Wildflower Patch Update & Northern Michigan Garden Tour

The Northern Michigan Garden is just a little behind my garden at home or even the Proven Winners Signature Garden but it is always fun just to show you what the garden looks like in the spring so we can see how much it changes during the summer. We also stopped by the Wildflower Patch to see what was blooming there.

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in today’s video rod and I actually headed up north to the northern Michigan garden to just check out to see what the gardens are doing also we’re up here on the property right now if you remember last fall we planted a huge Wildflower patch so as we were driving past this piece of land we notice little Dibbles of blue here and there so I’m excited to show you the first wild flowers that we have here in the Wildflower Garden so stick with me as we take a walk through the wildf flower garden and also heading over to the cottage to see all the beautiful landscape and what’s blooming there let’s take a look in the garden so we’re going to pan Over The Wildflower field and I don’t know if you can see just the little splashes of blue as we’re walking I’m going to go ahead and get a closer up picture CU I feel like it is a little bit hard to see in the video so this is where you are going to be able to help me so obviously I know you think that I know everything about flowers but that’s just not the case I don’t know every single flower I know a lot of the flowers we grow but not every flower FL so here is a beautiful blue very low growing looks like a little cup kind of flower and I don’t know what this one is called so if any of you are watching right now and know what this is I would love for you to tell me so right now that is the only thing that really I’m seeing in The wildf Flower Patch when we planted this we loaded it with various um mixes of seeds a bunch of Lupin a bunch of poppies two uh escal or milkweed cuz I want to make this kind of more of a butterfly Oasis and as I’ve been walking past here I’ve been able to see some of the beautiful butterflies that have been coming to check out the field there’s Lupin in here uh Rebeca I’m just trying to think of all the things that we like really doubled up on and wanted to load this field full of so we’re excited to watch as the flowers start to come up and give us color but really like I said I’ve never seen these blue flowers before and it was so pretty as we were driving past the road and saw just all these little sprinkles of blue popping up so this is really fun so we’ll continue to update you on this little field that we created with all of the various wild flowers as they begin to bloom I know there’s a lot of poppy in here and I anticipate that the next thing will probably start seeing blooming would be those spring poppies and I’m excited because I’ve seen beautiful fields of poppies that have just been so breathtaking and I’m hoping that’s will be the next color phase that we’ll be seeing in this little garden and by little it’s really not that little it was fun last fall just taking all the seeds and just sewing them in this space and just envisioning what it could look like as basically a sea of wild flowers let’s go ahead and take a look up at the gardens around the C Cottage and see what’s blooming there we’ve now made our way over to the cottage and so we’re going to check out the gardens here at the northern Michigan garden so these Gardens were planted in 2020 uh in 2021 and they are filling out really nicely so one thing I do find up here it’s a Zone I think it’s a 5B is things are just a little bit slower than what they are up nor you know down at the greenhouse and at our house um but everything is coming along quite nicely and this space here as summer goes on we’ll start to see colors of dianthus uh hopefully hopefully a day Liles if the deer don’t eat them there’s Sedum in here there’s Lupin in here Salvia a few hostas which I know the deer will eat but they usually leave them along alone for a fairly decent amount of time there is penstamin in here as we move up manard more of the dayes let’s see an enemy hostas more hastas more of the tall flocks the next level here everything is on a hill this next level here we’ve got some ornamental grasses there in the back for height and for interest we do have little lime punch hydrangeas planted to give us some big specimen type varieties more dianthus are planted here right along the bricks and that’s going to look really pretty when they’re in bloom it’s just going to be a mass of pink Veronica and Salvia there’s a few bleeding heart and berera blooming right now now look at those beautiful Periwinkle blue Blooms of the berera that’s always so fun to fun to see one of the first colors of the season along the back wall we have some of the Gold Heart bleeding heart and if you’ve been watching my videos you’ll notice that in nearly every Garden I have we have this Gold Heart bleeding heart and it’s because I love love love love that chartreuse foliage with those really bright pink flowers so these are pretty little yet so they’re going to continue to fill out as years go on obviously a garden doesn’t happen overnight um but it’s been fun to watch this Garden evolve over the last couple years and just see what things work and what things don’t work things that the deer eat and don’t eat uh and sometimes they’re they’re leaving things alone that they should be eating but then at other times they’re eating things that are like 100% deer resistant and for somehow some reason they didn’t get the memo that they shouldn’t be eating on those plants here is this nice level here in front so from the cotage as we’re looking down from the various decks or Windows we’re looking down into this Garden of course when we’re down at the lake we’re looking up but when we designed this Garden we wanted to make for sure that it was pleasing both looking down on and looking up on so plants that are in this area they’re not blooming obviously yet but there’s a lot of Bobo hydrangeas Invincible mini Maat hydrangeas pugster butterfly bsh Bush Spa those are all things that we kind of planted as like anchor plants or Foundation plants shrubs good sturdy shrubs to kind of fill in the space then we went ahead and sprinkled um perals around so I did a huge sweep of cone flowers that’ll be something we’ll want to look for this summer when I show you updates so giant sweep of cone flowers going through this bed there’s also some tall flocks the open act flocks Monarda there are corabels to give some consistent color I’m going to try to walk and show you some of these things kind of from a ground level standpoint so just seeing those corabells or or tiella hella I think those are actually the huc carella maybe Red Rover just gives a little pokes of color before things start to wake up now in this Garden in the past we have planted super Bells kind of lining this front brick border um this year I’m not sure what the plan is I think I think we are doing the sun Pati in here you can see we’ve got drip tubing so this area gets dripped irrigated uh every probably daily Rod has it set once the summer starts you know heat kicks in uh so all these plants are getting irrigated to that drip tubing but we’ll have a splash of those Sun Pati right along the front here so that way when we’re looking from the bottom up we’re seeing a huge mass of color all summer long now I think I did Red to go along with the white and blue Cottage to give kind of a patriotic theme and look this year stepping downward we have what we call our little butterfly garden I mean obviously all the gardens are butterfly gardens but in this space we planted a lot of escalopas or milkweed um there are some uh hydrangeas in here along with a rose some alium Millennium which is nice for the pollinators you see we’ve got another little Huka or Corell in here coming back Atlas Rose more pulman area and there is a hosta in the corner and for whatever reason this particular hosta the deer the deer really don’t eat so that’s kind of nice now we’re at the very bottom looking up and I told you um if you’ve watched we have this huge mass of auga that we planted so it’s in the shade right now so it’s kind of hard to really see its true colors but AA is typically a deer resistant ground cover that is aggressive it does take over but the right plant for the right place I like to say that all the time and this is definitely the right plant in this right place holding back this huge slope so as I mentioned these are deer resistant but the deer went and just gobbled them down to the ground this winter never fear though they are coming back beautifully and we’re seeing the chartreuse the black there’s even kind of some coppery foliage I think we have about six or eight different auga on this planting and it’s going to once it starts flowering it’s going to have beautiful purple flowers that are just going to totally Line This Hillside why we mixed all the different colors together is just to kind of break it up a little bit give it some texture interest foliage color interest and uh just spice up kind of a blah place in the garden but look at that beautiful chartreuse green I love that chartreuse it really lights up these dark spaces I’ve said that many times before so again like I mentioned even though plants are deer resistant does not mean the deer will not eat them but a lot of times you don’t have to worry the deer will eat them and they will come back and flush back out now we’ll notice the summer the deer won’t touch these at all it was just a winter eating buffet for them and now that they’ve got so many other choices they’re not going to come back and eat on this until perhaps next winter we’re going to go ahead and head up to see the beds that are up and along the cottage there it’s so peaceful and quiet just sitting here listening to the birds I was sitting out this morning just with my Merlin Bird app on listening to all the various Birds I think I counted 25 different sounds of birds and that’s one thing that’s different when you live in the woods there’s so much more nature to enjoy um there’s purple martin that just have arrived so that’s been kind of fun we have a Martin feeder there down by the water and just watching them come and go it’s it’s it’s just so relaxing and peaceful if you remember the video from a few years ago when Rod had planted in and along the walk here just to kind of hold this wood chips and dirt from flowing down the drive he planted the hack AOA all gold grass and then there’s some so he has a hack on a CL all gold sorry kind of got off track and then the hore cor Bells the purple colored I believe those are wild berry so it kind of goes the wild berry and then the chartreuse grass and then as it got a little bit steeper he went and did more with the auga using a dark variety and then another chartreuse green variety and the goal is is that that ajuga will eventually fill in all that space and not have any wood chips there so that would be a really nice erosion control plant to just hold this space in place checking out the tiered Gardens here there was four levels that we had mentioned uh down here in the bottom most triangular tier there are creeping flocks berina or Pig squeak and a sby along with some uh low legal area and they’re just kind of starting to fill out this will be something we’ll continue to watch the progress of the summer as it takes on more color and more interest um so this is more just to kind of let you know what we’re using uh in these spaces that are shadier and potentially deer resistant uh in this pocket here there are atill be bleeding heart po uh p po ponum or Jacob’s Ladder there’s even some penamon and a Delphinium the next level up a little bit more colorful in this space again a great use of foliage for color we have the golden feathers Jacob’s Ladder it’s going to get lavender blooms but it’s so pretty just that foliage and of itself with that beautiful by color there we sell a ton of this golden feathers plant because it’s just so versatile in the garden and has so much interest texturally color-wise and flowers of course got some bleeding heart there gold heart you’ll notice more rep repetition of that golden chartreuse foliage beautiful pink flowers pulmonaria behind it brera there’s some more of the heavenscent Jacobs ladder back there legal areia more corabells for foliage color just filling in the space so nothing in this space did we want to be very tall uh 12 to 18 in is kind of the max we were going for and definitely in front of the window we didn’t want anything that was going to really block any air flow into that space uh if we wanted to have that window open along this tiered wall here in Hillside we have some poppies so those will probably be another month or so before they’re blooming um but I don’t I don’t even know why Rod did poppies I think because they are deer resistant um but they’re just the nice early season color you can see there’s more sun here on the edge so they are in more of a full sun area than what most of this Garden is so that’ll be kind of fun and Whimsy when they start to bloom at the roadside this hackin AOA all gold is looking amazing and I’m loving loving that bright color especially up against that blue of the cottage I think it’s so complimentary other things in this area are Nepeta corabells dianthus anemy and some flocks as we step across the entry there this Garden too is starting to really color up nicely bleeding heart lavender um rote a dendron that looks like it’s not going to bloom this year even though I had it covered so the deer wouldn’t get at it and I don’t think the deer did get at it but I think we trimmed it too late in the season there’s that golden feathers bleeding heart again just starting to bloom isn’t that beautiful lantham M’s in here Daisy may there’s uh Fire Light tidbit hydrangeas Bobo hydrangeas more flocks Monarda and then enemy more little Dian this here around the rock that’ll be pretty when it starts blooming some bleeding heart that sun-loving bleeding heart and then tucked in this little pocket over here is just a pocket full of cone flowers and then Rod did tuck a couple dianas it looks like in there last summer as well just to give this space some color before those cone flowers really start to put on a show The Gardens are waking up starting to show a little touch of color so we wanted to show you the progress of where things are at now and where they’ll go throughout the summer if you have any questions or comments please feel free to leave them below thanks for watching I’m Heidi from garden Crossings