The garden in May. This is the time of roses and iris and lush greenery. It is also a time when we frequently hold a large party to share this vast wave of beauty. So, won't you join me in the garden? As usual, Bess will be wearing a dress and Ed will not be wearing a tie.

A view of the house, welcoming in the bright cool shade. This is BigDarling's grandest project - designed and built by him over the course of several years. I admire most that ability to focus and to come to completion, which it took to wrest this home out of the ground. The garden begins to your left and winds around behind the house.



This is the newest garden - I call it the Shade Garden, although it is not the only shady spot. But it was completely planned and designed as an oasis of cool restrained shade in what is usually a riotous and helter-skelter garden. In fact, much of it is still unplanted and some of what was there in this photo did not survive last summer's tremendous drought. But it is the first bed you come to when you walk into the yard, although this view is looking at it from the rest of the garden rather than from the front yard. To the left are hostas and a long boarder of candytuft and creeping phlox. They make a seafoam of cool colors right about now, so I must have taken this picture later in the month. That is Mercury in the birdbath; surround by blue glass beads which visiting children think must be sapphires. If I am asked politely, a child is allowed to take one of the jewels home.



By May the garden has become lush with blossoms. Iris are one of the true harbingers of the late spring season. I know once they're blooming, roses won't be far behind.



The little green clumps here are alternating French and Hidecote lavender plants. Behind them are pink roses with no name - wild things that have no scent but leap and bound throughout the landscape, setting root wherever they touch ground. I have so many babies from this single plant now that I will begin digging them up and moving them to the edge of the forest behind my lane of daffodils. This plant was a gift from one of my staff, so I call it Rosa Lois.



Every garden needs a naked woman in it - who better than Venus herself. My little Mrs. Tiger god-daughter loves her and likes to stand in the shell and hug her. They are about the same height. Behind Venus is a clump of Tradescantia, commonly known as Spiderwort. Beyond her is a large clump of azalea. The path goes between the azalea and Venus back to a shaded stone bench where I often eat or knit but, for some reason, seldom read.



One day I was sitting on the porch with BigDarling and told him I was supremely happy. He laughingly asked - what do you need when you have everything? And my instant answer was "More Peonies". This has now become one of those happy catch phrases in the family - when you are given a gift that brings utter delight you say "More Peonies". He has also worked it into a poem.



Here you see the peonies in their setting. They are in the lower left of the picture - and just to the right of them are the lavish blossoms of Souvenier de Malmaison - or as BigDarling calls it, Memories of a Bad House. Be that as it may, it is a gorgeous abundantly petaled fragrant gift. If potpourri is your reason for growing roses - admittedly one of mine - this is an essential rose. Mine has been nibbled on by voles and beetles, scoured with blackspot, hit by high winds and burned by drought and every year it comes back to give me 3 good flushes of blossoms. Don't let any body tell you roses are hard to grow. They may impossible to keep looking picture perfect every day of the growing season, but if you give them plenty of time to rest, they will give you a weeks of perfect bliss.



Glorious Iris - purple, lush, fragrant or brilliant yellow. The red rose in bloom is Othello - a great favorite of mine. I make rose petal jelly with some of its blossoms and fill huge bowls with others. It is a David Austin rose - one of the first I ever planted and has proven to be thoroughly successful. This shot is from the back, northern end of old gardens looking out across the newer beds and into the field.



Here is a view from just outside the garden - again the large red rose in the center is Othello. He is joined in his bed with Sweet Williams, pretty red perennials planted in honor of LittleDarling, and Southernwood - my favorite of the camphor smelling wormwood family. It helps to keep the Mayflies away in late May and June. To the left is a white rose, Mme. Hardy - and she really does have a whiskey and roses fragrance. She is what prompted me to begin making rose liqueur. The pink rose to the right is Abraham Darby, but the low red roses on the bed to the right are The Prince. Both of these are also David Austins. Red Hot Pokers are front and center. A gift from Ted Clark, planted in a hurry, a horrible orange clash next to the pink of Bouncing Bess, but too darn hard to dig up and move.



This is a view along the garden's northern most path. It runs behind the major flower beds though there is still one narrow bed to the left with several roses in it and a large blue butterfly bush. That bed used to be in sun, but the trees have grown up so much now, it is in bright shade much of the day now.



Here is the same path, walking a little further east, so you can see the larkspur in the bed on the right and the sedum, Paprika, on the left. I adore this little bench but have since moved it to a shadier spot.



This little corner is a favorite type of gardening for me - jumbled growth. No restraint here - you see cleome leaves, iris, larkspur, and probably many weeds - all dancing around what will become the biggest climbing White Dawn you ever saw! It is now so big it grabs you as you walk past and I am always having to prune it back into the bed. I've begun training it across the back of its bed and perhaps will have a cascade of White Dawn flowers one of these days.



I don't know where this Iris came from, but it consistently provides the biggest blossoms every spring. It doesn't seem to want to multiply though - i just get a few blossoms every year and am expected to be satisfied with it. Who would not?



This is my favorite Iris of them all. Royal purple velvet with the thinnest white edge on the falls, the thick golden fur, its glorious white upright petals. The fragrance is that grape scent most purple Iris have. It comes from my cousin Pearce Gardener and it is generous. I will have to thin it this June.



I am ashamed to admit - I'm not sure what this rose is - perhaps Mary Rose, another David Austin.



Here is my darling Abraham Darby again - you will see him often in this garden.



Yes yes - here he is again, being lavish, generous, fragrant, romantic - the perfect gentleman. This is a view looking west down that back path - in the far beyond is Gertrude Jekyll.



Now - doesn't he look splendid here? This is a true GAAAAHD'N photo like you find in those books about English gardens. The clay pot came from the Williamsburg Pottery - an emporium extraordinaire - It's been there all my life, really in Lightfoot, but it's on the road to Williamsburg which is close enough for most folk. You can get garden statuary there at pretty low prices, worth the trip if you have a truck. I remember going there when I was a girl (decades ago) when Mama wanted to pick up Wedgwood dinnerware at a discount. They sold either seconds or discontinued items back then. There were three buildings, one for china, one for glassware and one for junk. Now they have a building for china, one for glassware, and a dozen for junk. This was the first "outlet" type of store I knew of - and the trip down was such a treat. Now that I have a house full of stuff I'm not so tempted to stop - except in the spring, because you never know if you need another garden pot.



Here is Othello in all his glory. Deep red, strong fragrance, generous prolific bloomer, thick juicy canes. He's got his thorns, but they're widely spaced so if you are careful you can work around him without getting hurt. Just do be careful. These days he is backed up by bright yellow and bright purple iris and otherwise surrounded by garlic chives. They are one of the few plants that prospered in last year's dry weather. They are everywhere now and I'm having to dig dig dig to get rid of them.



Somewhere I have a garden journal with the names of everything in the garden. Unfortunately the last time I wrote in it was 2000 and I'm not exactly sure where I stashed it, but it will give you the name of this rose. All I know for sure is it is one of the Romanticas. I bought it for its beauty - one of only 2 roses I have ever bought that were scentless. The red color is particularly clear. The gloss on the leaves glows from a deep green. It behaves a little more like a tea rose than the others in my garden.



This little darling - and I have four of them - is The Prince. I had only one to begin with, and it didn't bloom that spring, but come the cooler days of fall it put out a few of the richest, most glorious, fragrant blossoms I had ever seen or smelled. I was enchanted. I had to have more. The bed was new then, and fairly empty and I ordered three more! Had I waited, I might not have done so, though, for the spring flush really suffers here in our torpid Virginia climate. Whereas in the autumn flush the blossoms lasted, and faded into a lovely soft dusky red, in the spring flush - the largest - the aging blooms turn a tired purpley red, with a grayish cast. Not pretty at all, especially in the bright light of late spring. Unless we get lots of rain and at least moderate temperatures (moderate being low 90's) he won't bloom at all the rest of the summer and blackspot is a scourge to which he is particularly vulnerable. The only thing is - come September he once again offers you those rich fragrant gifts. Who can say. He's never grown very tall - perhaps just under 3 feet. In July, when the Japanese beetles invade I just give him a sharp haircut, pruning as if he were a perennial instead of a bush. Takes a little strain off the roots during the worst of the heat.



Okay - here is my frilly little heart at its happiest.



And once again. The large pink singles are from Dainty Bess - whoo hoo - just love those Bessie flowers. And the little vase is a real Victorian relic, inherited from the grandmother born just after the war. You know, the one in 1861.



Rose time is over now - and this is what follows. Just at the very last of May, and throughout June, the daylilies wake up. This collection includes a few I got up at Andre Viette's on a trip with BigDarling. I had never been and we drove the long way up into Fishersville to have a look. It was the summer of 1988 - beastly hot and particularly dry in the Valley. I was as interested in seeing the display beds as I was in seeing, or purchasing, any individual specimen. But on the tour I stumbled across a little cantaloupe colored double lily. And it said "hello. I've been waiting for you." I asked at the shop and rather gulped at the price of $15.00 for one lily and decided "not this year". But when we were leaving, BigDarling said "You mean you drove all this way and you're not going to buy anything?" so well, what is a girl supposed to do? And guess what? That day, if you purchased $15 worth of lilies, you got one free. The purchase was made in July, the shipment came late August. And I learned that year, that lilies are always a good buy because they multiply so freely that within a few years you have dozens all for the price of that first one.

We also took a trip to New England that year - beastly hot as it was, we were seeking cooler climes. And on a back road in Connecticut we stumbled upon White's Flower Farm. Imagine - Viette’s and White's in the same summer. And I'll get a little provincial here, but I thought the display beds at Viette’s were the prettier.



This is the bed of common orange daylilies. The sort that grow along the road. The sort that live forever. And among them is one we call the anniversary lily, though this year I am unable to distinguish it from the rest. We dug it up from an abandoned house site where we picnicked one spring, on a rambling drive through Cumberland County.



This is the dogwood bed, looking east, included because I think it is a pretty view of the house from the gardens.



This little collection of gladiolas was taken well into June. A fitting end of the May garden tour, I hope - for gladiolas are the first flower I ever planted, with Mama, on a glorious spring afternoon. I've included a little essay I wrote on snowy February day underneath the May tour that tells about it. A slice of perfect time out of a single life - indelible in its sweetness - paramount in setting the direction of my life. A gift beyond measure.