to open the door to the library for her. Sorry, one second. Here you go, Grace. I'm doing artichokes in the middle. They haven't really taken off yet because it hasn't been that warm yet here, but you can see the sapenaria is starting to come up. Something is eating on my basil big time, and I have a feeling I'm going to have to replace them with something else. I'm not going to fight that issue. I'm just going to replace them. So now we come back here to the raised beds where I'm growing some different cup flowers. Back here we have radishes, hyacinth bean vine, and the variegated thyme spilling over that bed. Right here we have some sunflowers that I need to thin. These are branching sunflowers, so I need to basically take out every other one because the branching ones, they need a little bit more room, and I've underplanted those. I thought this was interesting. I had a whole bunch of spinach seed, so I just threw the spinach down, and look, plenty of spinach to harvest and eat, and also some lamb's quarters, which I will weed out eventually, but I thought that was a fun experiment. Rather than just leaving that little bear, why not just throw some spinach seed down? You'll at least have, I don't know, eight salads there to eat. Back here we have more sunflowers for cutting. These are pro-cut peach that I'm doing. Probably about 30 more days until these are ready. I didn't underplant these with anything, but I definitely should have. I mentioned that I was doing lilies and pots this year to stick into the flower borders, so here's a look at how those are doing. They're doing really great, even better than the ones that I planted in the borders. The bed next to that has an interplanting experiment with gladiolas and peach strawflowers, so that's pretty much what's going on in these back-raised beds. There's the Coosa dogwood and bloom, always so, so beautiful. I just have to stop and stare at her. Our pear has some fire blight, which I've been trying to prune out and take care of, and this plum here I think is going to be moving because I'm pretty sure what I want to do is about right here. I want to start that hydrangea alley that I was talking about earlier. I'm going to do hydrangeas all along here and then also all along here, so I need to move this plum I think just a little bit closer to the fence line. Really, really foggy morning today. Hopefully you can see everything all right. The hydrangea annex is starting to come into bloom. You can see some oak leaf hydrangeas there. Lots of fever few everywhere. I always love surprise views that you don't plan in the garden, and this is one of those views. I didn't really plan for this, but it sure turned out beautifully. So now we find ourselves nearing the hydrangea room. I think I'm going to give the daffodils one more week, and then I'll go ahead and just take their leaves back down to ground level, but I want to give them as much time as possible to recharge the bulb for next year. So this is a garden that is a two years old or three years old? I think three now. I can't remember, but here we have the sensational honeysuckle in bloom. The fragrance on this, man, it is out of this world. The garden is really fragrant this week. Penstemon in bloom now, so we have penstemon, foxglove, sensational honeysuckle, and the alliums that were in this area have all turned green. These are Mount Everest, and Mount Everest stays nice for a long time. Some of the other ones go brown pretty quickly, but Mount Everest holds that green color after turning from white to green for a pretty long time. So let's circle around and walk through Hummingbird Way about two more weeks, I would say, until the hydrangeas are in bloom. Smooth hydrangeas will be in bloom first, and they'll be blooming along with the astilbe that I have in this garden. I can't believe this sensational honeysuckle. It is so beautiful and just covered in flowers. I mean, it's just loaded. The hummingbird really, really likes these also. The birds sound so beautiful this morning, I almost don't want to talk. You can see we really miss the peony show, friends, and I am very sorry about that. I just didn't get out here in enough time to show you them, and I ended up cutting and selling a good amount. Well, let me rephrase that. I cut a lot. I did not sell that many peonies this year. It was a pretty bad year in terms of selling peonies. I'm not really sure why. There's that penstemon again. So we can take a look at the other side of the border on our way back, and then we'll head over to the driveway garden. These foxglove are so beautiful. Most of the foxglove in my garden I've grown from seed, but these ones I got as small plants from jung seed, and I'll put the name on the screen because, man, are they gorgeous. Underplanted with lady's mantle. These are pinball wizard alliums, and I still don't know what this allium is. This is that allium that just appeared in my garden one year. Still haven't figured out the variety. Gorgeous, gorgeous foxgloves. Ambassador allium, still purple, getting bigger. Gladiator has all faded now. They're a little bit green, starting to go brown. Have you guys seen how some people spray paint their alliums purple after they turn brown? What do you guys think about that? Gracie, look at this. Look at this, Gracie. I think Gracie's getting anxious. More of the pickety pink white ranunculus. And what do you guys do with your gems at this point? Do you cut them back to the first leaf? This is my first year with gems in bloom, and you can just see those peonies pretty much all faded away at this point. Let's see if I can walk backwards. Okay, Grace, do you want to go inside? You want to go get some breakfast while I show them the driveway garden? What do you want for breakfast? Eggs, cheese, and chicken? Does that sound like a good idea to you? You want eggs, cheese, and chicken for breakfast? Okay, friends, let me get Grace some breakfast, and then I'll show you the driveway garden. Okay, let's pick up where we left off. I got Grace some beef bacon. Delphiniums starting to come into bloom. They should be really beautiful next week. Lots more of the pickety pink white ranunculus. And so as we say goodbye to the main flower walk, it might be helpful to point out how I've started to plant the magenta flowers. I've planted them right next to the ranunculus. So we have these fall in love sweetly anemones planted all throughout anywhere that you see ranunculus so that as the ranunculus fade because they go dormant when it gets hot, hopefully the anemones will take over, bloom late summer into fall, and then hopefully, weather dependent, these ranunculus will all come back in very late fall and bloom again. We will see how that works out. I've been doing some planting in this garden. I added in 15 serendipity alliums. Uh-oh, there's Grace. She wants some more bacon, but we have a lot of things blooming in this garden now. The main thing is the foxy fox glove. These are all reseeded from a previous year, and I also just threw some orlea seed into this garden, and they're in bloom right now. And I'm trying to do only a few plants in this garden. Foxglove allium, boxwood lilies, orlea larkspur. Did I just say a few and now I'm giving you a long list? Yes, I did. Sea holly, but maybe instead I should say that I'm trying to do a more purposeful repetitive planting over here so that we can still have that wonderful bulb succession, but it feels a little more purposeful. At least that's my hope because this garden is kind of wild over here. I like it, honestly. This is kind of my style, and there's lots of hydrangeas in here. I did all of this just by direct seeding this year, so I just threw some dara seed out here, and it took the larkspur seed I just threw out, all the orlea, just trying to make things easier on myself. And you can see some of those really tall alliums back there are Sicilian honey garlic. Almost all the bearded iris are done now. We do have one that we didn't see last week called October splendor. Oh, one thing I want to tell you, this is the last time that we will see the lion birdbath right here, because I'm going to be swapping that out. And you can see how I've started to just tuck in the serendipity alliums here and there, so hopefully we get that nice fall show over here. This garden explodes with tons of lilies in late June and July. Here's that October splendor bearded iris. This is a re-blooming iris, and just one Persian berry left. It's evening now. I had to abruptly stop filming and take care of some mom duties and then some work duties, but here we are back in the garden this evening for our weekly book chat, and today we're going to be talking about some great books for perennial cut flowers. As I was talking about earlier today, I really want to focus in on perennials that are good for cutting in all my gardens. And by the way, this sensation honeysuckle right now in the evening, amazing. As I look forward to transitioning away from annuals and leaning way more heavily into perennials and shrubs for cutting, I want to recommend one book that uses a lot of perennials and shrubs in floral design, and the other one is the best book that I've encountered on growing cut flowers that focuses solely on perennials. I'm trying to think if it covers woody shrubs also. I think it does. So let's take a look. Here's what the library is looking like this evening. Now this first one I think I have mentioned before. It's called the Cut Flower Source Book. It's been a while since I read this one, but this is such a well-written book, and it has not only the story of how this cut flower grower came to transition from annuals to perennials, and it talks about her favorite perennials and woody cuts to grow on her farm, but it also has this glossary in the back, and it covers everything. Spacing, propagation, when to harvest, how to get the longest space life, just anything and everything that you can think of in regards to every perennial and woody shrub, and she does cover some bulbs also. And I find this book really valuable for the glossary, and I also get a lot of inspiration from her floral designs. I really like her style. Here's a picture of one of her pieces. They have kind of this nice wild garden feel to them. Now here's another book I love that really focuses in on using perennials and woody cuts and floral design in full flower, and they have lots of designers in this book that I'm sure you'll know. They each get a few pages, but it really just gives you lots of different ideas for designing with perennials and woody cuts, and I think it's just fun to look through these books, find inspiration, and if you're ever stuck in a rut, I think it's really helpful to leaf through one of these books and just get re-inspired to create something new and different. So I love both of these books. I'll put links to both of them in the description section below. Well friends, I think that brings us to the end of tonight's garden walk and talk. Well, we started at sunrise and we're ending here at sunset. I want to wish you a wonderful day out there in your gardens, and let me give you one final look down the main flower walk because the light is beautiful right now. It's been really fun to do these weekly garden walk and talks with you, and it really has opened my eyes to how quickly things changed around here. So as I said at the beginning, let me know if you would like to continue these tours, or if you would like to get back to what we used to do, which was a lot more vlogs. All right friends, I'll see you sometime real soon. Must be something delicious in that boxwood. Bye friends! Gracie, what was in there?