Spring Planting

Herb & Butterfly garden

Beat the rain this morning and got all my new planting done, all 63, tiny, 6"-ish tall plants which I ordered from Bluestone Perennials, a nursery in Ohio.  They included plants from their pre-planned Butterfly Garden, 6 herbs (basil, sage, chives, rosemary, tarragon, and lavender), and a few shrubs and groundcovers to fill in some gaps in the existing garden. The soil was moist and responsive to digging and tamping, like well kneaded bread dough in one's hands.  

Starter Garden

This will be my second gardening experiment since we moved to Bloomington.  The first was the "Starter Garden", also from Bluestone, which I put in the bed off the Sunroom last September.  It consists of 57 plants in 23 varieties of easy to start, foolproof, perennials which are guaranteed to thrive - an encouraging thought to gardening newbies.  Even though they seem to have come back alive with the advent of spring, they are far from resembling the full-grown plants with colorful blooms as shown on their website.  I'm not sure how long it will take before that happens but I guess I must learn to be patient; plants have their own 'plant time', not to be equated to human time.


Kirk and I have become seriously concerned and alarmed that the wisteria vine is perhaps dead!  What a ghastly thought!  Dead, after 45 productive years!  Here are two pictures of the pergola in our backyard, one taken on 4/25/2010, when it was densely covered with purple wisteria, the other on 4/27/2011, around the same time a year later, completely barren and dry, showing no sign of life. 

Then

Now

Don't you agree there is
cause to be alarmed?