the long view

The pictures that follow are submitted all the while feeling like I'm showing you my bare arse, not willingly or defiantly, oh no! More like trying desperately to keep it covered the whole while...sort of like the nightmares of arriving at work in your underwear or something. Keep reading and you will understand why. (It's a response to a sort of challenge I found in a blog posted by Randa, at Garden Geek. You'll also find the link to Randa's blog below.)

The view out the kitchen window of the crabapple trees in the rain:

This is the view from our back steps. An old-fashioned beauty-bush is in the foreground. By the hydrangea, the closest dark mound is a barberry. Behind it is a grey grass I can't recall the name of right now, behind it the purple heuchera. Around the bend behind the hydrangea on the north side of the house are hosta, geranium, ferns, holly, pieris, bergenia, etc. (trust me, ok!):

Oh, my! Isn't that an awful picture? Blown tulips, crocus foliage, spent white soapwort, not-yet-blooming candytuft ...There's a wild red columbine in the back there somewhere,under the clematis that I haven't had time to tidy up and secure to its trellis. Among the tulip foliage are a hosta and a sweetgrass. Some giant allium, a miscanthus, and threadleaf coreopsis are next to the hydrangea and among the tulips. In front are some hellebore, a geranium, a variegated soapwort, candytuft. Among the crocus foliage, I plan to put in some pink creeping phlox:
Heavenly lilac perfume fills the air at dusk and the scent delights from yards and yards away! Below it, a couple of pots of rhubarb roots which will go in the garden asap (when it dries up from all the rain a little). A white version of Bouncing Bet (Saponaria officinalis), coming up under the lilac:

The front steps on the north side of the house:
At the west end of the house, a catch-all kind of place with a haphazard woodpile; ajuga reptans, lily of the valley and vinca intermingle:

A little bed under a large beauty-bush, with hosta, the daylily "Stella d'oro" and some geraniums out of view to the right; iris, bleeding heart, and artemisia.

The vegetable garden, from which I am in self-imposed exile until it dries up from the rain. For weeks we had sunshine and I couldn't get into the garden for one reason or another. Now, I have a stretch of days that I can call all mine, but it has been raining since last Thursday, every day, on and off. Mucking about in the garden would only turn the soil to clods of hard rock-like impossibility! Visible in the nearest bed on the left, asparagus. In the middle nearest bed, lovage and lemon balm, in the second bed on the left, garlic and French tarragon and more garlic in the beds beyond. Mesclun, beet, etc seedlings not visible in photo. Raspberry batch on right.

At the south-west corner of the main house, columbine and the dreaded stink-weed. A mock- orange shrub in the top left corner of the picture. The bricks are an attempt to keep the dogs from crawling under the deck:

This bed is along the south-facing L of the deck. The vegetable garden is beyond it to the west. Here, by the well cover is the Purple-flowering Raspberry, which is wild in these parts, some blue columbine, narcissi, the emerging foliage of a tall single Shasta daisy and a goldenrod. Somewhere, there are also some lavenders and a Russian sage, tucked into the corner and not yet tall enough to be visible.

The bed on the west side of the new addition & greenhouse:

Let's see, what's visible? a golden hops vine, tansy, the amur maple, ajuga, pachysandra, lemon thyme, some unnamed iris, another thyme, a white peony, the green nicotiana seedlings, white hollyhocks, a yellow rose, a blue geranium, absinthe, pink verbena, lavender, a pink clematis vine, the black-berry brambles, harebell(Campanula rapunculoides) seedlings (which I hope to pull out -- or maybe not...) and oregano.

Randa suggested that some gardeners like me are often reluctant to show the whole bed as it looks right now, because in our minds, it's always a work in progress, never nearly perfect enough. I'd have to agree. It's much more satisfying, to me anyhow, to concentrate photographing a single beautiful bloom.

So here you have seen some of our beds, showing the long view. Please imagine them in your mind's eye as I hope they will look someday, full and lush and perfectly balanced in design...Somehow, in showing these beds now, as they are, feels like I am going out in public somewhere half naked!

Plus! These photos were obtained in & between rain showers, while under the whining attack of clouds of predatory mosquitoes the size of small helicopters. (yes, I would swear under oath, that indeed, I feared for my life!)

Just as I finished my supper, I looked eastward watching the swallows in the air over the orchard and, behold! a rainbow!