Welcome!

Have you recently stopped to notice the garden under our Welcome sign? No? Well, then, let’s take a look.

For a long time the garden has contained lavender plants. The flowers are harvested, and then incorporated into the Welcome packets that are given to newcomers.

Last year, the plants needed to be replaced, and you can see the new lavender plants flowering in the middle of the garden bed. Here is a close-up picture of one them:

Since the new plants are so much smaller than the old ones, that left a lot of space available for more flowers. Our gardeners chose plants that are native to Northern Virginia. The Golden Groundsel has finished flowering. This is what would have looked like:

Watch out for it next year!

Flowering right now is Threadleaf coreopsis. It looks like this:

You will see that this cultivar is called ‘Moonbeam.’ That means it has been bred for certain characteristics. All of the ‘Moonbeam’ plants look exactly the same, no matter where they are purchased. That means if you want more plants in a particular place, you don’t have to remember where you bought the first lot, and hope they still have some! The plants form seeds, but these are developed so that they cannot germinate. This means several things: you can’t save the seeds and propagate more plants from them next year; and the plants can’t pop up where you didn’t mean them to be. They also can’t easily spread to fill a space. The plants do grow bigger, though – so they do fill out that way. And if you dig up the plants every few years and thin them you can get new plants that way. But you wouldn’t be allowed to sell those seedlings.

There are other plants in the garden. Tell us in the Comments section what you can find.