Befores & Afters--my favourite! Of course, to be effective, these must chronicle the passage of at least two or three years...
Here be witness to the transformation of Anne & Peter's new garden (see the previous post "Gardening with a Paintbrush" July 2008). The above two pics are circa 2006. Note the expanses of age-old English ivy and heather, and although you can't see it, a mature pine tree is surrounded by the stone pathway.
The ivy and heather were clawed out with the sanity-saving assistance of a friend's crew. More shrubs (the hazel and rhodi below) were removed in 2007. The winter of 2006/07 felled the pine, roots and all, right across the newly-planted garden aaarrggh. Peter removed other mature trees and reconfigured the stone pathway, built rose trellises, irrigation systems, veg garden, and on and on!
Most significant of all (to the floral side of things), Anne and I salvaged mature shrubs and perennials (with permission) from her previous garden, in the heat of summer, I might add--which goes to show that when you gotta do what you gotta do, you find out plants are a lot tougher than you thought. As a result, the garden was remarkably "instant" and we were terribly pleased with ourselves by the next spring.
I think the shots below are from late 2007...
An edge of Lady's mantle (Alchemilla mollis), Coral bells (Heuchera), seeded Alyssum, English lavender, Hebe, etc. contains a tumble of perennials and strategic annuals, biennials, bulbs, tubers, and on and on, plus hydrangea, roses, spiraea, choisya...too much to list for now. As you can see, the pine was replaced with a Katsura Tree (Cercidiphyllum japonicum) just to the right of the red Japanese maple. And Anne chose some own-root beauties from the Old Rose Nursery (on Galiano Island) which are now sending shoots to the heavens (my title bar photo). The photo below is from the past few days...
And below, one of my favourite shrubs--the Black Elderberry (Sambucas nigra 'Black Beauty')--finally grew tall enough this year to be a backdrop for the red dahlias. Plants having fun--Anne has taught me the art of staking/tying perennials So You Can't Tell. No cinching allowed.
2 comments:
So, are you going to share the "staking so you can't tell" secret with the rest of us?
gonzoschicken@yahoo.com
Please enlighten me.
Hi GC, (I have a faint memory of a rubber chicken..?). Um, Staking So You Can't Tell involves many many secrets that are only divulged to those who read my blog (an elite group of attractive garden gnomes). Some of these techniques include: using moss-green jute string/moss-green bamboo stakes/moss-green velcro ties...running string through the centre of tall clumps of perennials in an "x" for extra support so that drastic waist-cinching isn't necessary...bending a flexible stake into a half-circle, and sticking both ends into the earth at the base of flopping perennials, so that the thick bases of the stems are supported,raising the whole plant without tall pokey stakes showing. You can also look at the posts from Aug.28/2010, Dec.8/2010 and Feb.20 2011 for some specific techniques (like hilling dahlias so you don't have to stake them at all!).The most important thing, which I learned from Anne, is the awareness that staking should be a subtle art of supporting-without-thwarting the natural form of the plant.
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