Why I Oughta...

Thanks to Google Photos, I was served this image of our sideyard from 2017.  This was the day were were installing our fence and shows the state of the sideyard before we moved in.  Grass all the way around the house, no trees or plants.  And, no walkway/boardwalk/path.  See below: Compare that with the photo from this post from this past month showing the same view towards the backyard (photo posted below): Quite the change.  Eight years apart.

The hedge of Frans Fontaine Columnar Hornbeam trees that are planted along the side of our house have NOW been pruned.  Just a little bit.  These are now in their eighth (8th) growing season and up until now I have NOT touched one branch.  No pruning what-so-ever.  But, that ended because of the boardwalk along the side of our house.   I'm eager to keep the idea of miegakure - or "hide and reveal" with these trees and the boardwalk that provides the pathway. That 'hide-and-reveal' is for the full backyard. After a big rain, the branches are loaded with wet leaves and the lower ones on these Frans Fontaine European Hornbeams begin to droop.  And, lean against the screened porch.    This weekend, I grabbed my small hand pruners and began to cut back some of the lower branches.  I picked spots that had foliage back behind the cut, to ensure there would be continued leaf-out.   I didn't want to hack the whole thing back, but ra...

One of the thing that's been on my mind over the past few months is the concept of 'legibility' in the garden.  I wrote up a post about it - when I first came across the concept.  I also included it in my 2025 to-do list .  Part of legibility are 'entrances'.  Entrances to garden spaces.   One of the primary entrances to our garden is along the side of house via the boardwalk.  In my 2025 to-do list, I mentioned 'planting up the boardwalk' as something I wanted to get done.   Over the past few years, I've planted a few things there - but nothing has worked.  Ferns.  Hostas.  I think it is too dry and too dark.   But, I'm trying again.  This time...with an Ajuga.  Bronze Beauty Ajuga.  Here's the six-pack of groundcover that I bought: Along the screened porch, there's a long, thin bed.  Below is the before/after of planting these six plugs: I watered them in and they looked flat that first day....

Recently, we had a crew come in and clean up the garden, edge out the beds and lay down a layer of mulch.  Was it leaf mulch?  No.  And, I'm ok with that.  It was hardwood fines and it sure looks good.  I channeled my inner Stu Finer and made the most of the installation.  Mulch and those edges play a role in what is called 'garden legibility'.  That was #10 on my 2025 to-do-list:  work on legibility in the garden .   This mulch - with its dark brown color - sure *does* make the garden more legible.   Below are a few photos showing the mulch in the beds.  Starting with the front yard - where the recently expanded front porch bed is now showing how much space there is for annuals.   The island bed in front is now larger, connected to the driveway and has a better, more organic shape to it.  This was #3 on my 2025 to-do list  (part of it, at least).  Below are a couple of photos showing the island b...

I was watching this garden tour on YouTube from Garden Gate Magazine and just about totally fell in love.  What a garden.   There is SO MUCH to appreciate in this one video in this one garden that I'll probably post a few things about it that struck me.  The first of which...is related to gabion-style walls.  Below is a screenshot of the garden tour - at the 9:53 mark ( here's a link to that 9:53 mark in the video ) that shows off a set of pillars that are done gabion-style.  See below: The garden-owner talks about framing and how they use these gabion-style pillars as a way to frame the entrance for visitor's experience.  The gardener saw these in a local garden and decided to replicate them and included putting pots on top.   I've posted about gabion walls back in 2019 when I saw them in an annual garden trend post .   I also posted a few other posts about various walls over the years including this stone wall at Disney's Aulani ...

The biggest 'project' item on my 2022 to-do list was to begin the side-yard retaining wall/walkway project in some way.  I called it #3 on the list and said that I should start with the 'upper' wall and planting box .  This was based on a late-March post showing how I could tackle the project by building an upper and lower retaining wall and 'placing' the walkway on 'top and in-between' those two walls.  When I did my check-in on the list in early September, I was pretty confident that I wasn't going to get to this item .  Today - in mid-November - I now can say:  I didn't get to it.  As I went into project-planning mode, I went and looked around the Web for ideas.  I also looked at our lived environment for ideas, too.  And, that's where I came across a recently-installed landscape timber retaining wall project a couple of blocks away from our house.  We were out on a walk and saw this fresh, treated lumber wall that looked nicely done: Thi...

My number one priority for this gardening season has been to focus on adding shrubs to the garden.  That means both evergreen shrubs as well as deciduous ones that lose their leaves come Fall.   To date, I've planted 15 shrubs in the garden with the last ones being the set of three Little Lime Hydrangeas in the backyard .   When I was at the orange Big Box nursery recently, I found a table of very small (1# nursery pots) Hicks upright Yews.  I've used these all over the place in our garden, so I figured I could pick up another set of these to plant.  I mean...they were $5 each, so what's not to like, right? The question was where to put them.  There are a bunch of places, but one that I've been thinking about is how we add a little bit of structure to the (current) entrance to our fire pit area.  We have this little mulch border that we've placed a couple of small pieces of flagstone that you can use to traverse from the lawn to the fire pit...

I've talked about how our yard, beds and even view of our house from the street has changed since we moved in back in 2017.  At that time, we had a house next door (to the north) that was sitting closer (than our house setback-wise) to the street and had a driveway that wasn't right on the property line.  With our new neighbors building and moving in a couple of years back, that changed.  They upgraded the property and house in a MASSIVE way.  And...they're just good neighbors and nice people.  But, they did upgrade the property in so many ways.  In doing so, they built their new house a bit further back from where the old, smaller house was situated.   As a result, that 'view from the street' that I mentioned changed a little bit.  It changed when you are coming south on our street/sidewalk and 'see' our house.  What used to be hidden (mostly) due to landscaping and the old house was the side of our garage.  It is a big, mass of wa...

Earlier here on the blog, I posted about the idea of a 'fountain wall' right next to our patio and mentioned that I thought there was an 'order of operations' post that needed to come first to ensure that I had all of the pieces sorted out and that any project that I took on would not have to be REDONE when I moved on to other projects.  However....in order to get to that 'order of operations' post, I think I need to lay out a few more of the building blocks/underlying projects that make up the choices I have to make.   One of the biggest ones is to finish up solving the 'entrance' to our backyard.    I've gone around-and-around on how to best solve the situation I'm facing:  a gradient that transverses the path we need to complete from our front yard (driveway) back to our patio. Last year, I put in a gravel walkway that covers half of the area .  And, we love it.  But, I can't simply lay down a gravel walkway for the rest of this walkway b...