The Rain Garden Photos

Early last year I put together a rain garden in our yard to absorb some of the driveway drainage. Here are a few pictures of how it looks now!

Inside the garden we have a variety of perennials that are generally carefree and tolerate a wide range of growing conditions. Plants like coneflowers. Echinacea purpurea is having a perfect year here in our garden.


If we change our focus a little we can view the gladiola. One of the few summer blooming bulbs I've added to the gardens. They look really nice when they stand upright but have a terrible tendency to topple toward the turf! Those little green bamboo stakes would be good to help stake them up if necessary.



The pale pink blends nicely with the purple of the coneflowers but the gladiolas look great all by themselves as well.


Asclepias tuberosa or orange butterfly weed is a fantastic, easy care perennial. It doesn't transplant very well due to the large tuber so if you decide it needs to be moved you had better move much of the dirt around the roots as well. You'll see butterfly weed growing along roadsides and it grows readily from seed planted directly in the garden.


It's not blooming yet but this ornamental golden rod (aren't they all?) is beginning to bud. Over the years varieties of golden rod (Solidago) have been bred to grow as shorter heights with different flowers than what we normally see in the wild. Unfortunately many people don't see the value of golden rod in the landscape as they get it confused with a more infamous plant: ragweed. Both plants blooms at the same time and golden rod gets blamed for the allergy problems associated with ragweed. Golden rod is insect pollinated while ragweed is wind pollinated. 


Here you can see the golden rod's placement next to the coneflowers. It should look very neat with the purple and gold colors blending together in the late summer raingarden.



One of the two kinds of ornamental grasses in the raingarden is Miscanthus sinensis 'Zebrinus' also known as Zebra grass. I took advantage of the setting sun to capture some back lighting for the photo. You can really see the variegation in the leaves of grass.



Due to Garden Blogger's Bloom Day on Wednesday (and poor planning on my part) I'm delaying Worst Weed Wednesday until July 29th. Wednesday July 22nd isn't an option since I'll be unavailable for blogging that day. I'll post a reminder toward the end of next week!

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