Waiting on butterflies

I've planted what feels like a thousand butterfly nectar plants in my yard but I only seem to see cabbage whites and skippers. I've got milkweed and agastache, allium, aquilegia, sidalcea, mahonia, and solidago. I've got arctostaphylos and ceanothus, ribes and spirea.

I've got basking sites, in the form of the large flat light-colored rocks that surround the berm in the front.

I've got a meadow in development, which will get planted with achillea and asters alongside the grasses.

I'm feeling impatient, so I made an impromptu puddling station. Apparently butterflies won't drink from open water and they like mud puddles or wet gravel. I tucked a plate filled with gravel and soil near the milkweed. It will never stay wet all day but I've read you can bury a bucket full of sand in the soil and that should have some staying power through the heat of the day.

Do you have a butterfly magnet in your yard? What plant am I missing? Just don't say butterfly bush, it's a noxious weed in Oregon.

Checking in on the front yard

We're having an unusually sunny spring and the front garden is really appreciating it. Even though the cannas are just starting to poke up and the zauschneria is still pretty tiny, everything looks so much fuller than it did last spring.

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My Verbascum bombyciferum is going to bloom, which makes me a bit sad, since the rosette it formed is so, so nice.

I can't wait to see what it will look like when it's actually filled in at the height of summer. If we're being honest, I'm a little fearful too. I have crammed so many plants into this area that I think it's going to be a little nuts. I'm going to be moving some plants in the fall, I think.

Bad ideas

Do you read Hayefield? I came late to discovering Nan Ondra's site so I've had the pleasure of losing myself for hours in the archives. She's been doing a series on annual events, which have been nothing short of inspiring. Like any normal person, I sometimes become irrationally obsessed with a plant and I need to have it. This has been the case this year with Daphne x transatlantica 'Everblooming Alba', then later with Chionochloa rubra. The other plant that's been sitting in the back of my head is a coreopsis I saw on Nan's site, 'Limerock Ruby.' You can see a photo of it here. It has beautiful wine colored blooms and Nan pairs them with both dark purple foliage and orange(!) blooms.

I called around and couldn't find anyone local who carried it. I searched online and found one single seller, Gorge Top Gardens. I'd never heard of them, which made me a little nervous. I haven't done enough plant buying online to know who's good and who's not. They were on sale for $3.99 so I decided to buy seven of them.

Seven! I have a big yard but I'm not really sure what I was thinking. Actually, I know what I was thinking: flat-fee shipping, might as well reach for the stars. I can do two plantings of three and give one to Scott.

It took a week for the plants to arrive after shipping, and they were smooshed down with newspaper, plopped unceremoniously into a plastic bag. The plants were very unhappy. I was less than impressed.

But coreopsis are tough and they are all perked up again, so I think we're going to be just fine. I've gotten used to ordering from Annie's and they pack their plants so beautifully; I sort of expect that from everyone now. Of course, the delivery guy always ignores the THIS SIDE UP message and parks them on my doorstep in blatant disregard for the arrow. It drives me crazy.

Are there any online nurseries that you absolutely avoid? I've been waiting for-f*cking-ever on a shipment from High Country Gardens and it's making me so impatient. Good thing I've got all this coreopsis to keep me busy.

What do you think?

I was buying more rock this weekend so I could finally finish off the shade bed in the backyard. They've started giving me a discount at Oregon Decorative Rock, I'm there so often.

Greg thinks I should add a third layer of rock to make the retaining wall look more substantial.

That makes things a little tricky, since the soil level should rise to meet the top of the wall. You want the soil to meet the house at least four, but ideally six inches, from where the wood starts so you don't get termites. So I'd have to create a slope and grade the soil back toward the house. It's not impossible but it might look funny.

What say you? Add another level?

Leave it be?

I can't decide.

How to fill a really large pot

Do you have pots of soil lying around? Every time I move a plant around (which is a lot) I end up with extra soil. I don't know how it happens. I mean, I know why it happens but it's seems like there's way too much leftover soil. So I have random pots of it stashed all over the yard.

I've wanted a second galvanized tank for the area to the right of the bamboo and to the left of the Pieris for a while now. The long term goal is to have a pathway running in front of them, so it works to keep everything narrow and contained. This area was a weedy mess, covered in popweed and uneven with holes from where we pulled the clump of bamboo out of the ground.

My friend Carrie told me that Bamboo Craftsman was getting a shipment of stock tanks in this weekend, and while they were more expensive than Burns Feed, they were five minutes away. Burns Feed is forty minutes each way. And they were borrowing Greg's truck, so they could pick one up for me and bring it to me, in the lazy princess fashion I deserve.

I got a six foot tank, which is huuuuuge. I weeded and dumped a whole bunch of gravel to level the area, then started to wonder how I was going to fill this.

I started by grabbing all the concrete chunks and broken bricks I've recently unearthed from the yard. My yard has a seemingly endless supply of rubble. This ensures that when I realize that the container is crooked or off-center, I'll be SOL because the thing weighs a million pounds.

Then I added gravel because I put gravel in, on, and over everything now.

Then I grabbed all that sod I had removed from the new bed on the back of the house and installed it grass-side down.

This means I don't have to try and sneak it into the yard debris bin, which means I can remove more sod from somewhere else in the yard and sneak that in the bin.

For now it got six inches of mulch on top, which should hopefully put the final nail in the coffin for the sod. In a few weeks I'll take all the random pots full of soil I have lying around and amend it with compost and plant up this container.

I have my heart set on a colocasia I read about in Fine Gardening last summer, Colocasia esculenta 'Coffee Cups'.

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When it rains the leaves fill with water until they hit a certain point (presumably when they get all steamed up), then they tip over and pour it out. I don't even care if this plant doesn't fit in with my garden theme; it's kinetic and beautiful. Remind me of this when I complain next fall about how this tank "just doesn't go" with my yard.

Snap to grid

I'm at that point in the gardening season where I want to do something, but if I want to do that, I have do this thing first, which means that I might as well do this other thing while I'm at it . . . and so now I have a bunch of projects going all at once and nothing's finished and everything looks like hell.

It started with this area on the back of the house, which faces north. I had the two shrubs back here ground out so I could start fresh.

This is the first time I'll have an area in shade that isn't dry. Hooray! So I started removing sod. But first I felt like I needed to address the area under our little deck, which is weedy and pitted and not sloped correctly.

I took some of the gravel that had been languishing on a tarp in the front yard and dumped it under here until everything was level.

You'll never guess where the tarp used to be.

I had to stop to take photos because the light was so good that night. Also, I was starving.

The back rain garden

I put down rock and I started planting, grabbing ferns and hostas from the side entrance, and the shrub mint and oakleaf hydrangea from under the cedar. And damn it if I didn't plant everything in two perfectly straight rows. What is wrong with me?

Every time I'd dig something up to move it so it wouldn't be in a line I'd somehow have a brain fart and the thing would end up back in line with everything else. And I ran out of rock, so this bed still isn't finished. How do you like that reveal?

As a palate cleanser, let's admire my new Darmera peltata. I bought it at the HPSO sale and the cashier proclaimed it "so ugly only a mother could love it."

This Oregon native is a relative of rhubarb and its leaves will grow to as much as two feet in width. And they also have flowers, which aren't very exciting.

I told the cashier that, come summer, she'd be jealous of my ugly plant. She just may not be jealous of the rest of my garden, which is a swampy half-finished mess.

So say we all

Columbines always look like cylons to me.

Aquilegia caerulea 'Krystal'

Pretty cylons, though.