The high heat of summer has arrived, so everything moves slower in the garden. My breaks match or exceed my working sessions so I can cool down and rehydrate.
The goal is always to stop buying new plants before ninety plus degrees, but the clearance racks have been very good to me this year, and I have a surplus in the rescue nursery still waiting for planting.
The latest bed took nearly a week to strip and work the soil. Its location is the hardest clay I’ve dug yet, requiring a few bags of topsoil to amend it for planting.
Above is the finished bed. It is the first in the front half of the garden to narrow open space down to just walkways, so it feels a bigger accomplishment.
The stones were excess gifted to us from neighbors after they finished their landscaping.
The rescue plants used are: variegated sedum, silver brocade artemisia, ‘sweet kate’ spiderwort, and ‘tinkle white’ balloon flower; in the quantities of four, four, three, and ten.
The reason for this bed is to give a new home to our grape soda scented bearded iris from their former morning-sun-only location.
The above image shows them from last year. A Google search suggests they may be Iris pallida ‘Variegata Aurea’ or something close.
This year was a decreased performance, so it’s time to break them up anyway. They have foliage that is more silver than our other bearded irises. They are bloomed out already, so I took a guess. we shall see how accurate I was next year.
I’ll close with the nighttime shots from last night, mostly planted:
Hopefully, the tree stump segment will be the future home of a large vessel as a bird bath.
our cattywampus cottage 
Beautiful and creative!
Irises are a favorite of mine! They always look so colorful and frilly. I can’t wait to see what the other things look like, too!