Mixed perennial and wilflower garden finally picking up!

[hendi_alex]

Annuals are really just getting started and very little bloom, but will be exploding with bloom in the next couple of weeks.

Various views of my main flower bed area.

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[img]https://farm3.static.flickr.com/2426/3589448816_d9c1004e98.jpg[/img]

[img]https://farm3.static.flickr.com/2442/3589448136_ff5f99b94b.jpg[/img]

This part is only about a foot high now. Will end up growing four to seven feet tall will profuse bloom mostly coming from cosmos, zinnas, and Mexican sun flowers, but many other smaller growers in the mix.

[img]https://farm4.static.flickr.com/3385/3589447676_990edfbb89.jpg[/img]

[vintagejuls]

Alex, Wow, your yard is just lovely. Absolutely beautiful. Is it one one of those garden tours?

[hendi_alex]

Most people would see it as a wild rambling mess. We have large areas which we mostly leave a naturalized and only run the mower once or twice per season to keep it reasonably tame. Right now large portions of the annual wildflower bed looks more like a large weed patch than flower garden. There are in fact more weeds there than flowers, but soon the flowers will form a large canopy over the weeds causing the weeds to be suppressed. Later in the fall, the weeds will once again dominate and the flower garden will start to look kind of rough. It doesn't matter so much to me however, as this naturalized yard and garden is being grown in such a way as to maximize the amount of wildlife associate with it. The weeds add to the diversity of the mix, make the area more complex, therefore attract many more critters than if the soil was sterilized prior to planting. Everything that we do in the yard is approached this way. The vegetable garden is grown using intensive planting techniques, interplanting flowers, using companion planting, and interplanting vegetables to create more of a mosaic of vegetable plants rather than having more traditional rows and blocks of plants. There is always some compromise in those efforts, but that is always the goal, to interplant and mix, creating as much diversity and as much of a random mix as possible.