If I had a title for my landscape here in Oklahoma City, it would be
"AN ENGLISH GARDEN ON THE PRAIRIE"
a touch self-important, yes...but still quite appropriate. A garden befitting an English Tudor house on the heartland's prairie soil...
an English garden with an Oklahoma accent as it were. And nothing in my garden sings with that Oklahoma prairie drawl quite like
Echinacea purpurea, the lovely hued purple coneflower.
It always tops my list of extremely difficult, if not impossible to kill
perennials to plant in troublesome soil; in my case heavy clay.
It self-seeds a little too readily sometimes, but never so much as to be truly irritating. Particularly because each summer it appears in new places in new combinations, in new subtly different purple hues, and with new companions...Mother Nature sees to that.
This year, with our unusually wet and damp weather, it is keeping company with large swaths of a lavender veronica...
the combination looking especially soft and ruggedly feminine (truly, not a contradiction in terms) on cool, foggy mornings.
Today, the sphinx moths are as smitten with their blossoms as I.
All in all, not a bad way to start another summer morning.
