The saga continues. This part of the garden tour covers what I've done in the front yard.

This is the far left of the front of the house. At the very left is a stinging nettle. I've got enough of them around I get stung pretty frequently, but this one I manage to stay out of the way of. In the spring I had to pull out a lot of its runners. It is supposed to be a good companion plant, and I think it has an interesting look to it.

At the right of its base are some pansies. I planted pansies and dahlias alternately all along the front this spring. That cute bush with the yellow flowers is a coreopsis which I put in last year and got through the winter very well. Its vegetation is very thin and I'm impressed how it can come up with these husky looking yellow flowers. I don't know what that pink thing is at the bottom right of the coreopsis. Maybe another pansy. I took these pictures a couple weeks ago, and I can't find anything that would make a flower like that there today.

Beside the coreopsis is lemon balm. Some of its branches stick up behind the coreopsis. It's smell reminds me of a lemon furniture polish I used to use. I have to pull its sprouts and trim its branches to keep it from getting too out of hand. I moved it out of the backyard garden and only let it grow in marginal areas where it's easier to control. I started it from seed when I first started gardening, and I also got a plant from a nursery (Sears?) which is this plant you're looking at. It's supposed to make a good herbal tea, but tea that smells like furniture polish doesn't appeal to me, so I've never made any.

That plant at the back with the big round leaves to the right of the lemon balm is a hollyhock. It is a few years old and didn't make any flowers this year, or maybe it's a sprout from the old plant and is too young to make flowers. They are very distinctive black flowers when they show up. They tend to get bug eaten out here in front. Hopefully in a summer coming soon I'll get hollyhocks back in the picture.

In front of the hollyhock, close to the ground and not very visible, is, I think, sweet woodruff. At least it's a Galium of some kind. They like to grow in meadows and put out white flowers in the spring. I think that's another plant from the Groton garden cart.

As for the plant with the pink flowers at the far right, I'll wait until another picture to talk about it since these are a few vagrants who've strayed from the main tribe.

These flowers in the front need to be watered even when it rains since the eaves and perhaps the prevailing direction of the rain fall keep it pretty dry. When I first moved in, there were sparse patches of grass and ant lions. Now that I water it regularly, it has the vegetation you are viewing, but I imagine it would revert to the old regime if I stopped watering. And actually, I think I would have a better survival rate over the winter if I got some moisture in there during the off season as well.

During the mild winters we were having, I used to have pansies survive through the whole winter. I guess the heat from the house kept them going. They really made a show in the spring. That hasn't happened for a few years.

So now we've moved to the right a little. This picture overlaps with the one we were just looking at. You can see a better shot of the bedstraw just to the right of the post. Then come some more pansies with that red-pink flower behind them. Those purple flowers to the right of the red-pink flower are Verbena boraniensis according to the label. Below and in front of them is some yarrow whose flowers start out red and then go to the usual white. Both of these I got this summer at the Groton garden cart and they represented my 4th of July celebration since they looked sort of like fireworks.

Below the red-pink flowers clinging close to the ground are some flowers with an intense pink. These I got from the Gardener's Exchange, and like most of those plants, I've forgotten it's name. It is quite an interesting plant and make runners everywhere and sprouts these intense pink flowers. I hope it's perennial or reseeds in the spring. Occurring in most of the right half of this picture are snapdragons. They reseed every spring, though not as vigorously as the red-pink flowers. I originally grew them from seeds several years ago. Back then they were quite an interesting variety of colors, but now all I get is this pale pink.

Now we come to the right half of the front. In this view you can see the front door and a little bit of the left half which we have just been looking at. So to the right of the door is the most vigorous patch of that red-pink flower though you'd hardly know it from this shot. It grows from seed every spring. There are a lot of sprouts and I usually thin them out. I started these from a packet of seeds early in my gardening career and have had them follow me ever since. I can't remember what they're called. A struggling gloriosa daisy has inserted its flower in front of the right post. There are also a couple shaggy specimens of butterfly weed whose cousins you met earlier in this tour.

I used to grow sunflowers out here and I hope to do it again in a summer coming soon. This summer I didn't manage to grow anything from seed I was so busy transplanting this and that.

Further to the right and down low is a patch of marigolds whose orange flowers you can make out I hope. It gets bigger every year. They grow from seed. Usually I transplant some to the back where they help control nematodes. For some reason, they don't reseed in the back. There are a lot of things which won't reseed back there but do fine elsewhere. I think there is some ant or something that carries off the seeds.

Finally, you can see I've started some morning glories out here. If you have made it this far, I think you deserve a reward, so I will tell you the secret of making morning glories climb up posts. I had to refresh my memory since I just started these morning glories the summer before last. I really didn't have morning glories in mind for out here, but they came along with spiderwort which is behind them and invisible at this point. Fortunately for the spiderwort the morning glories don't really get going until the weather gets fairly warm.

Here you can see I have some pink morning glories mixed in with the blue, and to the far right, an adventurous morning glory is climbing up a mullein plant (I think the German name of Königskerze, king's candle, is much more descriptive) which made a really nice display last summer, and whose dead husk persists. It didn't need any help to do that, and it doesn't need help to get up chain-link fenses, but it does need help to get up four-by-four posts. I tie a piece of twine at the top of the post and spiral the twine loosely down the post and tie it at the bottom. As the morning glories send out tendrils in the spring, I guide them under the twine if they don't look like they'll find it by themselves. I had to tuck the tendrils for this post in all they way up. Now that it's grown up though, the twine is invisible and I'm sure naive people think the morning glories did that by themselves. But now you know better.

Thank you again for going on my little tour. The last stop is the back yard. Hopefully there will be something to look at this late in the season. If a frost hits too soon you may have to wait for the spring. Actually I may have to wait until the spring just to get my breath back.