Back in May of this year, I had visions of pure white geraniums surrounded with trailing white bacopa in all my planters.
In fact, I did plant both (see my post Early Beginnings) plus I used Variegated Feather Grass as the central focal point of each of the smaller planters. I used Majesty Palms for the larger planters to provide height and some screening from my neighbors and from the street.
Well, the feather grass did really well in the planter that has sun almost all day, however the geraniums and bacopa suffered from too much sun in that location. In fact, the feather grass took over and is quite beautiful as shown in the photo at the top of this page.
The geraniums seemed to like sun part of the day, but did not do really well where there was next to no sun or where there was full sun. The bacopa was similar, and while everything looked good, it wasn’t the showing what I had visualized in my mind.
This may be because everything has matured over the last 4 or 5 years, and while I have the privacy I wanted in our urban setting, the shade from the Ivory Silk Lilacs surrounding the garden is beginnng to encroach the center of the terrace where I have the planters for the annuals. This kind of thing just creeps up on you and all of a sudden there is too much shade. I normally have the lilacs trimmed back each fall, I think we’ll have to go harder than ususal this year.
The outer hedge of yews and the garden border of hostas are thriving. But next year I will have to switch to something like begonias and maybe some shade impatiens. We’ll see, that’s next spring when I will get the planting bug again.
The garden looks great nonetheless, but rather green and subdued.
