The wild flowers we planted in the driveway bed are doing their best...

...and the hollyhocks are starting to bloom.

...and our jumbo garlic is blooming.

It all looks so nice.

I planted my new glads late so they aren't going to bloom until mid- to late-June.

Our poppies and larkspur are almost finished blooming, but it feels like they have been in bloom for a couple of months so I shouldn't be surprised that they are about done. Some years if I deadhead regularly, I can keep them in bloom until at least Father's Day, but they are not in well-drained soil and the poppies go downhill fast when we get really heavy rain and saturated soil. In the last week or 10 days it has rained a lot---about 7" at our house, so they have gone downhill fast. If it wasn't raining here right now, I'd be outside yanking them out of the ground. I have several flats of zinnias in the greenhouse ready to go into the ground when the poppies and larkspur come out., but first I am going to do some soil amending. The poppy corner of the garden is a problem in terms of soil improvement. I have flowers in bloom there almost year-round so never seem to get around to doing any soil improvement. It is an erosion prone area on our sloping property, and I am determined to get the spring bloomers out and do good soil improvement before putting in some summer bloomers. For years I have been putting it off because everything there reseeds, but I really need to do it this year. If the soil improvement means I have to sow seeds there this fall because the poppy and larkspur seeds dropped by this year's plants are buried too deeply in the soil by soil improvement, then I'm okay with that.

I first planted poppies the year before we moved here, sowing a poppy seed mix alongside the gravel driveway that we put in before the house was built...so the builders could get from the then dirt road in front of our property to the house site. Poppies in that area have reseeded ever since. I added them to the edge of the big garden around 2000 or 2001 and they have reseeded ever since. They also have popped up here and there at various places on the property, but we have enough very dry years and very wet years that they do not become invasive. I love, love, love poppies. One year I planted a poppy seed mix in about a 200' stretch of our bar ditch and people stopped and took photos of them and even put the kids and dogs in the ditch and took photos of them surrounded by the flowers.

Poppies are one of my favorite flowers and are ridiculously easy to grow, even in poor soil, so I grow a lot of them since I have a lot of poor soil. I have to be careful to keep them out of the really good soil or they get unbearably tall and flop over.

wbonesteel those look nice. I hope to have hollyhocks some day, I sowed seeds this year. I always mean to grow glads, they were my parents' wedding flower & they always had some in the garden.

Dawn, thanks for you poppy advice a while back, we have enjoyed ours SO much this spring. This picture I think is a good example of what the same packet of poppy seed will do in different soil/light. See the tiny ones down below?

Those beautiful 'vignettes' are everywhere in a garden.

Dawn: A ditch full of poppies? That would've been gorgeous! Having them growing up and down the drive or along the property line like that, they've got to add quite a 'pop' to the landscape, especially in bloom.

Betty: I'm going to do my best to save as many hollyhock seeds as I can. We really only have the room for a couple dozen hollyhocks in any, or even all of our flower beds. So, if I'm successful in my seed saving efforts, we'll have some extra seeds. Lovely picture, btw. Thanks for sharing it! (Is that rosemary behind the flowers?)

The main idea in our garden wasn't to plant a lot of flowers, except in the beds nearest the street. Eventually, those two beds are going to be a mass of flowers, with a contorted hazelnut in each bed, if all goes according to plan. (pussy willows? roses? eh...)

However, the driveway bed won't be dealt with for several years. Vegetables won't grow there, because it's always in the shade. We had to do something with until we can get those trees outta there, so, flowers it is.

The same with the long bed on the north side of the property. Eventually, we'll put honeyberries and goji berries in there with perennial edibles as border plantings, but for now, it's glads, blazing stars, irises and alliums.

We get 'lookee-loos' all day long on this busy street. Some of the neighbors who drive by are simply curious about what we've planted *this* year, or else checking on our progess with the installation. Anywhere from a few times per month to a dozen times per month, people stop and ask about the garden. (If I'd known we were going to get this many uninvited guests...)

I just now finished planting (seventy!!!) daffodils in the front bed for next year. Also planted a few 'surprize' lilies. Huge bulbs, for lilies. Traded for some ornamental onions and vegetable seeds on the Oklahoma exhange on this site. We have more ornamental onions and tall bearded irises than we know what to do with -not to mention certain types of veggie and squash seeds- and she had more daffodils than she knew what to do with...

About half the daffodil bulbs were pretty small. You can tell they were quite crowded where she had them. If the half of them come up next spring, we'll be *very* happy with the trade.

Monday, we have another 'trader' stopping by to get a few of our irises and mebbe some seeds, too. ...in exchange for some heritage lilies and whatever they happen to bring with them. ;) I'm looking forward to it. The creation of evernew vignettes in the garden...even if we can't eat them. ;)

Y'know I didn't count those daff bulbs. Just picked up a few handfulls from the five gallon bucketful that I had dug up a couple weeks ago. And yes, they were quite crowded; should have been dug 2 or 4 years ago. I look forward to seeing a pic posted of them in a couple years.

Thanks, Mulberry Knob! I think the two or three dozen schubertii alliums will make up for most of it. If not, check my 'trade list' under my profile and lemme know what ya else ya need or want, in addition to what we discussed before. (We still have five dozen irises more than we want or need.)

The first time the daffodils sprout next spring, I'll be sharing pics, blooms or not!

Several years ago (in Rapid City), I let an iris and lily bed go for more than five years...when I finally dug it up, I had more bulbs and rhizomes than I knew what to do with... After I ran out of people to give them to, I ended up planting about a dozen of both along an abandoned dirt road, just off the street where we lived.

Betty, Your garden looks great. I love the poppies. What a bright pop of color they are in that photo.

I get the tiny ones too in the gravel along the edge where the gravel driveway meets the grass and I love them as much as the big ones. They always look so little but so brave battling the wind's efforts to blow them to bits because of their tiny size.

Is that some of your art in the background that looks sort of like a totem with a bird feeder dish? Whatever it is, I love it.

wbonesteel, It was pretty wonderful. It is hard to keep poppies there though because rainwater drains through the bar ditch and carries away seeds that fall so each year there's fewer and fewer new plants. I ought to reseed that whole area next winter so it will be full of poppies and lush again.

I met oodles and oodles of WWI and WWII veterans the first year that ditch bloomed. You know how red poppies are a special symbol to many veterans from those wars ("In Flanders fields the poppies grow....")? They stopped to talk about the poppies and asked if they could come back and collect seed when the blooming was about done and I told them "of course". Then, of course, they told me where they lived and invited me to come visit their gardens. It is amazing what a great icebreaker a bunch of flowers along the roadway can be.

We moved onto a very quiet rural road with homes spaced pretty far apart, where everyone but us had lived here forever. The garden and the flowers were the best icebreaker imaginable. The ladies stopped to talk and admire the flowers, and the old farmers and old ranchers stopped by to try to teach me how to plow a straight row.....(grin). We met so many people whose friendship we cherish merely because they stopped to say hi and talk about the garden. In one way or another, they all became a part of our garden, whether it was because they gave us old straw for mulch, old manure for a soil amendment, a handful of favorite seeds or, even, unsolicited advice. My old farmer friend, Fred, who still ranches and gardens at the age of 90.5 years young, makes sure my ego doesn't get out of bounds by constantly stopping by to tell me his corn is taller than mine, or his beans are 2 weeks ahead of mine. He cracks me up. I am not competitive, so I let him win. It makes him happy, and if I have harvested 30 tomatoes before he harvests a single one, I don't even tell him because it ruins his summer.

Our life is infinitely richer because of the friends we made when folks stopped by to admire the garden, but there were times I was not especially happy to have someone stop by right then at that specific time because some of them could talk forever, and I had work to do.

I love the guerilla planting of leftovers along an abandoned dirt road. What a surprise for everyone! I bet they were wondering how those plants miraculously dropped in from nowhere.

Dawn

Well, we aren't going to tell them where all of those angelonias on that hillside came from, either. It was an accident! Honest!

They wouldn't grow in the flower garden. One day, several weeks after I'd planted them, and they didn't come up, I raked up the garden and threw the organic debris over the fence. The next spring, there were a few of them growing by the fence. ("Yeah, that figgers...") Ten years later, they were growing in scattered pockets, all over the hillside. ...for almost a mile.. and they grew by the thousands. It was kinda scary, in a weird, beautiful sorta way. iow, I don't think anyone will notice the lilies and irises on that same hillside...

The ground wasn't acidic enough, so they turned a pale lavender. Now, in spring and early summer, that hillside is covered in tall, pale lavender flowers.

Another thing wrt to gardening, I've notioced that no one really, truly does it all themselves. We always have some sort of help, or advice or assistance along the way. Someone taught us something or gave us some plants or compost or...

Of course, when I started this garden in Duncan, social contracts were the last thing on my mind. I was interested in food. ;)