Gardens aren’t static

Mon. Sep. 9, 2019

Click below to listen to my 2 min. Garden Bite radio show: Gardens aren’t static

Last weekend was the Labor Day holiday and a good friend of mine came over to help me do some garden chores. Oh, the joy of sharing hard work and laughs with good friends!

We dug into my perennial gardens. After 5 years, some plant choices I wasn’t completely pleased about and an ant farm that lifted some plants out of the ground, it was time to create some change.

for starters… Baptisia taking over …

I realized that’s not something I’ve talked about very often but there are times when it’s simply TIME to change things up.

Gardens aren’t static. You don’t plant them and forget them. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve yanked something out from somewhere, moved it somewhere else and found that somewhere didn’t work or it worked great!

After the ants invaded my Prairie dropseed plants, earlier this summer, I decided to take out the sculpture the plants were now hiding.

Prairie dropseed, Blackeyed Susans, daylilies and wayward milkweed!

This weekend my friend got 3 prairie dropseed plants to take out to her farm where they will be stunning!

9-2-19

I haven’t been as pleased with my Elderberry ‘Black Tower’ that I bought after I had to rip out my gorgeous virginia creeper ‘Red wall’ after the Japanese beetles annihilated it last year.

Virginia Creeper ‘Red Wall’ 6-18

It was so pretty but those nasty beetles were so attracted to it that they wouldn’t leave, meaning those rotten things were covering everything.

This year the bugs are manageable but I had to wrestle with keeping the ‘Black Tower’.

I decided I needed to be patient with this columnar shrub. So I’m going to leave it be, for now.

I did take out some tall coreopsis that was crowding and crawling on my leadplant.

Before it became out of control!

And then there were the daylilies I’ve had since day one of my fence garden renovation in 2012. Frankly, they had to go. When I tried to pawn them off to my friend, she let me know she would work with me but NOT if I snuck those plants into her truck! Oh, look at the time! I guess I’ll have to carry  over this Garden Bite till tomorrow!