Right now in the garden
🌸 Blooming or about to
Foliage doing the heavy lifting too: rainbow chard, coleus, the Boston ferns, and the corn getting taller by the day.
🔎 Ask about your garden
Type a plant or a word (deadhead, water, divide) and jump straight to the right card. The dream version of this answers questions in plain sentences; this version finds the page that already has the answer.
🖨️ The printable handbook
The same content, on paper: the garden map, every plant card, and the whole year of tasks. Prints clean, staples into a booklet.
The garden, mapped
Seven areas, drawn from the photos (so the shapes are approximate and the bed names are invented). Tap a number to jump to that bed. Julia: rename these to whatever you actually call them.
🧭 The back yard is a blank spot on this map: no photos yet. Send a few and it joins the guide.
The beds, one by one
The photo tour · July 29, 2026
A card for every plant
Nineteen from the photos, plus six from Julia's starter list (violet badges, not in the ground yet). The badge says how each card got here; the checkbox is for Julia to bless it. Care text is drafted for zone 6b and wants her expert red pen before it goes near a client.
The garden year
Twelve months of this specific garden: what's blooming, what wants doing, what to leave alone. Frost bookends for Natick run roughly mid-May to mid-October (typical, not guaranteed).
The to-do list
The boring-stretch finder
How many things are in flower each month. Solid green is what's in the ground now; the lighter tops are Julia's starter list once planted. The camassia and daffodils land exactly in the old March-to-May hole this chart flagged, which is very satisfying.
Solid green: in the ground now. Lighter purple top: Julia's starter list once planted. Dashed: still quiet (hellebores and fall asters remain on the bench).
What should I do today?
🧳 Vacation mode
Going away? This is the whole garden reduced to instructions a house-sitter can follow without a tour.
- Pots and hanging baskets: water every day it's 85° or hotter, every other day otherwise. Water until it runs out the bottom. The big blue pot with the sunflower drinks fastest.
- The Boston ferns: same schedule as the pots; they sulk if they dry out but forgive quickly.
- Beds (sunflowers, corn, chard, everything in the ground): a long deep soak twice a week beats a daily sprinkle. The hose is already snaked through the front bed.
- Chard: please help yourself to the outer leaves. It grows back faster than anyone can eat it.
- Do not cut anything. Not even the thing that looks done. Julia will deal with it when she's back.
Before you cut it
Pick the plant and the month. The garden will tell you whether to deadhead it, harvest it, leave it alone, or please step away from it.
The plant-idea program
Describe a space and it circulates directions to react to: not "the answer," just possibilities with their reasoning showing. Push back with the buttons and watch each direction adjust. This is a working sketch: the ideas below are hand-built for this garden; the real version would generate fresh ones from any description and keep revising as long as you keep reacting.
Also on file from the photos: loamy beds under fresh mulch, a hose that reaches everything, low deer pressure (village neighborhood), kids and a dog in the picture, and a gardener who is clearly not afraid of tall plants.
The first real input: Julia's starter list (July 30)
Julia's opening move, in her words: "a combo of spring bulbs, perennials, and annuals grown from seed." Names tidied to their formal Latin where autocorrect got involved. Every one of these now has its own plant card and a place in the Garden Year.
| The plant | What it brings | How it goes in |
|---|---|---|
| Camassia 🪻 | Starry blue May spikes; shrugs at damp clay | Bulbs, planted THIS October |
| Daffodils 🌼 | The March–April morale section; deer-proof | Bulbs, planted THIS October |
| Echinacea pallida (pale purple coneflower) 🌸 | Drooping pale-pink rays in June; prairie-tough taproot | Seed, winter-sown in Jan–Feb (needs cold), or spring plants |
| Asclepias tuberosa (butterfly weed) 🦋 | Orange umbels; monarch nursery; wakes late | Seed, winter-sown; mark its spot forever |
| Monarda fistulosa (wild bergamot) 🐝 | Lavender mopheads; the bee party, July–Sept | Seed, winter-sown or spring surface-sow; easy |
| Verbena hastata (blue vervain) 💜 | Violet candelabras; cousin of the tall verbena in the pots | Seed, winter-sown (needs cold) |
| Sunflowers 🌻 | The incumbents; the hedge continues | Seed, direct-sown late May, in waves |
| Corn 🌽 | Also the incumbents, gloriously | Seed, in a block, after last frost |
What the list is telling us: four of the six new picks are northeastern natives, which is Direction B talking. The two bulbs land precisely in the March-to-May quiet stretch the bloom chart flagged, which is Direction C's early shift. So the program's honest read: Julia already voted for the pollinator remix with the early shift bolted on, and Direction A stays on the menu for pure joy. The bloom chart on the Garden Year tab now shows before and after.
The full version of this program now exists
The three hand-built directions below were the sketch. The working tool is Groundwork: a 300-plant library filtered to your zone, twelve situations that build layered schemes with the same reaction buttons (more native, less work, earlier, taller, deer-proof), a pruning calendar with the cuts drawn out, a symptom-based plant doctor, and a photo kit that points back to this garden as the worked example.
Open GroundworkThree directions to react to
The garden journal
What thrived, what died, what moved, what bloomed early. Notes save in this browser only (nothing leaves this device); the grown-up version would sync and hold photos too.
Get it right
Everything in this guide came from nine photos and educated guessing. These are the questions that make it truly yours, Julia. Answer any way you like: a chaotic text, a voice memo, ten photos of plant tags. Check things off as you go.