June is the month for lilies, butterfly gardens, herbs, and veggies. This is when all the planning and dreaming of winter comes to a head, followed by the inevitable list of all the things we’re going to do differently next year. That’s the great thing about gardening… it’s never the same two years in a row… sometimes on purpose!  So, let’s get started. We’ll be concentrating on the backyard for this tour. First stop is the herb garden. I love having the herbs surrounding the back deck. It’s handy for picking when you need a little something extra for the dinner meal; or, if you’re like me and often let your herbs bolt and flower (not always recommended), they make lovely bouquets for the table.  And, if you happen to be sitting on the deck when your husband is watering the gardens, the smell is absolutely heavenly!

Then, moving away from the deck and taking a detour to the left, we come to the east side garden. Here we find everything a monarch or swallowtail or a few of their friends would want:

In the back corner of the yard, we have an interesting ivy-covered relic from the past… a concrete wall that was part of a railway bridge many years ago. Now, it’s just a nice place for English ivy to grow. There’s also coral bells, bleeding hearts, lemon balm, a pot of impatiens, and Stick and Straw…two of our three concrete pigs. Brick, you may remember, is in the front yard.

And finally, turning to the west, we see the veggie garden boxes. For some reason, this year is the Year of the Tomatillo. I mean, really… you can’t see much else here except tomatillos. Oh, wait… maybe I see a bean in the back there….

Now this is a very cool thing. We’ve been adding native plants to the back yard each year. Last year, we bough a compass plant. It gets its name… I’m not kidding…from the fact that the leaves tend to orient themselves north-south. So, you can theoretically find your way around by paying close attention to the compass plant leaves. I’m happy to say that it seems to be true. Here’s ours:

And lo and behold… the leaves do, in general, point north-south. And, because one can’t have too much cilantro, we plant it everywhere.

The last stop on the veggie tour is our Swiss chard. Interesting, isn’t it, that many of our plants have nationalistic names… Swiss chard, French lavender, English lavender… love it. Oh, and next to the Swiss chard… more tomatillos.

Anyone got any tomatillo recipes?