How Does Your Garden Grow?

We have lived in this house for just over four years. When we moved in it was newly constructed, raw, and surrounded by mud. Other than arranging furniture and hanging our art we have done very little inside the house; outside is a very different story.

Because of the soils dumped on the clay by the builder creating gardens was a huge problem. Any new garden had to either be raise up with good quality soils added or else we had to dig down for more than a foot, remove the bad soil, and replace it with good soil. Needless to say over the past four years we have spent close to $800 on soil alone!

The front of the house has a large balcony so I wanted to create a raised garden in front of the balcony to provide some privacy, shade, and to break up the geometric harshness of the building.

This was the garden when we first created it:

This is the same garden this week:

Along the side of the house we had some trouble. The next house is quite close and little sunlight reached the grass that the builders placed there . . . and so it died. There was a huge patch of mud. Last year my neighbour and I decided to have a cement walkway put in with a garden on either side. I planted a shade garden which has really taken off!

In the part of the shade garden which gets the least sun we tried to duplicate a wild forest garden with trilliums, Jacob's Ladder, Jack-in-the-Pulpit, mayflower, and other native flowers.

The back has seen the most change. We started with a flower garden back in 2004:

The back shows what the soil is like hidden under the sod. This is the same garden this year:

You'll notice that we expanded it considerably. We also added a pond:

Last year we noticed that the grass that was in the shade of the fence was not doing well, what to do? Dig it out and create another shade garden. This is the result:

We are at the point where we need very few annuals. Our trips to the garden centre and far less expensive then they were in the past. Now I am busy splitting perennials and giving them away, and replacing those plants which don't make it through the winter.

Comments

[Rose]

Your gardens look wonderful! How about sending some plants my way :) With our weather lately, I just cleaned up my gardens yesterday and will finish the last 2 today. I'm looking at planting 2 or 3 flowering shrubs. Got any suggestions?

[sandi @ the whistlestop cafe]

Beautiful! Y'all obviously spend a lot of time working outside~ when you aren't in those chairs with a cold beverage.