Still Here. Gardens Beautiful.

Ah yes, she is still alive - as are the gardens. As well as ever-expanding. 😁😁

I'll let the pictures speak...

When we last left off, I had a newly planted rain garden of natives, most of which didn't bloom until the following year (see further pictures), but the late-blooming swamp-mallow (native hibiscus) was the jewel! 

Slowly starting to fill in...

Lovely midsummer coloring with black-eyed susans and four o' clocks...

By November all has largely faded and the winterberries start shining...

Spring brought dogwood blossoms on my baby tree!

And a constant flow of new plants 😁😁

And new beds 😁😁😁

The fleabane is the perfect plant to bridge the "in between" of spring bloomers and summer bloomers. It's also a nice medium height which seems often allusive among plants. (And it blooms for over a month! And reseeds and pops up for a fall bloom in places too!)

Summer gorgeousness with gardenia and lily flowers behind butterfly weed and penstemon...

Fleabane gotta get its glory in there too...

Last year I grabbed a red 'Jacob Cline' bee's balm (monarda)...probably a partially non-native cultivar, but too beautiful not to call good enough!

Alongside the 'Burning Heart' heliopsis which I moved here so it wouldn't get lost among the also yellow black-eyed susans (I switched it with purple echinacea which looks great amidst the yellow - see below)

Black-eyed susans, echinacea, lovely light purple monarda I expanded here last year...

My cardinal flowers have been incredible this year! I planted them all around the yard and saw a hummingbird at them every day!

The phlox behind in my shade garden is just happiness all around!

Late summer blooms with my 8' tall cutleaf coneflower mixed with the 6' tall cosmos...

 

One of my new jewels from last year - purple Joe Pye weed that gets to be up to 8' tall (as did my swamp mallow hibiscus!) and then turns into lovely pinkish brown fluffy as it fades after summer.... 

I brightened this photo up a lot because camera cannot capture how spectacularly the mix of flowers pop when looking out my kitchen window!

The color combination of the orange cosmos, red cardinal flower, blue cardinal flower, (earlier there were yellow black-eyed susans in there too!), and a new favorite - pinkish three-nerved Joe Pye weed! Gorrrrgeous!

It's been an absolutely lovely year of flowers; bringing me so much happiness whenever I look out regardless of the season. I feel like after over a decade of gardening here I'm finally seeing my dreams come true!!

But I don't do this just for me. This year I got to see again all the little friends I am also gardening for...

The gardens have been a-swam and a-buzz and it's been beautiful!! Not just visually, but such beautiful fullness in seeing my attempts working to do my teeny tiny part to help this broken world.

Rain Garden

After taking out two giant trees in a part of the yard where everything drains anyway, we definitely had standing water and the whole area by the sheds was wet wet wet. 

So my plans for that area got moved up in priority!

I decided that since I had a ton of extra wood chips no one wanted, I'd just go ahead and kill more grass and cover it in wood chips. Down went my tarp...

But during his visit, my Dad said it wouldn't take that long to just dig out the sod. 
Okaaaaay, knock yourself out! (I think he came to greatly regret his words!)

Meanwhile I was digging in the corner to get it flush with the grass. This was the corner where years of who knows what had piled up so it was always high ground aaaaand the maple tree roots had grown up into it. So not only am I removing 4-12" of soil, I'm removing tangles of dead roots. Worst. Job. Ever!
Not, not true.
My spade has had the tip broken/folded down for years, which makes digging very well difficult and then my rake broke, so NOW it was the worst job ever! 😵😵

But over two days we did it!!!

I removed by beloved photina fraseri because there just wasn't room for it and all the natives I wanted. A friend in the neighborhood actually took it from me!
This really gave me a blank slate (though I'm leaving the hostas for now until things fill in) and I found a few places with some native plants so in went the Blue False Indigo, 2 kinds of Joe Pye Weed, Blue Cardinal Flower, Foam Flower, Blue-eyed Grass, Hardy Hibiscus, Black Chokeberry, and probably others I'm forgetting!

A couple of weeks later I got some Sweetspire volunteers from a friend and then I decided to finally get the rest of the woodchips out of my driveway and just dumped them on cardboard onto the grass around the cherry tree to connect the two gardens!

Sooooo much new garden!!

Eventually I'll finish digging out the space by the shed so it's all flush and can drain well, but for now there's no space to place the mound of dirt, so there it sits!

I'm very excited to see how all of this works! I tried to get plants that do well in 4-5 hours of sun, but will also be fine when the oak tree grows and shades them. Some may need to be transplanted, but as we have probably at least 10 years before that's really an issue, I'm going to let future accidental gardener deal with it!

I realize that despite mulch and filling in with a bunch of violets from all over the yard, it's going to be several years of obnoxious weeding before everything fills in and it turns into the low maintenance beds I have elsewhere. (Figures this is the year of a bumper crop of maple trees....the seedlings are out of control!!) 

But for now I'm just basking in seeing all the new plants where once was mess along the entire side and back!!!!

New Beds and Natives

Three years ago a friend invited me to a group on FB about environmentally friendly gardening in Maryland. I began learning about the importance of natives and how they are the best to feed native species. The plants, soil, animals and insects lived largely unaltered adapting well to each other for thousands of years until humans started "playing God".

I've read the book 'Founding Gardeners'. I love it. It's a really fascinating and fantastic read. These guys' commitment to nature was beautiful, but trying to replicate European gardens when you're not in Europe isn't the greatest plan. We're still reaping the ever-increasing consequences of non-natives decimating natives. (Here's looking at you, English Ivy 😑)

Someone recently shared that they get so frustrated when people say "Oh look at all the pollinators on these flowers, they must be good!"
That's like saying, "Oh look at all the cars around Mc-a-Dee's - it must be good for you!"

There just isn't as much nutrients in most of the plants at nurseries which have been played with to make longer blooms, more desirable attractiveness, etc.

So I began oh-so-slowly to buy a few natives.
And got some from my friend who started me on this journey.

But I think one of the biggest changes has been re-thinking beauty.

This is beautiful:

It really is. I absolutely LOVE color! I went overboard on annuals last year because I was hosting a luau and wanted fun, brightness!

But those are largely all cotton candy for pollinators.

What else is beautiful?
I've come to see that this is:

Sure, you might think it looks messy and it kind of is - I'm working on it! So let me share some of the gardens from folks in the group I mentioned above:

Snapdragons are decidedly not native, but
I didn't know they're perennial when I
planted them years ago 🙊

Absolutely beautiful! 

I've found that learning more about what's actually helpful instead of just what I've been conditioned to see as beautiful in "what a yard should look like" has truly changed how I see beauty in plants.

Just letting things go a bit more "wild" has already made our yard explode with butterflies and birds. Last year we saw our first ever Carolina mantis egg sac (though they never hatched...alas. Still - all I'd seen before were the invasive ones!) And this year we're seeing a ton of 9-spotted ladybugs, which were introduced from Europe, but at least have been around decades longer than Asian ones that have taken over of late.

I don't want to be a psycho about this. I personally have a hard time thinking that over the hundreds of years since Europeans introduced new plants, pollinators haven't adapted to them...?
But I do want to be a good caretaker of this tiny piece of land I've been entrusted with, so I'm tryin'!

Where we took the trees down, I wanted to take advantage of this now-open space and create new beds, especially since I had a ridiculous amount of mulch to keep too much stuff taking over while I planned and obtained plants to fill what has become a significant square footage!

Huge empty areas after the trees were removed

Brand new enormous bed! Gosh I hate removing sod 😩

In the fall I bought a few natives to fill in (which I didn't take good close pictures of 🙄)...

Giant coneflower / brown-eyed susans, Tickseed, Creeping Phlox, Yarrow (which I ended up planting in a giant pot in the front), and a new favorite: Blue False Indigo - sooo pretty!

This spring I'm very excited that I got some new natives from a fellow gardener in the group! I put them right to work, starting in my "new" wildflower bed (refer to  last year's jungle  to remember this history of this little bed)...

Sure, sure, I know it looks sparse now, but you plant for the size plants will become, NOT like developers do and smoosh it in for current curb appeal leaving homeowners cursing and ripping out trees and shrubs planted 3' from their foundation 5 years later 😑 (I clearly don't have strong feelings on this 😑😑)

Some of these plants are decently eager spreaders (hence putting them here and NOT along our neighbor's fences!), so I'm sure by next year and especially the year after it'll be spectacular!

I got Golden Alexander, Lyreleaf sage, Cutleaf coneflower, Aromatic aster, Pussytoes, and I'm quite excited about a few St. Johns Wort shrubs she shared as they seem to be great in multiple conditions, are pretty, and remain a decent size.

But the crowning glory is finally having my first packera aurea! Golden ragwort!

For some reason, it's a featured plant in my gardening group and so I feel so "in" having some now 😄 Mostly I'm excited because this and a few others are May bloomers, which has historically been my bloom-less time (and also when half my friends have birthdays, so no fresh garden bouquets for you 😞)

Several of those plants are the preferred host for pollinators to lay their eggs on. Within 2 days of planting, an American Lady butterfly was checking out the pussytoes!

So yay! We're well on the journey now!

Next up, take a peek at my psychotic, slightly spontaneous huge rain garden addition!