Oh the front beds.
Started a year after we moved in when I knew 0.13 things about gardening, and so it has been over a decade of trial and error.
Part of the trickiness is two-fold:
1) North-Northwest facing, most of the beds are shaded by the house until about 2-3pm when they then get blasted with afternoon sun.
2) Above them are two cantilevers (split-foyer overhang plus roof overhang) that equal FIVE FEET of coverage...a.k.a. a nightmare for rain watering.
Take a moment for patting on the back since that is what it looked like when we toured the house...so ANYTHING has got to be an improvement!
We cleared out the 3' tall maple saplings and it sat sadly empty for a year.
After a year spent renovating our foreclosure inside, we decided to make beautiful beds out in the front.
So I designed it and researched plants and learned about the benefits of natives and learned about their sun and water needs before knowing if they are right for this spot.....10 years after planting these beds. (See the name of my blog?! I never claimed to have learned anything except the hard way!)
So what we ACTUALLY did was to just show up at the nursery and go "this looks cool" "ooh, let's get one of those".
Well, as I mentioned it was so much trial and error. Many of the plants didn't survive...I am just not a good water-er!
For years I've known that for it to look really great and to actually work without constant watering, we needed raised beds since the right side was quite sloped to the driveway.
But ouch on the wallet!
In the fall of 2024 I grabbed some end of season clearance perennials and literally stuck them in the ground with grass all around intending to finally do my overhaul in the spring.
I even measured and started calculating and pricing for retaining wall stones.
Well there came spring and without going into too much of our personal lives, current events meant husband's job was looking a bit precarious. Definitely no hundreds of dollars "beautification" projects happening right now!
I made lemonade with some random edging materials we had lying around and extra dirt from the back of the shed so I could at least get some plants establishing until I could do more.
Getting that cursed knock-out rose out was such an awful (thorns! ON THE ROOTS! 😖😖), but satisfying task. I replaced it with a mostly evergreen Shrubby St. Johns Wort (Hypericum prolificum) that I had gotten established in the back yard knowing it would do better in the front.
Well, thankfully things somewhat stabilized within a month or so and we decided since I had a good quantity of soil already on hand, with el cheapo blocks, I could pull the trigger on the top tier!
Bless my Dad for yet again being my grunt force labor in helping me load up my car and his rental (I was about 13 blocks too many for being too-close-to-the-weight-capacity-for-comfort!)
And thus began what I believe to be my least favorite job in all of landscaping: leveling stones to build a retaining wall. 😩😩😩
At one point I had to REDO the corner since I didn't like how much it had sagged with my following the driveway slope, but not wanting that much of a slope from the wall to the front of the bed 😵
It took shape slooooowly over a few days and then I was able to continue moving/dividing and plant with what I already had and only had to buy a few more plants.
Within a few weeks I had used all the stones I had bought, which got me farther than I had planned, at which point husband said for just the last few stones it would take (the front level is mostly just one stone deep), I should just go get the last load to finish!!!
I am so pleased with how it came out, although I certainly would have chosen prettier stones if money were no object. The ultimate goal is for plants to fill it in anyway, so most shouldn't be visible for most of the year.
It became delightful to watch the gardens fill in over the summer. And yes, I know the 'Black Truffle' cardinal flowers (Lobelia cardinalis) are a cultivar, not a straight native, but I needed some leaf color variety and boy they did not disappoint!
The Shrubby St. John's Wort has the coolest flowers that bumblebees love!
The combination of the cardinal flowers and Little Bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium) grass is wonderful! And hopefully the yellow wild indigo (Baptisia tinctoria) will add glorious color too! (Unfortunately, I thought it was an early bloomer and then the St. Johns would give yellow in the later summer, buuuuut that's blue indigo that's earlier, so turns out the yellows overlap🤦)
All of the snapdragons just emerged by themselves! And I was glad to see many of my calla lilies and other spring and summer bulbs survived being buried with a lot of soil.
I did end up moving the bottom tier stones back a few inches to make the tiers more proportional and because I realized I had likely buried my tulips. 😬
That move helped it look much better and thankfully some of them are emerging this spring, but I think I'll have to do some excavating surgery after bloom time.
The celosia also came back wonderfully considering how deep those seeds had been buried too! (They're a non-native I also can't quite part with because they're so cool looking and bloom late summer all the way until our first freeze!)
Everything filled in shockingly well for how new most of it was! Unfortunately either because they're so new or because they don't get enough sun, the bluestem and cardinal flowers did get quite floppy, so I'll have to work on that.
And what about the other side of the house?!
It got some love as well with an expanded bed and plantings that better match the right side of the house (bluestem, cardinal flowers, tickseed (Coreopsis), creeping phlox, baptisia, St. Johns wort). Plus I added a Dwarf Fothergilla (gardenii).
Eventually I would love to edge it with the same stones as the right side, but since that's aesthetics and not structural needs (this side of the house is higher and less sloped), it'll have to wait.
Of course I added compost to my revised beds and therefore of course I grew a pepper plant in this front flower bed right next to my front door.
We ate about 4 very tiny very bitter peppers in the fall.
(And by 'we' I mean the really cute 3 year-old and 5 year-old garbage disposals who think eating dandelion flowers is wonderful, so have very low standards for outdoor edibles.)
It really was an ideal spot for a pepper plant: with the house and stoop, that spot is guaranteed to get at least 30 minutes of direct sunlight each day.
Can we talk about my favorites yet?!
Likely through my gardening group, I came across Beautyberry (Callicarpa americana)! I needed one! (Was SO excited to find it at an all native nursery that's not horribly far from my house.)
A lovely shrub that will hopefully fill the big empty wall spot between the windows nicely, but most incredibly are the berries that come in the fall!!
And they're edible!
Not generally by normal people, of course, unless it's for a jam with copious amounts of sugar, but the garbage disposals will be thrilled!
And then there was my unicorn.
Also saw it referenced in my gardening group years ago and I wanted one so bad. I kept researching it and knowing I didn't have the space for it to spread out like it likes to. Every time I was looking for new plants to plant in a new bed I was creating it would come back up, but just never had the space.
But wait!
The death of the monstrous shrub at the corner of the house meant maybe I could make room!!!
Totally beautiful in the fall!
But this ain't called a red twig dogwood (Cornus alba 'Sibirica') for nothing! 😍😍😍
All the pictures I take and photo editing I try can't even do justice to its color. The red stems are absolutely spectacular! One of the plants where the pictures you see online really aren't exaggerating its beauty; so much so that I am not wanting it to start putting its leaves back on!
I cannot wait for it to get to the 8-10' tall it may get and start filling in that spot! Can you imagine all those red twigs in winter?!! Once I have enough, folks say they cut stalks and and bring them in for winter decoration!
So that's it! After nearly 15 years in this house, finally I feel like I have some decent front beds! Not that I won't continue tweaking and filling them in, but there is a more cohesive plan and look, not to mention how much easier natives make everything!
A dream finally come true!
