Bloom boom

Matchette won't let adverse conditions harm her garden

By the time late summer rolls around, most gardens have paid dearly.

Unrelenting heat, way too little rainfall and winds that seem oven dried have stressed our plants to the max. Yet the garden of Julie Matchette is going strong. Starting along the left side of the front lawn until it fans out to the curb, the garden boasts many annuals that are still in high gear.

A Spanish Sunflower is one of the many highlights found in Julie Matchette's garden.

The most abundant annuals are celosia plants. Their tell-tale feathery blooms look like flames bursting in the heat throughout the garden.

“Celosia is quite appropriate,” says Matchette. “It gets going when the weather is hot. I’m kind of partial to red celosia. It looks like fire to me.”

The most noticeable of her celosia plants is one specimen that, at six feet tall, towers above the rest. Side branches reach out horizontally from the plant’s thick stalk and stretch out to four feet.

“I have a lot of things get tall,” notes Matchette. “I don’t know why.”

Among her taller-than-usual plants are red and pink zinnias, which are easily over three feet in height, and blue ageratum, nearly twice as stall as one would expect. Another surprise in her garden is a young lilac bush-in bloom!

Matchette’s garden is a casual collection of annuals, some she has planted this year and many that have reseeded from last year.

“I’m a wild gardener. I let a lot of things go,” she admits. “I love it when things come up on their own. You can’t be too tidy. You have to let things go to seed.”

“It’s a double-edged sword,” Matchette says of her easygoing gardening technique. “Sometimes they get too close together.”

Flourishing tour

Her sun-drenched front garden overflows with colorful annuals and a few perennials Mexican sunflowers, cosmos, marigolds, vinca, coneflowers, lithrum and verbena. A huge sunflower anchors one corner, the unusually tall celosia the other.

A handsome picket fence left in its natural color marks the back boundary, letting the eye see through it to an open expanse next to the property that is home to an athletic field.

“We left it open so we could see the openness,” she explains. “Why look out at boards.”

Scarlet runner vines with delicate red tubular flowers grow on the fence. Forsythia bushes grow in front of them. A young volunteer maple tree is half hidden by the flowers. Several clumps of ornamental grasses bend in the breeze.

“It’s usually windy,” Matchette says. “It’s a real challenge. We have some funny wind currents.”

Lilac bushes and Rose of Sharon plants line the side entry to the backyard. They are encased in wire cages for protection from the rabbits that feast on the young shrubs.

“They’re not very pretty that way,” Matchette admits. “When they get bigger, the rabbits won’t hurt them.”

Although the property sits on a former Christmas tree farm, few mature trees are present in this new development.

Celosia pokes through the fence of Matchette's garden.

“We bought it because it’s open space,” remembers Matchette.

Ten tall pine trees grow in the backyard, leftovers from earlier days. Matchette has planted other hardwood trees, such as ash, cottonless cottonwoods, throughout the garden space.

Matchette’s grandchildren have taken to gardening.

“The kids dumped out some seed packets,” she says pointing to an area where, among a crowded cluster of flowers, a cantaloupe vine is growing with a tiny fruit ripening. “I have no idea where that came from. We had some dirt hauled in from the country. Maybe there were some seeds in that.”

Whatever the case, the family already has enjoyed two tasty cantaloupes.

We pass through a gate where a huge moonflower vine sprawls, its flower tightly closed at midday. The raised gravel path edged with ajuga on one side and irises on the other was built last year.

When we return to the front yard, Matchette deadheads some geraniums growing in containers.

“All my geraniums are from last year,” she says. “I took them in the winter and put them in my only south window.”

She points to another geranium growing in the front garden bed, a volunteer from a spent flower bloom.

Like many gardeners, Matchette wants year-long garden interest.

“I try to have something going all year,” she explains.

But that anyone can have such a strong garden at this time of year is amazing.

Carol Boncella is education coordinator at Lawrence Memorial Hospital and home and garden writer for the Journal-World.