What's in a name?

There is a clump of some kind of grass next to the big blue stem that I don't recognize. While perusing garden pics in an effort to identify it, I came across one of what I referred to last time as little blue stem. Well, I think that is wrong. I think it is prairie drop seed. Oops!

This isn't the first time I have misidentified a plant or shrub in my garden. For example, I kept calling the silver grass 'big blue stem' even though it looks nothing like that native. Since I rely on my blog to keep track of what's what, this bad habit is very unfortunate. I hope you will forgive my errors.

I've been digging this past week, literally. I moved some of the northern sea oats and switch grass (at least I *hope* that is switch grass!) to the south side of the house. Today I capped that effort by hacking at the remaining plants in front of the house; tomorrow I will mulch that area.

The house faces east; the bed I am working on is at the south end, by my bedroom. Currently, the bed contains an overgrown purple leaf smoke bush, several 'PJM' rododendron, and a clump of pampas grass. The PJM has not done well lately, and now that I have cleared out the forest of northern sea oats, I can see why: the smoke bush is infringing on its territory. If I want the rododendron to recoup itself, something will have to change.

Here is a pic of the 'Scarlet O'Hara' morning glory. So far, there have not been many blooms on the vines. Since this is my first time growing them, I don't know if this is normal and I just need to be patient, or if the plants are not getting enough sun. The zinnias that share the morning glory pots are spindly, a sign of insufficient sun. The vines have reached the top of the pergola, which gets lots of sun, so we'll see if that makes a difference.

(Blogger has updated its user interface. Ugh. I like to compose in HTML, but apparently the HTML view does not recognize touch screen input. It's back to using the arrow keys because I don't have a mouse and I hate the touch pad. Some editing options are no longer available in the HtML view (or I can't find them), so I have to bop back and forth between views, then remove the extraneous HTML that the 'compose' view inserts. The photos may not fit into my template, either. Wah, wah, wah.)