The Garden Worm blog Digging up the best dirt on gardening!

September 27, 2011

Caution: Winter approaching

Filed under: Fall,Flowers,Grasses,Our gardens — Judy @ 3:52 pm

The air has been soft and warm these last few days and the pool warm enough to swim in, BUT time to be outdoors in shorts and tank tops is getting short before the snow flies. The signs of winter approaching are getting more numerous. The fall grasses are starting to throw up their plumage.

Grasses

The Virgina creeper in the trees is starting to color up, and a few of the early maples already are turning red and orange. Some yellow is peeking through on the birches and the ashes and, with a little bit of rain, the last roses of summer are pulling out all the stops and blooming like crazy.

Cuyahoga rose

Rosa 'Cuyahoga'

Morden blush rose

Rosa 'Morden Blush'

The sweet autumn clematis is putting (Clematis terniflora, formerly C. paniculata) on a spectacular show this year with, it seems like, millions of tiny flowers.

Sweet autumn clematis

The ‘Nikko Blue’ and ‘Endless Summer’ hydrangeas are pinking up.

Hydrangea 'Endless Summer'

The crabapples

Yellow crabapples

Red crabapples

and the seedheads on the coneflowers and rudbeckias are ripening, soon to be devoured by the hungry birds.

Rudbeckia 'Herbstsonne'

But the Autumn Joy sedum is still pink and the Amsonia hubrechtii is only just beginning to turn yellow.

Sedum and amsonia

Sedum 'Autumn Joy' and Amsonia hubrichtii

This is one of my favorite fall plant combinations – their glory is still to come! Maybe there is still time yet!

September 22, 2011

Oregon

Filed under: Miscellaneous,Travel — Judy @ 9:11 pm

Oregon. Ok, that is somewhere out to the west, says she, waving her arm over in that general direction.

Oregon US map

The other day I was checking out YouTube, pondering whether it would be a possible direction in which to expand. You know, adding videos of important gardening topics to my business website like . . . well, important stuff. Lo and behold, my business name of Just the Gardener was already taken! What? Why? How? Seems that a boy named Isaac from Oregon was posting some Lego videos he had made under the same name. If you have a mind, go and check them out – pretty clever!

Those of you who know me are probably questioning why I would even think of making videos. Ha! ha! Momentary lapse of sanity, I assure you. Anyways, there are plenty of pretty good gardening videos on YouTube – and some pretty bad ones too – so I decided to save myself from going down that route.

Back to Oregon. My friends at Oriental Garden Supply tell me that they make buying trips out there. I know that Al has some terrific stuff so maybe it’s the climate. Apparently, Oregon has two climatic regions separated by the Cascade Mountains. The Cascades serve to block the warm, moist winds coming from the Pacific Ocean and cause relatively heavy precipitation and moderate temperatures in the western part. The eastern part has relatively little precipitation and more extreme temperatures. I’m going to guess that the western part is home to some great nurseries.

I’ve never been there, but it would seem like a great place to visit – Crater Lake,

Crater Lake

Mount Hood,

Mount Hood

the Pacific Coast,

Pacific coastline

. . . and the nurseries! Have any of you been there?

Original photos found here, here, and here.

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