Garden Variety Bouquet

I've been quietly enjoying freshly cut flowers from our garden this summer. In previous summers, I've hesitated to cut flowers for fear that there would be nothing beautiful left in the garden. But this summer I discovered that if I clipped off a stem or two, the plant would burst forth with renewed vigour in a couple of weeks.

For the first weekend of fall, we had this on our dining room table.

This was the third summer since we moved in. Not one of those plants was in the yard when we moved here. You can see:

• periwinkle (foliage draping down, it flowers in the spring)
• sage (the velvety, grey-green foliage)
• white roses
• miniature pink roses (mostly in bud in this view, but you'll see more in the other pictures)
• pink-cream hydrangea
• ferns
• euonymous (the variegated green-and-white foliage)

That pink-and-cream hydrangea is actually our second attempt to grow a hydrangea.

We've had a couple of challenges with our  gardens:

1. Most of the garden areas are full shade, though we do have a large section that gets full sun. That's where I've planted the herbs. It's such a hot spot that even the parsley survived last winter! I finally got wise and planted ferns in the deepest shade - they LOVE it!
2. The soil is exceedingly poor: sandy with hardly any organic material. We've been building it up with mulch and rich soil, but I think I'm going to layer on some serious sheep manure this fall.

I am sad to see summer go, I've so enjoyed our back yard. I think I will dry some of these hydrangeas to get me through the grey days of winter.