Click below to listen to my 2 min. Garden Bite radio show: Rearranging your garden – Plan B
Last weekend I had plans for a lot of yardwork. I DID have a LOT of fun… pouring sweat and filthy. However, I also needed a Plan B.
This is the story of what gardening is about! Adapt and pivot. I’ve had 3 rose bushes in a place where there had been a really lousy looking Russian olive tree. It was removed in 2012. There is one rose, ‘Music Box’, that is flowering. I decided to dig out the ‘Kashmir’ and a yellow rose that just kept trying to survive, along with creeping phlox that I had planted for groundcover.
My thought was to actually take them all out and plant a smokebush there. Uh, that was not going to happen as I cut back ‘Kashmir’ and started digging the plant out.
The trunk of that Russian olive was hard as a rock with one root the size of an arm wrestler’s forearm!
Plan B was put into action on the fly. I ended up leaving ‘Music Box’ and creating a smaller circle, then planting white clover seed. I removed the limestone edging and went to work.
But I’d already purchased the Smokebush ‘Winecraft Black’. It’s GORGEOUS.
Hmmm, where to put it. I really knew I would place it along my fence but I had to remove the grasses that I placed there, literally, as a place holder. You can see in one of the photos above of my rose area what I did with the grasses. I divided the clump and placed them where the sod didn’t take from road construction.
Okay, so the mature size of the smokebush will eventually go past the current border of this garden. No worries, I will adapt and pivot. When it does get bigger, I will pull the border out! Easy peasy, she says with an eyebrow raised.
There are 3 sunflowers growing up in the photo above. My mandevilla I used a tomato cage for. Big bluestem ‘Blackhawks’ is growing really well and the coneflowers are shooting up in front of it!
I did a lot more planting and rearranging. The point of today’s Garden Bite is about enjoying your gardens and changing them when you want to!
I added Heliopsis into my rain garden. Removed columbine from an area it wasn’t thriving and into the rain garden too.
And the begonias…
