A stroll through the garden

I put in another few hours sorting the garden this weekend and discovered spider mites eating one of my favourite trees, which I bought full price, ACK.

What a fool I was to plant it in the part of the garden where the little beasts turn up every year, or more likely what a fool I am not to deal with the problem properly, perhaps by introducing predatory mites.

The back yard presents no such difficulties, so let's go there instead.

Here is my favourite flowerpatch, which was here when I moved in. It emerges from the ground early each spring and requires no effort from me whatsoever to look more and more amazing until it finally stops flowering in fall. Also I like this shade of purple.


Here is a plant whose name I don't know, which was marked $5 in the Please Get It Off Our Parking Lot section of my much-loved plant nursery last fall. It was nearly dead then but - $5? I couldn't pass up that challenge. It's doing much better than I expected (which is to say, I was hoping it would stay alive; I hadn't expected it to spread and flower prettily as well.)


And look at this Weigela! another plant that requires zero intervention from me, and does a bang-up job of hiding all the plastic pots I dumped in the corner last fall when I realized there wasn't room in the garage for any of them.


There are even a few strawberries coming along - or there were when I took this picture. In the intervening ten minutes they ripened enough for a local animal to come along and eat them. Still, the leaves are nice and green all summer, and so glossy. And they're never troubled by spider mites (knock wood.)


Speaking of which... I'd better go water the afflicted tree. Word on the street is that spider mites don't like humidity.