It's the beginning of May. Sorry I haven't written in a couple of weeks. You must forgive me. Like the garden, I am gathering my strength, girding my loins, and getting ready to launch myself and the garden into June. We are facing the calendar and weather with courage, the kind that's said its prayers. We have weddings and graduations in May and a regional daylily garden tour in June. We are fixing fences, building beds and borders, and weeding, always weeding. Anything we can't fix, we will cover with mulch and call it good. We are fluffing with abandon. This is the back garden from atop a side border. I am standing on top of the retaining wall about five feet in the air. No bulb foliage here, but you can see the great, greenness that is early May. Most of the garden is in its green phase between...

In my garden, there are four or five real problem plants. I have other interlopers, but the following natives and non-natives are really bad actors in my leaf-mold enriched soil. Note: most natives can be kept in check if you don't water much and have lean, sandy soil. My garden's natural soil is red sand with large pockets of clay. Over the years, I've enriched it with Back to Nature cotton burr compost, my own homemade compost and shredded leaves along with various wood bark mulches. My current favorite is shredded pine bark, but it can sometimes be hard to find. Our first problem child, 'er plant, is Verbesina alternifolia, commonly known as wingstem and yellow ironweed. When it blooms in summer, it is beautiful, and pollinators adore it. I do not. This native absolutely loves my garden and all of its resident plants...to death. I've ripped and pulled and done...

Most of Oklahoma got rain night before last. The rain-soaked garden woke up yesterday morning to singing birds, crawling caterpillars and me stalking it with my camera. There is nothing more pleasurable than spring in an Oklahoma garden, except, maybe fall, but spring is being extra good to us this year. I almost always approach the back garden from the French doors leading out onto my deck. I'm getting ready to skip down the stairs and out onto the gravel paths. This week I got all of my pots planted except one that held a blueberry bush. I was waiting to see if it was alive. Blueberries often go dormant here, but it definitely looks dead. I'll replace it with something from Bustani Plant Farm on Monday. Rain in Oklahoma is cause for celebration, and it looks like we're in a stormy pattern for the next week or so. We need...

After returning home from Italy last week, I found the garden in better shape than I expected. Ornamental gardens are forgiving. In spring, my garden is always covered in leaves and debris. I live at the axis of the shortgrass prairie and the beginning of the deciduous forest in the hills of east central Oklahoma after all. In the back garden, we removed the surrounding chicken wire fence and blew the leaves out into the lower pasture. The entire garden, including the back beds, is way ahead of last year. We will replace the worn out chicken wire with flat cattle panels cut in half to make it easier to weed-eat around the garden's border while keeping bunnies at bay. Front flower beds before cleanup yesterday and today. Yesterday, after a few days recovering from jetlag, I went outside and worked on the last two beds in disarray. I cut...