Like No Other

 Heliopsis

Last year, Nyla asked me to dig a Heliopsis out of her yard. Not the kind of thing I would have bought for myself. The foliage, which is all I could see when I dug it was weedy looking to me. The description of 'daisy-like' flowers was appealing but not very exciting. I like daisy though and I love a lot of the 'daisy-like' flowers... Osteospermum comes to mind. Plus, I have too much space and not enough budget to just turn things away. So I dug, drove it home and planted it toward the firepit from the 'Therese Bugnet' rose bushes. Then I forgot about it.

I had 'Loraine Sunshine' and I love it so I had an idea of what to expect. Of course, I wasn't expecting anything as showy as Loraine.

 Osteospermum

What a wonderful surprise it was to find out that it is showier with bigger and more flowers that last forever in the garden! Weedy foliage indeed! That hardly matters if the foliage is going to be absolutely covered in flowers for the whole season.

This is just the first year in my garden for this division. I can hardly wait for year 3 when it comes into its' own. There are a lot of annuals that fill with flowers like this for ages in my garden, Gazania comes to mind. But no other perennial gets this full of flowers from the start of the season all the way through.

Gazania

Containers

 

I used to have a lot more containers than I have now. My city garden was full of containers and finding unusual containers was a hobby of mine. I found plants to be easier to plant, maintain, control, feed and look after in containers. I could control the soil and the food easily. Move them if they were not happy. They provided bright colour in shady places just by rotating them out into the sun and back.

In my Valley garden, I find containers far more labour intensive. They fill with ants. To place them anywhere in the sun garden requires a lot of time laying hose to water or hauling water in buckets a long way... down steps. The steps are more decorative than functional and are among the paths that were built for me to garden - they are not paths or steps I would invite visitors to use. lol. Plants seem to need more water in containers here than they ever did in the city. The result is that I have pared down my container collection to about 10 or so. And so far this year, they are not all planted. The ones that are were only planted recently.

Of all the changes I have made to my gardening style, methods, design since moving from the city, this is the most noticable.