Gardening in May

This is a siberian iris that grows in the front garden.  The leaves are thinner and longer than a tall bearded german iris.   I have lost the name of this particular variety.  There is a grass growing among these irises that is very persistent. 

This is a yellow water iris that I had planted next to the half barrel water feature.  It grows in soil that has a plastic buried beneath it to try to create a bog garden.  These yellow water irises can be very showy when grown in the right conditions.  Mine were taking over the garden area they were in when I was watering them well.  Now that the half barrel is no longer in this spot, I shall move one of these iris into the black tub liner that I have moved to the back woodland garden area.

These are two different kinds of Lewisia that grow in the small rockery by the vegetable garden at the back.  I will be giving these plants some of the compost to boost their flower and leaf size. 

This is the tiny erodium flower that is in the front garden sun dial circle.  I should like to get the wild  plant that looks like this to grow in my front strip of grass along the street where the crocus field is in the spring. 

A red lupine that grows in the front garden with the darker cedar hedge for a backdrop.  I really like these flowers and the leaves.  They come in a variety of colors and they do seed around a bit.  I wish I had room for more of them.  
These photos are from the 16th of May.  I have more that feature some more of the flowers in bloom and the color combinations. I will upload them as time permits.
I have started some work on the cleaning up of the woodland garden with the germander cut back and the edging stones reset.  Hopefully, when I get this area cleaned up I will have room for some lupines and more columbines of other colors than the blue ones.  I do have a nice red columbine that is doing well in the woodland.  (photo on next post),
The hedges have been trimmed with the new cordless hedge trimmer and fine tuned with the hand pruner.  They look pretty good, except for the honeysuckle pilea at the front.  It is very ragged.  I think I might replace this hedge with boxwood cuttings.  The area needs to be cleaned up and renovated.with compost added to all the beds.   The peonies need attention and the blue bells need to be kept under control.  The lemon balm needs to be removed entirely as is taking over the whole area.
I am getting the weeding done in the small area by the magnolia tree.  The violets have got out of hand again and are everywhere in that bed.  I should remove these violets from the garden entirely.  They are very tenacious and spread like crazy.  I have to be sure to get the roots out, because the plant will just shoot up more leaves if I don't.  Very tedious job to get these plants out.  I also need to get the grass out of the irises in this area of the front too. 
I have been quite busy otherwise with Megashot  .   We can now create a presentation with music using up to 50 of our photos.  You can see my first attempt at the bottom of  my blog.  I really love this feature. 

At Ragley Farm

This is a super macro shot of the tiny flower growing on the old mossy rock wall around the Ragley farms house.  These tiny flowers also inhabit lawns, but I cannot seem to entice any of them into my lawn.  I do finally have an erodium growing in the little rockery at the front.  Its flowers are bigger, but look similiar.  More on this in the next post.

Last Sunday we joined the VCCC people on a run out to Ragley Farms in Sooke.  Was a pleasant drive. I took a photo of this greyhound hood ornament on a 34 Ford Fordor.  I was amazed to see the skeleton of the dog in the photo when I viewed it on my computer.  I never noticed this when I was shooting it.

The Bentley in front of the farm cookhouse.  Very contrasty shot.
I have got a bit of gardening done in the past week, and quite a lot of time spent on Megashot.  We are going to have our first Contest starting June 1st, with cash prizes and more.  The contests is for Flower photos.
Come join the fun.

Gardening

I am tweaking a few photos of   'petal art' for the community on megashot.net .

We have had some wonderful weather this last week.  I have finished edging the back grass area.  I moved the edging stones out a bit and reset them.  Today I was out all afternoon.  I finished trimming the hedges with my new cordless rechargeable hedger.  I have yet to do the final trimming by hand.  I mowed the grass, including the crocus field, as the crocus leaves were mostly brown and gone into dormancy.  As there were quite a lot of hedge trimmings in the lawn mower bag, I added them to the woodland trail.  I won't be renovating that trail this year.  It really just needs some bigger bark chips than I can get from Cannor.  Mrs. P. asked me to take off a few branches of my English Oak tree as her laundry was getting caught in it, so I did that with my long pole pruner.   I topped up the pool and put a bit of water on the garden.  There are a few little plants up.. no potatoes yet.  The whole garden is looking not too bad.  I need to add bark mulch to the front area by the magnolia tree,  after weeding; and a few other fine tuning things.