Hello Again, and Part One of the Story of My Garden

Time, as they say, has a way of slipping away. Today I am re-starting this blog in time for summer adventure and relaxation. What better way to get started than to introduce my garden.

My chapter in this garden has been seven years in the making, although it was started in 1950 by the previous owner. When we moved here in 2003, as only the third owners of a 1940 property, we had the great bones of a well established, but rather overgrown, garden of boxwoods, hollies, and a dozen Tropicana roses.

Did we ever have boxwoods. Probably 200-250 of them all told. Many of them squeezed in places where they could no longer be accessed, or where they had grown over and prevented passage. In other places they were growing in full force of the Washington summer sun, and fading quickly. So we started to purge. And believe me, it's not easy to get rid of boxwoods. The idea was to carefully edit by keeping only selected single boxwoods and nearly all of the curving hedges. We were able to give away several of them. We also managed to relocate many of them. And in one heartbreaking instance, a small hedge of them, which I had relocated only four months earlier, were decimated in a split second one January day by a falling avalanche of snow from the sunroom roof. It was horticide of the first order.

We suffered further disappointment this past winter, following the now-famous Snowpocalypse and Snowmaggedeon blizzards.

It certainly did look beautiful under the blue winter sky.

Here's the proud snow shoveler standing in front of his piece de resistence. This completely blocked off access to our back yard for about a month. On the right you can see one of the American boxwoods bent over into the driveway.

All of the boxwoods in the back yard, both English and American, bent over  under the weight of the heavy wet snow for about three weeks. Usually our heavy snows melt away in a matter of a few days. These back to back storms kept the shrubs doubled over for nearly a month. Although we didn't lose any of them outright, they did suffer tremendous disfigurement. The hedges in the front yard fared much better, for some reason.

There were also several yews that tightly girdled the front and back entrances. As much as I like yews, these again were completely misplaced. But digging these out, as anyone who has dared can tell you, is difficult because of the deep and stubborn tap roots. After digging deeper and deeper without disturbing the tap root, he finally climbed down into the hole attacked it with the masonry saw. That did it!

The poor old Tropicanas died away, one by one. I tried for three years to keep them going. But the back yard had become so shady since they had been planted years earlier, that they barely bloomed. I also tired very quickly of the spraying and coaxing that still resulted in black spot and stunted blooms. So out they went.

A beautiful flower that fades from salmon to soft pink. But I was no match for the black spot and mildew.

The most dramatic change involved removal of a 30 foot long, 30 foot high arborvitae hedge close to the house. Not only did the Green Monster bathe the east side of our back yard in shade, it was rapidly growing out of control. Time for that baby to go:  I spent an entire paycheck on having it removed, just as it was threatening to walk in the back door. Suddenly I had a whole new section of garden to merge into the existing plantings.

It was time to rethink the entire plan. With my interest in perennial gardening in a more natural style, I started to divide the garden into different zones. I obsessively observed the sun traveling over the yard from morning to night during all the seasons of the year. I noted the consistently sunny, partly sunny, and pretty much always shady spots. I also noted the dry spots (e.g., under the neighbors' 70-foot holly tree) and the wet spots. Over successive summers I tried (and often failed) with a variety of perennials, biennials and a few annuals to fill in. I tried different color combinations, heights, foliage colors and textures. And often I found plants that either got too comfortable with their accommodations, or those that could barely grow before they fell over. I dug new beds, made them bigger, and then made them bigger again. I added bags and bags of compost. My effort has finally started to pay off.

I feel that I am now very close to settling on a plan and a selection of hardy plants that more or less can survive our sultry, humid summers, wild springs and unpredictable winters.

Next, Part Two of the story of my garden.