{"id":101393,"date":"2022-07-20T19:51:55","date_gmt":"2022-07-20T23:51:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agrowingobsession.com\/?p=101393"},"modified":"2022-07-20T19:51:55","modified_gmt":"2022-07-20T23:51:55","slug":"the-summer-i-planted-pale-yellow-snapdragons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/agrowingobsession.com\/?p=101393","title":{"rendered":"the summer I planted pale yellow snapdragons"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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A farm stand was selling six-packs for $3 of these pale snapdragons, bordering on chartreuse. All wonky and swaying, not ramrod straight. Never having grown snaps before, I’m unclear if a lack of basal growth is normal or just a result of the grower pushing the plants into producing a single, very tall flower. And since I’m still on a planting bender, any flower that reminds me of my mom’s lemon meringue pie just has to come home with me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I was at the farm stand to pick up some deschampsia I had seen earlier and initially passed up. These cool-season grasses are an early presence in the garden, unlike many of the warm-season grasses I planted, just now filling out. The local plant offerings are not extensive, but I check things out frequently, assuming that there’s some hard-won local wisdom behind what they do sell. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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‘Rocket Yellow’<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The snapdragons are a summer fling slipped in among young, permanent plantings of phlomis, callistemon, melianthus, Choisya ‘Aztec Pearl’ — heck, unless the snaps thicken up after these blooms are done, it will be a very shor<\/em>t summer fling of mere weeks. The orangey-gold echinaceas were picked up local too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Another local find planted a couple months ago, Milium effusum ‘Aureum’ loves it wet and leafs out early, handling full sun fine here at the coast. I’m so glad I planted the milium, aka Bowles’ golden grass, in a pot to move around the garden to judge what doesn’t like being in proximity to shimmering chartreuse (turns out, nothing.). The Angelica stricta ‘Purpurea’ just behind is a fabulous plant up here even out of bloom, with those big winged leaves soaring out sideways and gently hovering on dark stems over the surrounding plants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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But it’s very difficult to capture its grace and the dimensionality it lends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This hybrid, summer-blooming anemone showed up locally too, ‘Dainty Swan.’ Love the dark sepals. I had no idea the hybridizers were working on such a thing and assumed there were spring-blooming anemones and fall-blooming anemones, end of story. Fooling around with various species produced summer-blooming anemones in the ‘Swan’ series — good leaves on this one and dark stems too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This little corner of planting with the dierama, angelica and anemone is one of my favorite views for the moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Bamboo hoops in the distance are for the few dahlias planted from tubers in May. I wasn’t sure I’d plant this back bed at all this year, which is where a lot of the stripped-off turf was piled for a berm effect. (The back bed is retained by two landscape timbers stacked, just visible above.) Would the decaying turf cause excessive settling? Dahlias seemed like a good temporary solution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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labeled ‘AC Rosebud,’ planted the tuber in early May, from Old House Dahlias<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Persicaria polymorpha<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

But of course I couldn’t resist plunging in and planting the back bed too. Sanguisorbas, patrinia, grasses, Rudbeckia maxima…I’d say the lion’s share of the plants have arrived via mail order, plus a couple trips to Portland nurseries and then the local finds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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castor bean and sanguisorbas<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Will the snapdragons turn out to be nothing more than two weeks’ worth of garden staging, a dozen cut flowers for $6? Possibly. And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that either. The only downside is I’ll be constantly hungry for lemon meringue pie while they’re in bloom…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A farm stand was selling six-packs for $3 of these pale snapdragons, bordering on chartreuse. All wonky and swaying, not ramrod straight. Never having grown snaps before, I’m unclear if a lack of basal growth is normal or just a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[550,5119,36,898],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paNJ2E-qnn","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/agrowingobsession.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101393"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/agrowingobsession.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/agrowingobsession.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/agrowingobsession.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/agrowingobsession.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=101393"}],"version-history":[{"count":55,"href":"http:\/\/agrowingobsession.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101393\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":101464,"href":"http:\/\/agrowingobsession.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101393\/revisions\/101464"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/agrowingobsession.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=101393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/agrowingobsession.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=101393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/agrowingobsession.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=101393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}