Playing in the Garden

Nearly four years ago, when we decided to move to Knoxville, I said I wanted a place where I didn't have to maintain a yard.  I may have said, in fact, something along the lines of "I'll never garden again.". I am prone to making grand and obviously false statements about myself like that, statements that I fully believe at the time.  Oh well.

That was obviously not true even though I did manage to successfully ignore my yard for the first two summers we lived here.  I did have a few pots here and there; I thought that would be enough. Even though the yard plagued me, it was the ugliest yard in the neighborhood, and that is not an exaggeration, I wondered if I would really enjoy maintaining a small but simple garden, or if it was just wishful thinking.

Work is still being done.  And the watering system is not complete.  But I am enjoying being out in the garden in the mornings. I still have my planters.  And this year I am using fewer flowers in the planters and more plants with interesting or colorful leaves.  We will see how that works out, but the early stages look promising.

But then I have flower beds to play with, and I have indeed been playing.  I've never had sunny flower beds before, and although there are plenty of perennials, there are also spots for annuals, spots to fill in until the perennials grow, and places that were intentionally left blank, for future experiments and discoveries. 

So my forays into planting annuals have been somewhat scattered and the result is something more like one of those Victorian crazy quilts, than an orderly systematically planned flower bed.  But I hope the effect is pleasing.  It looks promising, but the plants are really too small yet to see if they will achieve the desired effect.  At least the yard looks pretty and happy, and I love driving up to my house now, and I love spending mornings in the garden.

The pansies are still blooming and they make me incredibly happy, even though I know I will have to find something to replace them.  However, I am also learning that is good not to plan sometimes, to allow for the magpie approach to flower shopping, you know the old "oh, that's pretty, let's buy that" methodology. After all, we all need time to play.