Category: Outside

The weeds have been plucked and the plants are in the ground. Our garden is on its way to greatness. Or mediocrity. Time will tell.

Here’s the view from the front.

That huge bush is the neighbor’s red twig dogwood. While we don’t mind ‘sharing’ it in our garden, we aren’t all that fond of the abandoned compost heap at the front of their yard. Eventually (in oh, 10 years or so?) the boxwood should grow big enough to hide it.

Our iron sphere from Pot-Ted is as amazing as I had hoped. Brandon and I both love it. Even my sister, who thought it was incredibly stupid for us to spend money on a “big metal ball”, admitted to liking it.

Right now it’s the largest thing in the garden, but it will look great once everything else grows and catches up in size and scale.

I made a border at the edge out of bricks we had found in the dirt as we prepared the area.

Now I need to have patience. Everything looks so tiny right now. I put the mulch down to discourage the weeds from returning aggressively, but hopefully the little plants will still be able to grow and spread out a bit.

I hope the flowers make it! It still seems so strange to me that we will have plants growing in our garden. THAT I PUT THERE. And they may even flower for me. How odd.

I’m almost done clearing out the weeds along the side to make room for my flowers (for the second time this year). This is the plan:

The flowers in pen are the ones we’ve purchased, and the ones in pencil are tentatively planned for next year. I also left some room for future (undetermined as of yet) flowers.

The photo below is actually from a couple of weeks ago. It had gotten even worse since then.

I’m heading back out now to finish!

Another trip to the nursery, another batch of plants taken home with me.

We already have the green velvet boxwoods and francee hostas for the front.

And now we’ll have (clockwise from top left) purple dome asters, pixie meadowbrite coneflowers, ruby star coneflowers, and sweet dreams coreopsis. They’re all at varying heights, from 15″ to 36″. I still have to (re)prepare the side garden before I can plant them.

I feel like I have a direction now, but I’m not so sure about the burning bush and the crimson pygmy barberry bushes that I’ve put out there. They don’t really go together. I also put a cistena plum out front because I thought it was going to be more tree-like and less bushy (because I thought I saw the same plants in neighboring lawns). I think I’m wrong.

I wonder if I could move them? I think Brandon would be mad if I just got rid of them (money wasted). Eeesh.

What do we think? I like this idea for the basic layout of the front landscaping…

The bare spots could be filled with more colorful flowers – but which ones? We have the peonies…

It looks like too many rounded forms though, right? It needs something spiky and some height variation, yes? I feel like I’m 70% there, and I kind of need guidance for the rest of it. Eep!

I do know that I really want one of these iron garden spheres.

Aren’t they amazing? I wonder if shipping is prohibitively expensive.

Help, Please!

Here’s the photoshop file that I used for the mockup – if you want to play around with the layout, that would be AWESOME. Simple comment suggestions would be appreciated too though! Do you think the basic layout works, and just the finishing touches need to be modified?

Some of my fellow bloggers have been making enviable progress in their gardens.

This Young House (I loved seeing their “growth chart”! It gives me hope.)
Door Sixteen (I think we have similar taste in gardens – more modern and geometric).

The front of my house looks better than it did (but not like I want it to):

I planted all of those hostas, and the peonies were there already. I’m planning on moving them this fall so I could put something evergreen in their place. It looks nice enough, but it’s not really my taste.

My side garden, on the other hand, looks like this:

We joke that at least it’s green, but it’s so disappointing. I did so much work clearing out the area and even planting a few things, and now the weeds have obscured and choked out the bushes I put in. I think I was supposed to use mulch to prevent that from happening, right?

I’m determined to give it another go. I did some weeding, and I need to do some more. Still, I am finding that my talents do not extend to the garden.