Ain't Misbehavin'

After placing our very restrained seed order for the vegetable garden, I had been successfully ignoring the low hum of the plant, shrub, and flower catalogs' siren songs.  After all, I've seen the same catalogs for years, and have developed some immunity, largely due to my well developed desire for immediate gratification.  


You see, when you order plants from catalogs, they usually come in 3" pots, and it takes a year or two for them to get to the scale of the gorgeous specimen pictured in the catalog that sucked you in.  The alternative is hoping the nursery has something similar and more impressive.  In a great big pot.  So you can buy lots of them, plant them too close to one another, get the effect immediately, but then have to divide and relocate them before they choke one another to death.


There must be a happy medium somewhere in the middle.  Alas, I have yet to find it.


So, I was in my "wait-to-see-what-the-nursery-gets-in" mode when this appeared in the mail for the first time.

That's playing dirty.

Not only is this a catalog I have NEVER seen before, but the cover image is as alluring to me as Donald Trump's own image is to him.  I don't know much about birds beyond being able to make some basic identification of the most obvious varieties -- robins, crows, bluejays, etc.  I can't even name the bird that eats our raspberries and deposits them, post-digestion, on the roofs of our cars.  But I do know a hummingbird when I see one.  And they fascinate me. 

Click to see up close

I hadn't seen one close up until about two years ago when I planted some Monarda, which turns out to be one of their favorite repasts -- even though the common name is Bee Balm, and they're obviously not bees.  Monarda has these crazy jester hat-like blossoms that are evidently a collection of slipper shaped flasks full of hummingbird elixir so intoxicating that it summoned a vivid neon green hummingbird to the garden out of nowhere two summers ago. As long as the Monarda is blooming, he can be seen suspended, sipping and darting, sipping and darting, yanked by invisible temptation from bloom to bloom, presumably humming with delight the whole time.  Likewise, I can be seen mesmerized, watching him defy gravity for as long as I can get away with.


But we've only been visited by this lone magical bird. 


Imagine how enchanting it would be to have not one but many hummingbirds visiting, and not just during Monarda time, but throughout the entire gardening season, and not to an isolated patch of greenery, but to multiple locations, so one could discover these glittering aviators in just about any corner of the garden.  Such was the fantasy that sprang to my lunatic mind.


Which is all a longwinded way of saying I was totally sucked in.  Lost all resolve, all restraint and set upon the catalog as if the future of all hummingbirds depended on me and me alone.  And I did, indeed, misbehave, ordering (Click to see any image larger...)   




1 Weeping Cotoneaster

 




This one's upright, on a trunk, so it won't act as velcro and collect massive amounts of oak leaves (she said hopefully) 

 

5 Ruby Slippers Oakleaf Hydrangea





6 Creme Belle Foxglove

 

 

 

6 Goldcrest Foxglove



3 Solidarity Clematis

 



6 Salmon Rose Columbine

  

No partridges, no pear trees, just 27 plants.  And I'm afraid I'm just getting started.

I certainly hope these plant magnets work only on adult hummingbirds, otherwise the bird police might arrest me for corrupting minors.  Or at least for stalking them, since come June, I'll be lurking near all these plants with my camera, hoping to capture a little of their magic to share on this blog.

 

Full disclosure: these are shots from the catalog above which so thoroughly seduced me.  My versions will arrive at the end of the month, bare of root and small of pot -- and hopefully they'll look like this in another season or two.  We'll check back in on them sometime in June to mark their progress.