Container Garden Freak

In my gardening infancy, I also enjoyed container gardening (and still do).  I admit – I like the ‘instant garden’ advantage with potted plants! The deck on the back of the house became a potted oasis. I just couldn’t have enough!  (Heaven knows how much money I spent that season?!)

Texture, color, large, small…I wanted it all!

As time went on, the more I started to delve into the gardening resources available to learn more!  I’m a ‘visual learner’ and found gardening magazines could hold my short attention span the best!  They seemed to be most gentle on my tender gardening psyche.  I would frequently pick the brains of my two best gardening buddies (do you thank the people that get you hopelessly hooked on gardening?)

As you can see by the containers to the left, I take a concept like "staggering the heights" of pots & plants and embrace it!   I noticed in 'season 2' of gardening that all my perennials had 'grass green' leaves -- which, after the blooms fade, makes them pretty much disappear into the background of the yard! (arg!!)

I've learned that "variegated" is GOOD ('Fire & Ice Plantain Lily' Hostas - a new favorite)!  Plants like Bugleweed, with deep plum leaves are GREAT!  Time to go shopping!  (I'm one of those strange people that will forego a trip to the mall, for a trip to a plant nursery.  I even map out nurseries on 'field trips' out and about -- ask my family, I make them crazy!

Nemesia is such a sweet petit flower, like mini-snap dragons.

This was “Berries & Cream”.

It was the summer of 2007, just as I was becoming more comfortable as a ‘gardener-in-training’, that we decided to put an addition on the house. It became evident that all I had designed and planted now stood in the way of progress. So I started excavating all my perennials…  by the time I was done it looked like the backyard had been peppered by meteors!   (Little did I know what was to come.....)

All those friends that ‘shared’ their wealth with me in the past became recipients of my bounty. A cornucopia of daylilies now resides from the far northern suburbs of Chicago, to the far south! (I'll admit it now, it was hard to share my ‘Grape Velvet’ Daylilies (Hemerocallis diploid) – that saturated deep purple color was just breath-taking!)  Anything I didn’t ship off to my friends, I put in big pots and hid them from harm in the back corner of the backyard. It was a jungle back there!