Category: Garden

The first small shoots of green peeked up above the ground yesterday.  They gladdened my heart, sparking a frivolous bit of giddy happiness.  Most of the ground is still covered with snow.  The temperatures will once again drop and stay below the freezing mark and we will probably have more snow. But spring is coming.

It was finally time to turn my attention to the planters this past weekend.  The remains of summer greenery needed to be cleared, pots needed to be cleaned and stored, and those pots which remain outside year-round needed their seasonal greenery.

 

In seasons past I would run around to several nurseries to find just what I wanted, and I would usually do it slightly earlier in the season, while there was still a larger selection, although after the end of season sales had begun.  

 

This year I was late and short of time so only went to one nursery, where I contented myself with what was available.  Usually I am looking for height in the tall clay planters by the front door, but the options were limited.  Surprisingly, I found some very nice dwarf hinoki cypresses which I thought would work in combination with winterberry branches. I hoped to put two cypress in each pot, but they were too large, so one will have to do.  The pots feel a little sparse, but I do think they will be lovely when the snow falls.

More hinoki cypress and some arborvitae have taken up residence down by the garage in the large zinc planters.  These had been pulled out decoratively for the summerl, but of course in the winter they are dangerously close to the driveway where they could be crushed by the plows, so they have been pushed back against the safety of the wall.  

 

All of these planters have deep gouges and crush marks where they have met with plows past and this winter may be their last, as the bottoms are falling out of two planters now.

 

Luckily I also found some fabulous, very architectural looking, black planters made of a durable polyester resin that I believe will be fabulous with the house and landscaping.  Perusing the sizes and shapes available already has my mind spinning with ideas for the next season.

 

 

 

 

 

I haven't managed to clean out and replant the long flower bed at the end of my driveway yet this season and now I have a reward for my procrastination.  A single iris has thrown up a third bloom (these irises typically bloom in May/June and again in September).  It is a bright spot of joy amidst all the brown dying foliage.

 

There are three more buds on this stalk and as I plan to work in this flower bed this weekend, I shall simply have to work around it and save this small section for later, or next spring.

It is possible I got a little carried away.  I thought I was being cautious.  I thought I was only ordering a few things, that I was sticking to the plan and not letting my dreams run away with me.

 

You see I have really missed the flowers.  

 

I used to have crocuses in the old front yard, before they got overgrown and trampled, before the yard was dug up and the dirt was hauled away and then replaced with other dirt hauled from some other part of the yard.  Those crocuses may appear in surprising places.  I shall keep my eyes open.

 

My plan for the new front bed is for mostly foliage plants, plants that don't need a lot of care.  I love the textures and contrasts available in shades of green.  But I also miss my flowers.  I know how much I need to see those spring crocuses.  I know the irises need dividing and need to be moved from their current place which has become to shady as the neighbor's trees continue to grow and cast a longer shadow.  I used to plant hundreds of tulips in my rocky craggy clay-filled soil, replacing the bulbs every year as I couldn't plant them deep enough to insure a repeat bloom.  I want all these things and I want to plant them now so that next year my world will be filled with flowers,

 

So perhaps I did get a little carried away.  I always overestimate how much I can get done and how much time I have in which to accomplish any given task.

 

The tiny Tsuga you see above sits alone in the large stone bed on the north end of the house.  Nothing else will be planted there until next spring, so he shall have to face the winter alone. I've dreamed of this particular Tsuga for years and once we started building this bed I knew it would be the perfect place for him.  I was lucky to find him languishing among the end of season sale plants and he (why do I think of him as a "he"?) is one of the few plants I have purchased.

 

This is not true of bulbs.  It seems I have purchased hundreds and hundreds of bulbs. I am amazed at how quickly buying a hundred bulbs here, another few hundred there, and so forth turns into a huge mound of bulbs that need to be planted.   I suppose it is better to dream big than to underestimate oneself.

 

So the push to plant and finish, while the weather is still amenable, is strong.   I dug and planted then dug and planted some more.  This weekend I planned to transfer the dwarf irises and hakonechloa and plant crocuses and other tiny bulbs.  But the first day did not go so well.  The soil is rocky and hard and filled with clay, a bit of a struggle to work in, and not quite what I expected.  That was my own fault as I never made my expectations clear.  I added humus and manure last weekend, but my arms were already tired and I did not manage to dig it up and work it in as well as I wanted.  I could dig big holes for the plants, but planting hundreds of tiny crocus and species iris bulbs, approximately 15 bulbs per square foot, proved impossible.  

 

So I scraped off the mulch and dug the bed up again, mixing in the manure and even more peat, breaking up the clay and dragging buckets of rocks off to the woods.   I hadn't planned on having to do this, but it was necessary or my vision would never take root.  I interplanted the hakonechloa and hellebores with crocuses and the tiny bulbous irises that bloom in the early spring. Some of the irises were transplanted from another bed where they were hidden by larger plants, but I ordered more as I did not think I had enough to fill this new space  

 

For a few moments, as I started opening bags and tossing bulbs onto the newly spaded soil, I had misgivings.  I thought I over purchased even though I had measured the space and calculated the square footage and ordered just what I needed.  In the end it worked out perfectly.  I had exactly the right number of bulbs.    The bed looks a little messy here, but the plants are settled and about 400 bulbs have been planted, and the mulch has been put back as much as possible.  I spread the mulch a little more thickly than I found it but luckily  I have another bag which I can use to cover the bare area.  

 

I had forgotten this nervous excitement of planting.  I had forgotten how nice it is to settle roots into the soil, gingerly teasing them apart if they have become compacted into a ball, pushing bulbs into the yielding soil.  I had forgotten the giddy thrill of anticipation as well as the twinge of nervousness and fear — what if they don't come up?  What if I've done all this work but it is not enough?  No matter how many things I have planted, no matter how much I have learned, I always feel that working in the yard is a bit of a gamble. But I also know how I excited I will be if any single one of them survives and I have pretty flowers in the front yard next spring, how each new shoot will make my heart sing, and how I will peer at the soil nervously and impatiently waiting for everything to emerge.  

 

And I can't wait to get out there and plant some more.  It is all I can think about right now, all I dream about.  I look at plant lists and make plans, and measure beds and start diagrams to maximize ideal spacing.   Someday it may all pay off.  In the meantime I have a lot more digging to do — if all the other stars in my life align.

The front yard is "done".  

At least the hardscaping is done, and the men in boots are gone.  My work is just beginning.  

 

 

 

 

 

Saturday it seemed like everyone was working in my front yard.  It wasn't quite so, only the landscaping crew but it was exciting to watch as we are getting so near the end of the job.  I almost felt bad about not being out in the yard working myself, but I would have just been in the way.   Besides, the mason tells me he will be done on Thursday and that is when my work really begins.

 

We came home Saturday evening to see the final results on the north side of the house.  Final for now anyway.  The mason's work is done, the gravel is done, but the two other planting beds, the ones framed by cedar landscape timbers on either side of the gate are still to be built.  That is my job.  The final beds will be higher, even with the bottom rail of the fence behind them.  Once I have built the beds, I still have to plant everything, but planting here will wait until next spring.

 

There is still masonry work to be done on the front yard, but here is a glimpse of progress so far, again a shot at dusk.  You will have to wait until the end of the week for more.

 

And of course, after the crews go home, the fun part will begin.  It will take me some time to work my way through the various beds, planning and planting, but I am looking forward to it. Well, frankly, I was looking forward to it, but now I wonder if I have lost my mind.  After spending a few hours clearing out overgrowth from the old vegetable garden so that I could make space for some sun perennials that need relocating as well as a place for a few hundred tulip bulbs, every muscle in my body aches.  I can't believe I used to do this on a daily basis, although I assume, if I've done it before, eventually I will get those old gardening muscles back.  At the moment that looks like it will be a lifetime away, but I'm determined to give it a go.

Much better already, don't you think?

Here is the front yard, ready for the next stage. If you look closely you can see that the tops of the stone have been cleaned up and we will have new stonework there to bring the walls up to level, much better than the random piles of stones we had before. The area at the base of the stone wall, between the stones and the driveway will be filled with gravel.

 

On the south end of the walkway, this old shade bed still had the original railroad ties that were there when I moved in.  I had dug out the bed and replanted but hadn't really changed any of the timbers, merely replaced rotted pieces with new ones as necessary.

 

The timbers have been pulled out and the area widened so that the bed will be framed with stone.  And a new gravel path, to be bordered with belgian block,  is also going in, which will add structure and definition to the yard as well.

 

You can get a much better overview of what is happening from my kitchen window, where I can look out over the entire front yard area.  The photo is kind of gray and shaded because it was taken through the screen, but I think you  will get the general idea now.  Even unfinished, I love looking out the kitchen window now.

 

One of this summer's projects, the dominant project in fact, has been transforming my nice little haven in the woods into something more welcoming.    Here I present a little catch-up post showing progress so far. Some of these photos have already been posted elsewhere, so if this is a duplication, your patience is requested.

 

The overgrown front yard was really getting to me.  Granted some gardening work would have helped, and I was woefully behind, but more serious landscaping labors were also called for. Here is the before photo, dragged up from last year.  It actually looked even worse than this before work began.

 

It seemed to me that the house reflected my own inner chaos, and although I was pulling myself together, I couldn't get any further until my physical space was in order.

 

A sure sign that help was needed was that everything looked better almost immediately after cleanup, before any new work was done and it was all just clay.  I figure it was very telling that the front door was actually more easily accessible when there was no walkway, just packed clay, than it had been with the original walkway of slate set in clay, the walkway that came with the house.

Well, the packed clay was easier to walk on until it rained, that is.   Luckily for my construction projects, it rained little this summer, at least until last week, by which time the front walk was long since finished.

 

Here is the new bluestone walk, and the completion of phase one of the project, although as you can see work is still being done.  You've actually seen  the new front porch in the last couple of garment pics I have posted.

 

Of course, like any remodeling project, once you fix one thing, you see how bad everything else is around it.

 

I realized that I couldn't fix the plantings until I fixed the walls and did the rest of the hoped-for hard-scaping.  So we entered phase II, which is still in process, although in the middle of a brief interruption of work until mid-September.

After the walk, the mason started working on the north end of the house (the front walk is near the South).   One approaches the house coming down a hill on the north side.  The first thing one was faced was a pile of dirt and rocks with a fence to the pool enclosure behind it, but no landscaping or path leading to the pool gate.

 

This photo is the only one I have of the before scenario. Truthfully I avoided thinking about the area, or photographing it.

 

This next photo is taken from the driveway and shows the view one has of the north side of the house as you drive down my driveway.  The area now contained inside the stone bed is the area with the half buried tank shown in the first photo, and the front wall of the stone bed is the same location as the picket fence on the left side of the first photo.  The top of the stone wall is level with the bottom of the lattice fence behind it.

 

This wall is not complete, and eventually the bed contained within will be filled and planted, and there will be a gravel path and then a series of raised beds going up to the deck and the area in front of that stone wall will be cleaned up and filled with packed gravel leading up to the walkway and planting areas.  There will be no plantings in this area as it is also my primary winter snow repository.

 

Later in the week I will show how phase II is shaping up in the front yard, around that new front walkway.