It has been a good year in the garden. The wave of Aethionemas is starting to fade, and the Eriogonums are just starting to kick in. I am always amazed at how utterly different the garden is every year, a fact I contribute more to my own patterns of exhaustion more than anything else. We use to have lots of choice miniature bun dianthus. I became inordinately weary of the constant battle with the gophers to keep them alive and the garden gradually filled with more rodent resistant plants. We rely on a certain level of self-sowers to help overcome the constant plant attrition due to rodent predation. I always have plans to control who sows seeds where, based on my design preferences. But in the end, it usually boils down to vast populations of plants that I just never got around to deadheading until they had already spread seed in directions I had not really intended. One year the garden was a blue wave of Penstemon heterophyllus. This year a cloud of dianthus hybrids seems to have descended. We had a few Dianthus that have survived the gophers. Among them is a population born from various cheddar pinks, Dianthus nivalis, and a large cultivar known as “Mountain Mist”. I used to think that “Mountain Mist” was called such due to its lovely blue foliage. I have this year decided it is because of its ability to sneak into the garden and quietly, surreptitiously cover everything. I am not really complaining. We have an incredible array of frilly pink Dianthus, and the garden is bathed in a delicious clove scent.
But this year I think I need to do some Dianthus deadheading.