Hidden Beauty

One of the amazing things about gardens and plants in general is that you can usually find something amazing if you just look a little closer. Case in point, this Phlox paniculata, or garden phlox, that's growing at the end of the driveway. Beautiful plant, but if you look closely, you get these incredible flowers that haven't opened yet, rolled up in a neat little spiral.

These will open up tomorrow or the next day, but they're so neat just like this, and most people never notice them.

Once these flowers open, they are a big hit with the neighborhood butterflies and bees, and make a great garden specimen. Very tall, stout plants with big clusters of flowers and nice foliage. They especially look good in masses with hordes of butterflies feeding on them. They are also fairly easy to propagate, which I'll get to in a later post. For now, just remember to always look closely at the plants in the yard; some of them have hidden beauty.

Rain Gardens

One of the more popular tools in the Low Impact Development toolbox is the rain garden. You've probably seen these around town; little strips or bowls of grass and plants, designed to catch runoff from a storm. When designed properly and constructed correctly, they are very useful and beautiful. Not only do they divert rain water, they also help filter pollutants in the runoff, recharge underground aquifers and provide habitat for plants and animals.

As I'm currently a student in Low Impact Development, I had the opportunity to collaborate on a rain garden on campus. We were given a small, unused corner of the campus to work with, a little bit of grant money and a couple of months. Performing some pre-work soil tests, we quickly determined that our little plot was a former parking lot, with about eighteen inches of compressed gravel to show for it. Four hours of bulldozing later, and we had a formidable hole to work with.
After a few weeks of shoveling, amending, planting and mulching, we had a garden that we were proud off. Our rain garden is really more of a wetland, since we were able to catch and sequester such a large amount of rain.

 

We have a nice variety of plants and animals that call this area home now. On my visit today, I saw several dragonflies and butterflies, frogs and tadpoles, and a few different species of birds that had stopped by for a drink. This is certainly an improvement over the cluttered, unattractive and disused space that was here before. Beyond aesthetic issues, our little corner of campus manages to sequester and filter hundreds of gallons of rain water from every storm, providing long term benefits to the school and the environment.

You may notice more pipe planters in the background; these will be planted in the fall. As the site matures, plants will start to fill in the holes in the design, providing more shade and helping to cool the water in the pool. This is another big benefit of the rain garden design; lowering water temperatures before the water reaches streams and rivers helps maintain overall waterway health.

This view shows the overall design of the area. The curve in the channel helps to slow the storm water entering the garden, preventing erosion from cutting away at the bank. The stone in bottom serves a similar purpose, and helps to trap sediment in the water. The adjacent road is visible at the bottom edge of the image; a small speed bump will be added to the road to funnel even more water into the system. At the top right is an existing storm drain. This drain will catch any overflowing water in the event of an unusually large storm.

We have a good mix of (mostly) native plants. Rhododendron and its cousin, (both Rhododendron spp.) are establishing themselves along the back fence and the side road. We put in lots of doghobble (Leucothoe fontanesiana), a nice native shrub with great foliage and flowers. Bee balm (Monarda spp.) and a few varieties of echinacea (Echinacea spp.) provide lots of color this time of year.
It will be interesting to watch the garden mature over the next few years, and heartening to realize just how much storm water it will process.

Edit to add: A fellow student was serving as a guide and technical adviser on this project, and she was kind enough to forward her calculations on the actual impact that this little rain garden is having. Our garden takes up about 840 square feet, and is capturing the rain water from almost 16,000 feet of campus. We can capture and hold almost 1,100 cubic feet of water in our little garden, which keeps it out of the storm drain system and helps prevent downstream erosion. Not bad, eh?
(Thanks to Vicki Eastland for the guidance and the data!)

Backporch Bonanza

Mostly tomatoes and herbs, but also a few sunflowers, some rhubarb and an okra plant.

We got hit with three pretty bad hail storms in about two weeks, so I'm surprised how well these plants are doing.

We brought in two types of zucchini and red and green tomatoes today. The zucchini will probably go on the grill, and we've already made some fried green tomatoes. This is our first ripe tomato to come off, so that's pretty exciting. It's hard to describe how much better food tastes when it's really and truly fresh.

Pipe Planters

I found a long piece of steel culvert rusting away behind the house in a ditch. Four metal-cutting saw blades and 20-odd pieces of sandpaper later, we now have five spiffy new planters. These are the three in the yard just off the kitchen.

It's a bit hard to see the middle planter there because of the plants, but it really is back there.

There's a pretty interesting variety of plants in there, especially considering the situation with the light. These guys all reside under an old Carolina Hemlock (Tsuga caroliniana), and on a pretty steep east-facing slope. Lots of morning sun, filtered afternoon light and basically dark from late afternoon on. Working with that, we put in some fennel and Bright Lights chard, an asparagus fern, some pansies and a lemon thyme. The chard has already gone to seed, and we also had some decorative cabbages in there that bolted as well. I replaced those plants with some Coral Bells heuchera and, most excitingly, some amaranth.

This is a gorgeous plant, also known as Love-Lies-Bleeding, that is absolutely thriving in less than ideal conditions. I picked up seeds for this and a green variety from Baker Creek Seeds, and I couldn't be happier. I'm already fantasizing about a whole hillside covered in amaranth, waving and rustling in the breeze...