More New Plantings [Second Post of the Day.]

5-22-14 SHORT HILLS: We’ve had a couple rainstorms, with a T-storm looming to the west on the radar. I have done more maintenance work—weeding and pruning and pulling vines off several shrubs. Part of the flagstone path had disappeared in the grass, so I lifted them up and reset them on top of the grass—an easy and quick solution. A few are a little wobbly, but they will settle back down.

I did more planting in the shrub bed that used to be the oak tree. It’s still a struggle with the dead oak roots. I made the bed a bit bigger and added a dwarf lilac, Syringa patula ‘Miss Kim’, and a spirea x vanhouttei, as well as twenty lamium, ten each of Lamium maculatum ‘White Nancy’, and Lamium galeobdolon ‘Jade Frost’. I added a bayberry, Myrica pensylvanica to the boggy bed.

Judy ordered a birdhouse to go in the center of the new bed.

New blooms: wild strawberry, star-of-Bethlehem, jack-in-the-pulpit, another rhododendron, weigela.


Star-of-Bethlehem, a six-pointed star with grass like leaves.

Another rhododendron.

Mama robin at work. I already put up a short video of this domesticity.