Butterfly Mind

My work is (mostly) done. Now I can enjoy the garden.

I’ve spent the past five days in the open air. I am on my annual garden vacation. Instead of listening to news of the coronavirus, I’ve been outside in garden gloves and hat.

Over the past five years we’ve lived in our house, I’ve killed a lot of grass to create flower beds for butterflies. I’ve accumulated perennials over those years as well. In March, instead of the beds being barren and brown like they were when I first created them, green leaves and shoots emerge. They make me giddy every year. Green! Renewed life!

Each spring, I take a week off of work to spend in the garden, to get it ready for the birds and butterflies (and bunnies and deer). I move plants around to change things up year over year, and then spread about four tons of mulch over all the beds.

This week was that week for me. I finished spreading the mulch yesterday. With the lockdown in place, I’m grateful for five years of plant-buying. I don’t need to go to the nursery; I don’t have any big gaps to fill in, and I do have packets of zinnia and cosmos seeds for the places that do need filling.

Now I can sit back and watch it all grow.

Front Beds

Redbud budding
Rose and redbud bed (and herbs, lilac, silvery blue wormwoods, and artemesia)
Dogwood bud
Dogwood, butterfly bush, yarrow, and lavender already visible; butterfly attractors of milkweed, gallardia, salvia, liatris, and agastache, plus the delicious smelling lemon balm will come later
Hostas emerging under the dogwood; lavender and dianthus at the foot of my chair; Karl Foerster grass shorn for new growth in right of frame
The bed in front of the stairs is a prairie type bed, with switchgrass, prairie dropseed grass, little bluestem grass, black eyed Susans, white coneflowers, liatris, sage, New England asters, calamint, Russian sage, and nepeta (catmint with blue flowers)

Back Hill

Rhododendrons in bloom
Leftmost bed: grasses, agastaches, bee balm, rue, Joe Pye weed, nepeta, black eyed Susans, lollipop vervain
Middle bed: wind dancer grass, echinacea, sedum, marjoram, scabiosa, indigo salvia
Right bed: rue, Mexican feather grass, lamb’s ears, pink veronica, mums, Shasta daisies, blue gramma grass, little bluestem grass, milkweed, goldenrod, bee balm
Rain on sedums
Spicebush in bloom
My throne at the top of the hill
Hosta emerging; I caught it before the deer eat it
Back bed and hammock tree
Birdseed and rosemary
Late afternoon from the top of the hill

This is my entry for the Discover Open prompt. Also, if you like plants and butterflies and other gardeny stuff, I publish progress of this garden throughout the butterfly season at garden.andreabadgley.blog.

Andrea Badgley

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10 responses to “My work is (mostly) done. Now I can enjoy the garden.”

  3. I’m so jealous of how green everything is already! It’s still dry and brown in Colorado. But we’ll catch up eventually (hopefully)!

    Beautiful garden though, and four tons is a lot of mulch to move! Who needs a gym when you have a garden, right? 😀

  4. Gorgeous. We are full of snow and cold temps yet here in Canada. So nice to see pics of what spring should really look like. Love your chair–there for one to enjoy all of nature’s beauty.