Garden Photo of the Day

Alliums amongst the ferns - Fine Gardening

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The word amongst in the caption caught my attention. Do people you know still talk like that? Not that there is anything wrong with it.

Here is my photo of the day:

I took this photo because I just placed a growing red canna pot half-deep in this little kidney shaped pond. Before the tree fell in my yard, in early May, I placed some scraps of canna bulbs that I had in our basement for the winter into a pot in my pot graveyard behind the pines, one of which also still remains in its decapitated demise. Recently I ventured under the still living limbs which have not yet been removed from the backyard and found these canna growing. With the excessive rain this month they grew even though I forgot totally about them, buried under the branches of the fallen box elder. The hostas, heuchera 'Palace Purple', sedge, divided/transplanted iris, and re-seeded fountain grass are thriving around the pond, but time will tell whether the canna will survive or rot in the pond.

This pond was low budget by design. A leftover pile of dirt from another landscape project, a pre-formed pond purchased for a few dollars at a garage sale, a $2 end of the season sale on 6 cultivars of hosta, a few rocks and hunks of slate dug up here and there, some goat manure from a former neighbor who was moving to California and a 100 ft. extension cord and $40 pump which I haven't been able to regulate--it squirts water out of the pond!

Except for the pump and cord, this pond project is actually a testament to how inexpensively one can transform a pile of dirt (and a lot of watering) into a little garden spot for the enjoyment of passers-by, in just a few years time.

Hosta blooming by the pond: