Chaos Garden - August 2014

The Chaos Garden gets relatively little attention from me. I pull plants that I recognize as not wanting at all: grape vine, stickers, honeysuckle, blackberry canes.  Everything else I simply leave alone.

The hydrangea is recovering from the late (and hard) frost last spring that killed all its buds. It has no blooms this year but is coming up from the roots and should be almost back to normal for next spring/summer. I'll trim away more of the dead stems in my next weeding pass through the chaos garden.

There is lemon balm but it is not as overwhelming as in previous years. I cleared a lot of it away last summer. I like it in salads and to add to mint ‘tea’.

The chives and onions come back every year. I need to remind myself to harvest them more frequently.  The chives bloom in the spring and the onions are blooming now.

There are some flowers that are remnants of the butterfly garden phase of this plot: cone flowers and black eyed Susans. There don’t seem to be as many butterflies these days but they do attract the bees.

The rosemary I bought last spring has grown quite a lot and I am hopeful that it will overwinter. Last winter, all the rosemary plant in my area dyed form the repeated blasts of very cold temperatures.

The sycamore is shading the chaos garden more all the time. The hydrangea won’t mine - they thrive just fine in shade - but many of the other plants will not do as well. The old patch of day lilies never blooms any more but its progeny bulbs are doing quite well in the front flowerbed where I moved them last summer.