Craggy Gardens

Craggy Gardens, a popular area on the Blue Ridge Parkway, is interlaced with great trails that take hikers through the rhododendrons and grassy open gaps, as well as surrounding forests along the Mountains to the Sea trail and other trails.

A roadside meadow by the trailhead glowed with Rudbeckia, Coreopsis and Phlox, with slopes nearby puctuated with Silene virginica and Campanulastrum americana (formerly Campanula).

Woody enjoyed the cooler temperatures at higher elevations, as well as his first hike in the woods!

Native perennials

I was poking around in one of the meadow beds this afternoon (clearing the crowns of leaves and mulch).  My gardening companion is enthusiastic about mulch, and some had crept in along the edges of the bed.  Combined with fallen leaves, it was a bit thick.

I had figured that a few extra leaves were protective during the winter snows, but a plus 60°F afternoon had me thinking spring again.  And there's only so much reading one can do about plants and planting, without being out there!

Amazingly, signs of growth were everywhere, from the expanding basal leaf buds to young shoots coming up through the mulch.  Admittedly, these were all tough native perennials (so presumably are right on schedule for emergence now).

I thought I had posted a planting list  (uh, this is my online garden 'record' -- Thomas Jefferson would not be impressed).   But I didn't find one, although it was nice to review the posts that I found (linked above).

Front meadow last summer (August 2010)

Another that popped up was this post about sustainable gardening.  It was a good reminder to read it again.

A luminous meadow

I spent some time this afternoon cleaning up and 'editing' the front meadow. 

It needed to be freed of the weedy annuals that had popped up in late summer, the remnants of vines that had clambered around (including the passionvine, Passiflora incarnata), and generally tidied up -- the Helianthus hirsutus (Rough-stemmed Sunflower) was downright ugly, even to a wildlife-friendly gardener, and I'm confident the goldfinches have long since eaten its seeds.  And the Common Milkweed (Asclepias syriaca), which is such a great host for monarch caterpillars, is in decline as well, and most monarchs are well south at this point, too, and any stragglers are not going to be successful in reproducing here, before the first frost.

Front meadow in evening

It was satisfying work, even if driven by thinking I might have the Osher Lifelong Learning class come visit next after the Gardening for Nature class that I like doing for them.  I think I'll describe what our next projects are, and our real-life challenges as natural gardeners (hmm, full-time work, two gardens at the moment, we have other things to do, etc.)

Actually, our garden in the Upstate is a testament to the toughness of natives and well-adapted plants over a summer of brutal heat and no rain in the last third of the summer, with minimal 'care' on a couple of short visits and supplemental water only to recently planted things.

Hummingbirds and butterflies

We've finally started to see hummingbirds in the mountains.  They were visiting the native Impatiens capensis  (Jewelweed) below the house and the cardinal flower (Lobelia cardinalis) planted outside the ground floor 'green room.'

I put out the hummingbird feeder again with fresh sugar solution about a week ago, and now they've included the feeder on their rounds.

front meadow bed  in late July

Similarly, butterflies, particularly swallowtails, have started to be abundant, visiting butterfly bushes in our neighborhood, as well as our purple coneflowers, Liatris, Joe Pye, and Helianthus in the front meadow bed.  It's nice to see them.