More plants around the new gardens

I'm enjoying the continued discovery of plants around my new home.  I'm also spending time thinking about how I'd like to alter the garden beds over time, and create some new ones.  One thing that surprises me here, in comparison to my Iowa gardens, is the abundance of hostas.  It has made me realize just how very dense the white-tailed deer population is in that state.  If you have a garden in even semi-rural Iowa, you probably don't have a lot of hostas unless you are either have a tall fence, you are very lucky, or you plant them behind plants that deer tend to avoid.  Here, I have a surfeit of hostas and they are all doing extremely well.  When I think about it, the fairly rare sight of dead deer on the side of the highway is another sign that the deer population here has a much lower density than in Iowa - it was a sad but inevitably regular sight on my commute when I lived there.

My hostas here include variegated green and white....(this one has a slight twist to the leaf that creates a ruffled-looking edge)

...variegated dark green with a lighter lime green...

.....solid green (love this tiny snail!)...

...and blue-green.  I think this one is actually "blue mouse ears" hosta, which is a dwarf variety.

Some hostas are planted close to the house,

while others are planted in the woodland glade area.

Apart from a few holes caused by insects, they are all completely intact.  If I had deer in the area, they'd be gone in a heartbeat!

I've also had some wild mallow come into flower recently, which adds a lovely soft pink to the garden beds.

There are some significant stands of Lysimachia punctata, which is the tall yellow loosestrife (not to be confused with purple loosestrife...the perils of common names...but it is also rather aggressive).  I will probably take some of it out.  I noticed that at the base of my large stands of it, I also had a ground-cover with a very similar flower, which you can see in the picture below.

After some sleuthing, I determined that the ground-cover plant is Lysimachia nummularia, so it's in the same family!  No wonder the flowers were so similar.  The ground version is sometimes called creeping jenny.

There is also some Ajuga (bugleweed) in the lawn, but quite honestly, I prefer the creeping jenny and bugleweed to the "real" lawn!

Also on the yellow theme, there is a yellow rose, but it has virtually no scent.  Such a shame - I do love the fragrant old-fashioned roses.