August at Nan’s Place

Our friend, Nancy Helberg offered to share some pleasures of late season garden with some photos. She had been admiring the complementary plant combinations in simultaneous bloom on a particular day when she contacted me. When I arrived on Friday, a couple days later, the weather conditions had intervened on those between days, she said, battering down some of the blossoms that had caught her attention. It is so true that when our garden catches our emotional satisfactions on a particular day or moment in plays of light and shadow—get out there with a camera asap as that precious time fleets quickly!

We have visited this garden before at a different time of year in this blog. Nan’s garden is on a hillside off Old New Windsor Pike with a great view of Carroll’s rural countryside. She has been gardening on her property for almost 30 years and due to its open exposed locale,  gets a fair amount of wind in her location, as I recall from a previous conversation.

She likes to have bedding type plants and old standby bulbs or perennials  decorating the front of the house and near the roadside.

There are container plants on either side of the carport that she experiments with. A few pots didn’t do well this year, perhaps too much rain then baking sun, perhaps.  Her impatiens along the wall, geraniums and angelonia looked very good.

In back she has a number of beds with a mix of annuals and perennials with a few flowering shrubs.

This is the time of year when garden phlox is a showcase plant. She has pinkish-purple phlox and white ones-probably David phlox.

My favorite unusual garden bed spot is a very interesting perennial bed built around a rock outcropping on the slope .

You can see that she also has coneflowers in there that have gone by, but now the purples, pinks, off whites and greens are dominant in late August against the beautiful views.

Behind the garage is a sloped area that is difficult to maintain without help as it is steep. Nan had it planted with pink Spirea japonica at the top, which she says she has too much of. Lower down appears to be a type of cotoneaster and an edging ribbon of  Liriope with its tiny purple flowers. There were some yellow flowers, perhaps tickseed, yellow echinacea or a kind of helianthus– I don’t know but I like it.

Years ago, Carmen had given out a hardy begonia that seems to thrive in this location at the top of the slop by the garage. It has become a dense ground cover.

Around the side of her home she has a shadier area  where she showed me a rejuvenated hydrangea, a collection of hosta and the ubiquitous Nandina domestica used by many of our floral designers.

An indoor plant Nan showed off was this beautiful variegated cornplant, possibly Dracaena fragrans.

It is always such a pleasure to visit our member’s gardens!