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[SG] new person bio

Hi list:

I subscribed to the shadegardens list this morning and have gotten a very
nice e-mail welcome from Sherryl Sandersfeld, who tells me that a little
bio from me would be appropriate.  While I've yet to get any actual mail
from the list (you must all be outside playing in the dirt), I'm happy to
leap in.  She did suggest 'short bio' and I hope this fits under the wire.

I live in Minneapolis, zone 4, and no part of my yard gets more than 6
hours of sun a day.  Rather a lot of my yard gets no sun at all.  I've got
some mature elms and oaks, a couple of smaller maples, and live in a
north-facing house at the bottom of a curving hill -- the neighbor's houses
shade mine pretty effectively.

My current big project is recovering the large woodland garden on my
boulevard.  I think the name for the strip of grass between sidewalk and
street varies from state to state, but around here it's called the
boulevard.  Generally these are 2 or 3 feet wide; because my street curves
my boulevard is about 75 feet wide and over 100 feet long.  It's shaded by
an enormous elm, two smaller oaks, several cedars and pines.  It had gone
rather wild, and I have spent the last several years digging out tree
seedlings by the trashbagful.  Thousands of weed trees, some as tall as 8
feet.

We put in a wandering garden path this year, and are quite pleased with the
look and how the negative space is defined by the wood chip pathways.  It's
starting to look like a garden.  The area has a lot of violets, and had
been planted with some azaleas (the Lights series of cultivars from the
University of MN, I believe), but these are not doing so well.  They're
spindly and don't bloom well.  Questions:  what can I do to encourage these
azaleas to fill in from the bottom and not look so thin?  What can I do to
help them bloom more?  Is there some way to pinch them back?

The northside of the woodland is a hill and gets the most sun.  It came
with daylilies planted on it, and they bloom OK.  Don't know the variety's
names, though.  There's yellow and pink and a shorter red.  The Siberian
iris is blooming thinly now, too.  The daffodils don't bloom but the
virginia bluebells (mertensia) do.

Several hostas were planted around the woodland in years past, and I've
added to them, but again, I don't know the cultivars' names except the
Yellow River hosta I planted last week.

I also have a lot of both true and false Solomon's seal, some sharp-lobed
hepatica, and some rue anemone.  There's a nice bed of wild ginger and a
single giant white trillium which never multiplies because the squirrels
eat the seeds.  There are hundreds of jacks-in-the-pulpit, of all sizes.
The squirrels must be sowing the seeds around.  And there's a few ferns,
and some sort of sedge.  And I had a lovely surprise this year when dame's
rockets came up out of nowhere!

My biggest weed problems are nightshade, motherwort, something that looks
like phlox but isn't, and creeping charlie.  And the constant crop of weed
trees, of course, of which I mostly find elm, ash and buckthorns.  I've
also got a pact made with the virginia creeper, and the birds are helpfully
replanting the wild grapes I tear out every year.

In recovering this garden, I've changed and adjusted my plans many times,
but I think I've finally finished my plan for the understory and shrub
layers.  The city's arborist came and trimmed the dead branches out of all
my boulevard trees and cut down a few that were really sickly.  A
honeysuckle that was being shaded out is now blooming.  I moved a pagoda
dogwood treeling to fill in the big open space in the middle.  I put a rosa
rugosa on the sunny hillside, but am skeptical about how it will do.

I've also planted goatsbeard (aruncus) and queen-of-the-prairie
(filipendula) and meadow rue (thalictrum) to be in the 4-to-8 foot range.
The plants I'm most worried about now are the ligularia "The Rocket" -- I
planted 4 and one is doing very poorly.  It looks wilted all the time and
they all seem really thirsty.  Anybody have success with this plant?

So far, my efforts to plant the ground layer have been to plant scilla,
which is spreading OK, and the cranesbill geraniums are blooming now.  I
put in a siberian bugloss (brunnera).  I've added bloodroot and merrybells,
fern-leaf bleeding heart and the common kind, and also some varigated
creeping phlox.  And shooting stars.

I've got a couple of different trycitris (did I spell that right?  I mean
toad lilies), and the bunnies ate my turk's cap lilies when they came up
this spring.  I'd love to get some suggestions for other woodland lilies
that'll grow in zone 4.

I'm going to move some lilies-of-the-valley out to the woodland garden, and
some ostrich ferns -- these grow happily in other parts of my yard.  I'll
probably put in some astilbes, especially the red ones (Etna?).  I've got
some family heirloom columbine seedlings, but they are still tiny, despite
being started indoors on 20 March 98.  They're still in pots but I think
I'm going to  try a few in the ground and see how they do.

So that's my big project for this year.  I'm looking for suggestions on
other plants to add to the mix -- as you can see it's partly native
woodland species and partly more formal garden plants.

Thanks for reading this far.

Karen. [who found this list on Stephanie Da Silva' list of lists in
news.answers]
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