Pete's Place

Southern Gardening is back visiting Peter and Candace’s ever changing garden and landscape in Natchez. I love Candace’s butterfly garden that is surrounded by two great flowering shrubs. English dogwood, also called mock orange, isn’t a dogwood or an orange, it’s actually related to hydrangea. The fragrant and showy white flowers with prominent yellow stamens are produced by the hundreds. The fragrant blooms last for weeks and make it one of the showiest plants of late spring. The other shrub is deutzia, an upright, somewhat coarse shrub that typically grows 6+ feet tall with spreading to arching branches that form a rounded habit. Tiny, fragrant, star-shaped, white flowers appear in late spring in upright panicles which cover the shrub for about two weeks. Moving on I love the back walk. On one side there’s this cedar log planter that was made out of part of a cedar tree that fell on a corner of the house during a storm. There’s a variety of colorful petunias and verbena. I love the addition of Ajuga reptans, commonly called bugleweed. This is a dense spreading plant with shiny, dark green leaves. Whorls of tiny, blue-violet flowers appear in mid to late spring on spikes rising above the foliage. On the other side is a nice combination of dark red daylilies and purple lace leaf Japanese maple. Peter’s garden and landscape is always a work in progress, what will we see next time we visit? I’m horticulturist Gary Bachman and I’ll see you next time on Southern Gardening.