Lemon grass, lemon thyme, lemon basil, sorrel tastes lemony and so do roselle leaves, lemon scented geranium, lemon balm, Lemon scented plamts

I had a lemon garden bed quite a while back and it was fun. Plants I remember using were lemon basil, lemon balm, lemon thyme, lemon grass, lemon verbena, lemon catnip, two potted lemon trees (one Meyer Lemon and the other one was the lemon tree that has variegated foliage), and several different lemon-scented geraniums.

If you want to expand beyond merely lemon-scented plants, there's a whole slew of flowers in lemony yellow, including marigold 'Lemon Gem', an heirloom lily called 'Lemon Lily' and a newer daylily (I don't remember its exact name) that has Lemon in the name and a vague lemon scent. There's tons of other flowers available with blooms that are lemon yellow. One of my favorites is 'Lemon Swirl' four o'clock which has variegated yellow and white flowers. I grew it as a background plant just outside the garden fence (with my lemon garden just inside the garden fence) along with a flowering nicotine (Nicotian langsdorfii 'Lemon Tree') that I choose merely or the name. The flowers of the flowering nicotine were a lime green and different in appearance from most flowering nicotines. I really like it. Neither this particular flowering nicotine or four o'clock reseeded in my garden though.

If you want to add some edibles that have 'lemon' in the name, there's always lemon cucumber and Lemon Boy' tomato.

Daphe odora has a nice lemon scent and some people think Winter Honeysuckle (Lonicera frangrantissima) has a lemon scent. While I love winter honeysuckle, I don't think it smells like lemons. Therein lies one of the great delimmas of lemon gardening---since people perceive aromas/odors somewhat differently, some people may detect a lemon scent in some plants whereas others won't.

I was pretty "loose" in my definition of lemon when I planted my lemon garden bed and used anything I wanted that either had a lemon or lime scent, produced lemons, was the color or lemons, or had lemon in the name. My favorite holdover plant in the garden that lives to this day is the honeysuckle "Pink Lemonade", which grows on either side of my entry arbor. It doesn't have a lemon scent, but its delicious honeysuckle scent perfumes the entire yard and visitors always stop and say "what is that lovely scent?". Be advised that both lemon catnip and lemon balm reseed vigorously and spread themselves around all over the place with wild abandon.

Dawn you read my mind wild abandon of lemony yellowness!

I am redoing my main garden area to a more formal ugh type so rotating will be easy on me but there will be spots of wildness here and there. I was reading a post in TX gw about colored gardens. Stunning!

Today I am sorting and taking inventory of seed stock. What a chore. Can't wait till January.

Kim, I went through a Rainbow Garden phase for 4 or 5 years in the early to mid 2000s where I had a raised bed of each color of the rainbow, filled with veggies, herbs and flowers featuring that color. Of couse, all the raised rainbow beds were in proper rainbow order, though each bed did, of necessity, have some green in it. At that time, there weren't any actual blue tomatoes yet, so I grew one that was called Blue Fruit (it was a standard black tomato), but other than that, I didn't have that much trouble finding and growing plants in all the colors of the rainbow. Finding corn in each color was challenging, but I know that I had corn in red (Ruby Sweet or whatever the red sweet corn from Burpee was called then, and a red dent corn), yellow (easy), blue/green (Dwarf Blue Jade), and green. I didn't have a purple corn although I bet one is available, and I didn't have an orange one, so I grew orange maranth instead, and the golden orange seedheads were spectacular. That whole rainbow garden phase is what got me growing tomatoes and peppers, among other things, in such a wide array of colors---and I found Swiss Chard in an astonishing variety of colors too. I had a lot of fun with all the different colors....that was the first time I'd ever grown green coneflowers (from seed!) and Bells of Ireland. On top of everything else, eating veggies and fruits in a wide array of colors is very healthy because you get the phytonutrients linked to each different color.

I haven't grown my garden Rainbow Garden style in 5 or 6 years now, except a couple of years ago I did plant all my tomato/pepper plants together in Rainbow Garden style. That actually is helpful for anyone else who might be helping me harvest my garden---if they know which bed is which (from the color of the flowers, mature pepper or mature tomatoes), they know when to harvest the various peppers and tomatoes at full maturity. I don't grow many Green-When-Ripe tomatoes, for example, because I forget about them and keep waiting for them to turn their full mature color until I eventually realize that they already are their full mature color. However, if I plant the GWR tomatoes in a bed with green coneflowers, Bells of Ireland, green flowering amaranth, green nicotiana, basil, etc., then I never forget which tomato plants are the Green-When-Ripe types.

I bet that was beautiful. I love that idea.

This year I am trying to be more organized and really serious about a market garden. There is a great opportunity locally and even if I have to run to Lubbock I think it pay off. I still want to do some fun areas like the sunflower circle and more flower spots here and there.

I have never heard of a rainbow/certain color garden as a theme. What a neat challenge. Please post pics of how it turns out! How fun!

Luvncannin- where are you located?

I am in Texas but post here.

I have family in Lubbock and am a Texas Tech grad myself. Do the "gardening rules of Oklahoma" apply to your environment out there or do you differ? (ie, erratic weather, heavy clay soils, crazy critters?)

I found Oklahoma GW searching for gardeners dealing with crazy weather and wind. I have been coming to this corner for over 4 years. Everyone here is so helpful.