Our Garden
It's in the Backyard!
We have a medium-sized lot with a normal-sized house in suburban Saint Louis, Missouri. There are trees to the east, south and west, so the garden gets only 4 or 5 hours of direct sunlight each day. This semi-shaded condition slows down early spring growth, but it can be a blessing during a hot summer. The soil consists of enrichable clay. Over the past 30 years we have made regular additions of compost; now the garden can be worked even the day after a good rainstorm.
There are over 500 different varieties of daylilies in the backyard garden, many of them seedlings. Michael Bouman and his wife Karen Berry have graciously donated one of their large sunny gardens in St. Peters, Missouri, for my selected seedlings and recently registered cultivars.
Each summer we also grow red-skinned Italian garlic and arugula, plus a few other garden flowers. The amount of space devoted to the lawn ('grass' would be a euphemism) keeps shrinking year by year.
