The Garden
Welcome to my garden! I’m excited to share my journey with you. A quick history of my garden over time:
The Canvas
Here’s a few photos of what I started with. Great shade trees, but some serious underbrush, weeds, and vines. For the first few years, we just tried to keep it mowed down. It’s got potential, right?
2015–My first burst of energy
It was 2015 when I first tried to make progress in what I called “my garden area.” I put in a small hosta garden with bird houses painted by my niece and nephew and a mulched path through the back of the area.
2016–Lots of inspiration, zero implementation
In 2016 I saw some beautiful gardens, but due to other outdoor projects like a fence and a dry creekbed for drainage (and a sense of overwhelm when I looked at that big space), my progress on the garden was nada. So here’s a picture of Blaze among the weeds in 2016:
2017–Working on the garden becomes an addiction
I started 2017 by lining the dry creek bed with azaleas; I had a couple extra azaleas, so I planted them in the garden area. The problem was, they looked SO lonely. Since one of them was near the 2015 “hosta garden,” I figured I could just buy a few more plants to plug in around it and consider it an expansion of that small area.
Cute, right? Nice and easy. But then I realized that a winding path would look SO GOOD right behind that area, and once I had the path laid out, I really needed to have a garden on both sides of it, right? So by the end of May, what started out as the small hosta garden expansion had turned into this:
Sections 1&2
Whew. I It was about 25% of my planned eventual garden area, and I told my husband I was done for the year. I was going to take off the summer and enjoy!
…but have you ever SEEN a newly-planted garden space next to overgrown woodland that has been designated as “future garden”? It nags at you every time you look out the back window or try to enjoy a cold beverage on the deck. So when Home Depot put Japanese Painted Ferns and Autumn Ferns on clearance for $2 and hostas on sale for $4 in late June, you can see how I had no other choice than to start working on a new section of the garden.
Section 3
Me in July–“That’s a great place for another path–we can have it split here by the bird feeding station. Let me just lay this out…”
Section 4
“You know what I need? More flowers back here. Let’s see what I can find.”
Section 5
…and so it went. By the fall of 2017, I had about 2/3 of the total garden space planted. I left a big space in the middle for my water garden (scheduled for installation Spring 2018) and I didn’t make it all the way to the south end.
We’ll see what comes back this spring. I’ll certainly have my hands full between planting around the new water garden, finishing the space, replacing the unlucky plant souls who didn’t make it, and adding some annuals to fill in the space.
I’ll post plenty of updates with progress–so make sure to follow along!
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