Visit to PowellsWood Garden

 PowellsWood includes a 3-acre garden and a 35-acre native woodland. It's located in Federal Way, WA, just a half-an-hour away from Seattle. 

There are several distinct rooms in the garden, and the following pictures show some of them.
I also provided links to the garden's website with beautiful photographs of those rooms.

The entrance gate

Actinidia tetramera var.maloides (Rosy crab-apple kiwi)
arch leading to the Entry Garden

Looking at My Pampas Grass

This is a little update to my previous post Pampas Grass - Little Observation (February 19, 2011). In that post, I tried to figure out if the blooming power of pampas grass depends upon whether I cut it down or not. I also compared my pampas grass with the pampas grasses from our neighborhood.
In previous years, I cut my dwarf pampas grass two ways:  severe, all the way to the ground, and less severe.

This is what I call severe cutting -all the way down:

This is what I call less severe cut (on the right):

I didn't notice any connection between the type of cut and number of plumes. In both cases, I had just a couple of plumes.
Last year, for the first time, my pampas grass was not cut at all. It looked pretty good in spring 2011, so I just cleaned it a bit, removing yellow blades as much as possible. In 2011 there were no plumes at all.
The grass looked  green the whole time, including the mild winter of 2011-2012:

 January 2012

 

This spring, I am not cutting it again. With a rake, I just removed dead blades. Here is how it looked in the spring of 2012:

March 2012

My neighbors' pampas grass, which I wrote about, never got cut. I don't know the reason, but the owners just keep their clumps as they are. The clumps are not attractive with lots of yellow among green. But, as I noticed before, they do provide many blooms.
Following are the pictures of pampas grass (not dwarf type as mine) that has never been cut.

February 2011

September 2011

 September 2011

April 2012

So, what do we have after comparing mine and neighbors' grasses:

When mine is cut, it gives very few plumes.

When mine is not cut, it gives no plumes.

Neighbors' grass is never cut and gives lots of plumes.

The neighbors grass gets more sun, and it is older than mine. Maybe, the age of the plants and the amount of sun, which it gets, determines its blooming power?

Do the older plants and the more sunny location produce more blooms?

It looks like it to me.

As I wrote in 2011, for me personally, the appearance of the whole plant is more important than the plumes. So, I am pleased with how my pampas grass looks and will cut it only if it looks brown and worn-out.
As for composting, I personally don't compost it. Why, I wrote here Pampas Grass - Bad Guy?

In conclusion, here are the beautiful clumps of pampas grass in Kingston, WA in October 2011:



I hope your pampas grass behaves for you, doesn't self-seed and provides a lot of exotic feathery plumes.
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Addition: Please read the comments to this post. My plant grows in sandy, not very rich soil. But, there was a pile of horse manure close to it. The grass' roots can easily reach it. It might well be that my pampas grass gets more nutrients than the neighbors' grass.
My plant is well fed, happy and lazy.
Neighbors' plants are stressed out and try to bloom and seed being afraid that they are going to die! This is what our NW garden guru Ciscoe Morris told about non-blooming lilac (Stress it out and it'll bloom for you!).
Thank you Greggo, Rob, GoSS, Cathy&Steve, Casa Mariposa and everyone who tried to answer my question!!!

***Copyright 2012 TatyanaS

Accidental Flowerbed - Before and After

 Last October, I wrote about my so called  'Accidental' Flowerbed. It's time to show its progress since that time.
For starters, a couple of pictures from September 2009, when I finally decided to turn a pile of dirt into a plant bed.

September 2009:

Marking location for Ligularia and grasses:

Next picture, six months later, April 2010:

Plants are limited by grasses, Ligularias, Alliums and Heucheras 

 May 2010:

Blooming Bowles' Golden grass (Milium effusum 'Aureum') and Heucheras took  center stage

 Angelina Stonecrop starts to cover the soil

June 2010:

 

July 2010:

Alliums and more Heucheras opened their buds

One year later, May 2011 

June 2011:

Japanese maple and ferns were added in fall 2010. Groundcovers and mosses are spreading. Volunteer Foxglove has grown huge in the middle of Hakonechloa macra 'Aureola'.

July 2011

 A view from above:

Hostas with their variegated leaves really add nice accents to the bed. Among the varieties is Hosta undulata 'Albo marginata'

Blooming grass is Bowles' Golden grass (Milium effusum 'Aureum')

White-flowering Tradescantia loves this place

August 2011:

Ligularia and Echinacea 'Milkshake' are both long bloomers

Current look, September 2011:

Knock Out rose on the right and zonal geranium on the left brighten the bed with their last blooms

The bed is filled with plants. Not shown here, but present are: Brunnera Jack Frost, Euphorbia and several tiny shrubs of Hydrangea and Euonymus 'Canadale Gold'. I use this bed for hosting plants and their divisions taken from other parts of my garden. The last addition is a little purple Cotinus, Smoke bush

All in all, I am pleased with this accidental bed. The only frustration is the roots of the trees growing nearby on the border with neighbors. Whenever I dig a  new planting hole, I encounter not only a thick mat of feeder roots but also long thick woody roots. I believe that is why the plants in this bed dodn't grow as well as they could. Some of them are slow growers.

***Copyright 2011 TatyanaS

My First Autumn Containers

Plants: Japanese silver grass 'Gold Bar' (Miscanthus sinensis), Chrysanthemum morifolium.

 These containers will be viewed only from one side, that is why the plants are arranged this way. Some space is left for mums to grow. I like the big red containers themselves and try to choose the plants which won't overwhelm them.

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We are still enjoying our warm dry September. There are not many obvious signs of fall in my garden yet.

***Copyright 2011 TatyanaS

Pampas Grass - Little Observation

To cut or not to cut pampas grass? If to cut, how much? These are the questions many people ask. I see a lot of visitors on my blog who check my post Pampas Grass - A Bad Guy? after using key words 'cutting pampas grass' on the web.
I am in no way a person who can give advice on this matter. But, I can share a couple of little observations which I made.
1. Is there any connection between cutting back pampas grass and abandance of plumes?
I have one dwarf pampas grass plant. I compared it with several pampas grasses in one of our neighbors' gardens. They look like regular, not dwarf type, but I think I still can make comparisons.
Last spring, I cut my plant all the way down. All summer and fall I had a nice green plant.

Photo: September. My pampas grass that was cut in spring.
The neighbors' plants, which were not cut, looked, in my opinion, not so nice. You could see old yellow blades mixed with new green ones.

Photo: September. The neighbors' pampas grass which wasn't cut
Now, let's see how these grasses performed in term of blooms.
When the time came to bloom, my plant gave only TWO plumes:

Click on the pictures to enlarge themThe neighbors' plants gave MANY plumes:

February 2011.

Of course, the contrast in 'blooming power' could be explained by the difference in the plants' age. The neighbors' plants could be older, more mature. But, could there be a connection between cutting the plant down and number of blooms?
What if my grass didn't bloom profusely because I drastically cut it back? If I would want more plumes on my plant, I probably would not cut it back at least one year. But, I like the clump itself even without blooms, so I am not willing to sacrifice the plant's overall appearance for sake of getting more plumes. My dwarf pampas grass looked its best in 2007, the year after I bought it and before I started to cut it.
Do you think there is a connection between the number of plumes and whether we cut or don't cut the pampas grass?
2. Is there a connection betwen the severity of cutting and the pampas grass' appearance?
As I told in the previous pampas grass post, I cut it not very low one year and down to the very base another year (two pictures below).

I didn't notice any considerable difference in the size of the grass clumps. Both years, the plant grew the same size and had very few plumes. By the way, when should the cutting be done?

Everyone likes to leave the plants for winter interest. Not to damage any new growth, should it be done in late winter?

***
I need to ask the owners of this garden, in the picture below, whether they cut their pampas grass? This is how great it looked in early November:

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What are your observations regarding pampas grass?
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My last post 'Looking at My Pampas Grass' (May 2012) is HERE

***Copyright 2011 TatyanaS

‘Accidental’ Flowerbed

Accidents happen, even in gardening. Once, I miscalculated the amount of soil amendment for our garden and got too much of it . After its biggest portion was spread on the lawn, under the hedges and on the flowerbeds, the remaining part was moved from the driveway to the ugly part of the lawn behind the house.

B e f o r e

I planned to move the mix somewhere fast so that we wouldn’t kill the grass we dumped it on. Well, that was the plan. In reality, the pile stayed there for several months. It became clear that the grass under it was gone. After lengthy consideration, I took a shovel, outlined the edges of the pile, and got myself a new flowerbed.

I’ve been told that the nutritious value of the mix probably got low by then. So, I didn’t have big hopes and considered it as a temporary home for newly bought plants and divisions of existing plants.

To make a long and boring story short, this is what I had at the beginning of this summer:

A f t e r

I move everything here that I don’t know where else to plant. It’s kind of a nursery. Some plants are here temporarily, until I find a permanent place for them. (Although, who doesn’t know that there is nothing more permanent than temporary?)

Grasses, hostas and heucheras love it here. They have part shade and consistently moist soil.

Smaller pictures can be enlarged by clicking on them

Ligularia was the real winner. Two of them were sitting in pots for three or four years (I know, I know, it was cruel to hold them there!). Several weeks after I moved one of them to the pile, new bed, it became clear that the ligularias should be free!

Yellow blooms are lovely, although not my favorite color. What I love the most about ligularia are its leaves that are glossy when young.

Next to the ligularia picture is the picture of Bowles’ Golden grass in bloom. Variegated Japanese sedge grass is also doing great here.

Alliums, poppies, rose, tradescantia and heuchera blooms add colorful happy spots to this place.

Rain Gardener Gardening By Trial And Error and Grace (Gardening With Grace) commented on these heucheras in my August post Containers In My Garden. Thank you, ladies, for noticing! In this bed, I have H.Caramel, H.Beaujolais, H. Velvet Night and one more type, green-leaved, which I can’t recall the name of.

On the pictures above, did you see a huge foxglove growing right in the middle of the Hakonechloa grass? It’s a volunteer foxglove. I probably needed to remove it when it just appeared, but the plant looked so healthy and big, I am curious what flowers will it produce next year. I hope the hakonechloa will survive. There are several of them on this bed, and they thrive in the part shade.

Plants which didn’t grow well in other parts of the garden seem to be recovering here. For example, knock-out rose and East Indian Holly fern that, before I moved them here, were suffering in dry soil. The only plant which didn’t survive here was Little Bluestem (Schizachyrium). It was probably my fault – it wasn’t the right spot for sun-loving grass. Too much moisture during last winter didn’t help either.

There is only one bad thing about this bed. Do you see a row of fir trees behind it? The trees didn’t miss a trick and sent their roots into the pile for nutrients and water. I cut these new roots from time to time when I dig holes for plants, but it’s clear who will be the winner. I just hope that the firs won’t suffocate my plants.

Even now, in October, the Accidental bed looks good. In the future, I plan to add a focal point to it, maybe, a little tree.

Plants are not shown in the pictures: Brunnera, Euonymus Canadale Gold, Euphorbia, Cape Fuchsia and some groundcovers.

I bet some accidents happened in your garden too!

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Copyright 2010 TatyanaS