Hi Carla,
I grow lots of roses, and I come in from the garden wounded quite frequently. Fortunately nobody in my household is much bothered by this; but I'm sure it would be otherwise elsewhere.
Thinking it would be too dry for it to run far, I planted one peppermint plant six years ago but it has run twenty five feet in each direction. Ditto spearmint. I pull it up from time to time, but it runs quickly beneath the mulch. I have grown monardas. They run in the winter, but definitely need supplemental water here to survive summer. The nepetas need supplemental water to establish, but seem to get by without after that. I don't know if the nepeta attracts feral cats. Something like ten times in the last six years I've seen cats visit the garden but I cannot tell if they are checking out the catmint or the pocket gophers. I know we have a few bobcats around here. If I had small children, this would be a concern; but, again, I like to imagine them feasting on squirrels and gophers.
Bees like the nepeta, and it blooms for a long time. At one point I had more than a dozen salvia May Night blooming in the garden and I could hear the bees buzzing around it from fifty feet away. Usually, it's nice to know that one is making bees happy; but this bordered on the scary.
I keep planting coneflowers and they keep dying. I have another order arriving this spring; but when they fail, I might be done with them for a while. There's a seasonal stream running at the edge of my property and I've tried growing hostas in the shade of the alligator junipers there, but the gophers finish them off pretty quickly. I think one survived for eight or twelve weeks. Daylilies, by contrast survive quite well. I manage to squeeze in a few dahlias each year. The hummingbirds visit Bishop of Llandaff religiously.
This year I decided to try growing garlic and onions over the winter because the soil is dampish and these plants seem to tolerate the light frosts we have here. I'm pretty happy with the results so far. No actual onions or garlic, yet.
I've done well with Amaranth Hopi Red, which really is red all over, a very nice foliage plant. The mexican jumping bean Carmencita has bronze foliage and red seed pods. I've been successful with it once or twice, I have some seeds of it sprouting now. For silver foliage, I grow two artemesias, salvia argentea, and moonshine yarrow. I have sunflowers popping up in my garden every year; but they outcompete most of my other plants, so I'm resolved to pull them up this year before they reach the customary 10 ft tall.
In an effort to drive out the gophers, I've planted some euphorbias, foxgloves, and delphinium belladonna. I'm pretty sure I can keep the euphorbias happy, but even when I gardened in NJ I did not try foxgloves or delphiniums because I thought they needed more water than I could provide. This planting, though, was an act of desperation; the gophers have evidently killed one of our prize mature aspens, one apricot tree, and four roses. Poisoning and trapping have reduced their numbers, I think. If I could keep them from moving in, that would be better.
