Stop me before I buy more!

It could have been inspiration brought on by chatting with Sally Cunningham, our local guru, on her radio show. Cunningham advised a listener who wanted late summer flowers to go to the garden center and see what’s blooming now.

Or maybe it was just lazy Sunday boredom. I finally had enough of puttering around in the yard and needed an outing. A couple of Buffalo-area nurseries are just as good or even better than visiting a botanical garden; they have acres of healthy plants, both outdoors and in the greenhouses, while the area near the cash register is like a gift shop.


First, I visited just one garden (tiny bit of it above) on the Ken-Ton suburban garden walk—these are inner-ring suburbs that lie close to the Buffalo city limits. Mentee Ron had clued me in to this massive garden last year and I had to see it. It was everything he said it was, and I plan to post on Garden Rant about it Wednesday.

So, after the garden visit and lunch, fully primed for plant buying, I hit Lockwood’s, arguably our best nursery. There I found some fill-in shade plants: I am still tinkering with a couple front beds. I also got some tall purplish meadow plants that I hope will give all the other giants in the sun corral a run for their money. Any plant in this space must be at least 5-6 feet high and must be able to attain that height quickly, before being vanquished by its neighbors. So I bought a filipendula (meadow rue) and a vernonia (ironweed). The shade plants are great blue lobelia, a white Japanese anemone, and a black mondo grass (put out by Hort Couture, a grower I’d never heard of before). And what the heck, how about some annuals for one of the street planters that didn’t make it. There was a three-fer sale on the Proven Winners.

That’s a lot of purchases for August.