What The Heck Is This? and other things gardeners say in May

 

What the heck is this?

 Anyone who knows me would agree that organization is NOT my strong suit. Curiosity, absolutely. When May rolls around (and in April too!) and I start looking at signs of new growth in the garden, one of the first things I say is: "What the heck is this?" Sounds funny when I write it that way, because as anyone who has been around me for five minutes knows, there's a whole lot of profanity left out of that question.

Why is this an issue and why should anyone care? Organization is a very personal thing... on the same level of personal as what happens behind the bathroom door. Organization is what separates everything (see what I did there?). 

Years ago, when I first started gardening, I could remember all the names of all the plants I put in the ground. My neighbor, Marge, told me the name as I stuck the cuttings into the South Florida sand/dirt and that was that. The plant grew. The name was the name. Done.

Then I got old. I gardened in lots of different places. I got older. Eventually the plants that followed me became much like old friends. Easy to recognize at a glance, even if they were hanging out at someone else's garden. It was the new stuff that stymied me. Five years ago, we rebuilt this garden almost from nothing but lawn. First came the new (to me) shrubs and perennials we had never grown. Those came from nurseries, so I saved the tags or the receipts. Surely that was enough to help me remember, right?

It didn't take long to realize that I was buying a fairly expensive plant only to forget what the heck it was after winter had long since erased any memory of what it had looked like the year before. 

 It was the irises that finally changed my mind. We bought a grab bag of siberian irises from a grower (now retired) in Michigan. They arrived, well packaged and labeled. Since you cant easily tell one siberian iris from another, especially not as young recently divided plants, I knew that they needed some form of identification. In the gardening bucket in the shed, we had always kept the "garden things" that we were given and hadn't found a use for. Things like grass trimming shears from a grandparent or little metal garden label stakes. Hah! 

It didn't take long before I ran out of those metal labels and needed more. By then I had learned of how other gardeners kept track and how they sometimes even kept a database of what they planted, and where. Suffice to say, this made my heart race a beat. (not sure my cardiologist would be happy to hear that).

Those metal labels are $$. I decided that I couldn't justify putting one in for every single plant I put in. This became self-evident when we started winter sowing plants by the hundreds each summer. If a gallon jug was cut into chunks of seedlings, and plunked into the ground willy-nilly, I was sure I would remember what was what and where. Not a chance. The next step was trying to use vinyl window blinds, cut into strips and labeled. They worked pretty well, for a season or two... but this winter was cold. Cold enough that the ground stayed frozen for long extended periods of time. Freezing and thawing, coupled with high winds, deep snow and asshole squirrels meant that a lot of my labels were out of the ground and quite a distance from where they had gone in.

Which leads me to today's utterance of: What The Heck Is THIS?!!?? 

Hostas are pretty amazing as they come up through the ground!

Baptisia is growing by leaps and bounds.

This is Amsonia hubrichtii. Looks pretty wild as it comes up.

 

The answer to today's question is: campanula/balloonflower/platycodon

This is Platycodon grandiflorus 'Fuji Blue',

 If I hadn't seen it growing in distinct separate clumps, I would have had zero idea what it was. Turned out to be Platycodon grandiflorus 'Fuji Blue'