Sidewalk Greenspace on New York's Upper West Side
Summer may be over, but the sidewalk garden is still ticking along.
The asters which have looked plain all year are suddenly showing their delicate little flowers.
A couple of the rose bushes are still putting out new buds that are so intensely colorful that my phone’s camera doesn’t really know what to do with them.
The tomato plants are dying back, but throwing the last of their energy into ripening just a few more fruits.
And the giant sunflower has decided to go out with a bang.
It was only this spring that I learned that coleus is a member of the mint family — square stems, pointy leaf tips, spike of little flowers — but despite this fact you definitely should not eat it.
As if to measure up to its scarlet cousin currently blooming ten feet away, this pink clover has popped up in another of our containers.
(I think this pink one is Trifolium pratense, while the scarlet is T. incarnatum, but that’s just a guess.)
I scattered a bunch of crimson clover seed a while ago as a nitrogen-fixing ground cover, but I wasn’t quite prepared for how pretty the flowers are.
Thanks to our neighbor Anne who donated a pint of seeds harvested in her own garden last season from pollinator-friendly flowering plants: yarrow, coreopsis, echinacea, joe pye weed, black eyed susan, and sage.
These have been scattered into planters and tree beds throughout the garden and I expect to see some of them later this summer, with others remaining dormant and cropping up in subsequent years.
Thanks again, Anne!
My favorite variety of morning glories continues to be the Bavarian “Grandpa Ott” with its deep purple blooms.
They do a great job of climbing the fence — or bamboo rods, or tall plants, or anything else they can find for support — and although their flowers don’t stay open for long, there are so many of them that they provide a constant stream of color for months throughout the late summer and into the fall.
Most of the flowers are gone from the garden, but the cockscombs (Celosia) are still vibrant.
Much of the garden’s catnip is now in full flower.
All of this catnip stems from a single small flowerpot I brought home and placed on my windowsill a decade ago — it’s a prolific self-seeder, and has spread itself to multiple nearby containers and treebeds.
The sidewalk planters we added this spring have provided some lovely additional space for these new strawflowers (Bracteantha) to catch the sun.
These wild-strain sunflowers top out at three feet tall, so they aren’t as impressive as the giant forms, but they’re lovely nonetheless, and later in the season the seeds should provide some good eating for the birbs.
