Oh my gosh gorgeous!

I can't grow larkspur in my area so I'm pretty jealous lol.

Kate - love your garden pics. Nice to have something blooming between flushes. I have far too little!

Sharlene

It's wonderful to see a whole garden for a nice change. Sometimes I wonder what the entire garden looks like when I see the close ups of roses. Beautiful. Thanks for sharing!

Love your larkspur, Kate! Beautiful pictures!

Everything looks so serene!! Beautiful!!

Great looking flowers and garden Kate! :)

Gorgeous! Thanks for sharing your garden with us.

I also enjoy the garden pictures. So pretty! I love your bird-bath plantings.

I love it!

Beautiful just beautiful! Your garden looks effortless and peaceful, you are very lucky to have such a peaceful retreat. Thank you for sharing.

Oh I must grow those larkspurs again. They do look stunning!

Sooo gorgeous !! You have quite the green thumb !

I've never grown Larkspur before but they are stunning! I am loving the english garden vibe. I could be wrong but it has an english feel to it.

'Toscana Vigoroso' looks wonderful at the base of the bird bath. I could set up a chair and loll away the afternoon.

Love Larkspur, looks fantastic..

I confess--I grow larkspur only because I can't grow delphiniums decently in my region, As jjpeace suspected, I was --at one point long ago when I made my first gardens--trying for a kind of English garden look--notice the classic English blue, pink, and white colors--and delphiniums would really set all that off, but I never could get them to survive. The only other vivid blue with vertical growth I could think of was larkspur--not as impressive as delphinium, but it has the right color and adds a graceful wildflower effect to my gardens and seems quite appropriate for a midwestern garden. Then I discovered the advantage of wildflowers--they seed themselves, plant themselves, survive winters on their own, and come back even thicker the following years with no particular assistance from me! I've been sold on larkspur ever since.

Kate

Kate , I had to come back to look at this beautiful pic again ! And I noticed your beds are edged oh so perfectly . A task I never try . What is your secret or tips ? Last year I put down landscape timber but they are a mess .

It also appears you have a very nice lawn ! Something I never gave much thought , until this home. Ours is nothing but weeds .

Lily, thank you for the compliments. As for edging, I do it the old-fashioned way. Using either a hoe or, if I prefer to get down on my knees, a garden hand claw, I loosen the dirt next to the lawn edge, hand-pulling out any grass or weeds that don't want to grow in a straight line. Or if the edging is a real mess because I've neglected it for a long time, I get out a shovel and insert it along the grass edge, loosening the dirt that way. Then I have to get down on my knees and use the hand claw and hand-pulling to take out weeds or grass that I don't want.

I'm not always real conscientious about doing the edging, but then I remind myself that if I do it every couple weeks, it goes real fast cuz not much gets settled in the dirt where I don't want it to grow.

As for lawns, I took my Dad's advice years ago (he was an ex-farm boy). In the fall feed it with a high nitrogen fertilizer (lawn food) a couple times--5-6 weeks apart--and feed it again in early spring, and then water it occasionally in mid-summer when it gets too hot and it hasn't rained in some time. Do that for a couple years, and your healthy grass will spread out and take over most of the weeds. Oh yes, I forgot the other thing: mow the grass regularly and never real low. That way the weeds never mature enough to cast seeds about, but the grass gets thicker from being "pruned" (mowed) so often.

And I have been known occasionally, during the fall or very early springtime, to cast a couple handfuls of grass seed on some bare or thin spots, but then I have to remember to softly spray them with the hose a couple times a day to keep the seeds moist for a couple weeks until they germinate. That routine gets old--and as I get older, I do it less and less.

There--now you know all my secrets to an acceptable lawn. The real secret is: Go across the street and look at it. If it looks nice from there, it's good enough! That bit of wisdom has saved me a lot of worry and work. : )

Kate