Do these look wild to you? I had never had any experience with Sweet William before last year. In fact, I always got them mixed up with primroses, the little plants you can buy in the grocery store mid-Winter. But summer of 2007, I planted a package of "Wild Flowers" that had Sweet William listed as one of the mixture contained within. A few of these dainty plants came up last year. Now this year, even more have come up. Now this is a plant I like! Pretty, dainty, tough and it multiplies! I plan to plant more when I can find the seed. (From my photo, it looks like a gaillardia came up, too, although May seems pretty early for what I've always considered a summertime flower.)This is an area we look down on from our family room deck. It's about 15 feet wide bordering the house on the left, and then falling off down the hillside on the right. In 2007 my friend, Wayne, dug out the shale, Round-upped the weeds, and we filled it back in with a top soil and manure mixture. We bordered it with a curved rubber edging and I made a flat rock path curving through the middle. However, the drip line made its own trough so we moved the rocks under the drip line so the plants could receive the rain and not get washed away. That did away with the curving path, but fortunately, the plant leaves are camouflaging the straightness of the drip line rocks.
I had no real plan for this area; I just wanted it to blend in with the surrounding hillside which is covered with honeysuckle, small saplings, poke weed, and mullein.
I like mullein; poke weed I can do without! Our air conditioner lives over here also, up close to the pilings that hold up the deck. That's the shady end of this planting area.
The other end is sunny from the house facing southwest, so the plants receive the rays of the hot late afternoon and the setting sun. I've planted leftover day lilies in here, a few bearded iris, some liriope (monkey grass), rudebeckia (Black-eyed Susans), coreopsis, and all the packages of wildflower seeds I had accumulated. Recently, I had a landscaper (a recently graduated student who is starting up his own landscaping business) move some large plants for me, and he moved two deciduous azaleas into the sunny end. They really have perked up the area so it looks more "garden-ish" then just a whole bunch of plants tossed out by the alley. I'll post more pictures as interesting things happen over here. Wild children get a lot of attention, you know!
