Why I Oughta...

One of the best features of our garden back in Elmhurst were our peonies.  We had well-established and productive peony plants that produced a ton of blooms.  When we moved to Downers, we inherited one, but it was planted back in the shade and never really did anything .   I planted a couple and transplanted a couple from some teardowns , but they were all clustered in the back with not a ton of sun exposure.  Until last year.  When I expanded the beds closer to our patio and moved three of them there and one to the front yard - IB2DWs area.    I also planted a new white one - Duchesse de Nemours white .  If you look at the photo in this post , it looks like I had FOUR peony plants in this area last year.   When I go to look at that spot, there's good news and bad news.   Good news first:  I see some of those tell-tale red tips emerging from the soil.  If you look closely at this photo below, you can spot them: Now...the bad news:  I only count three.  See below for an annotated v

Earlier this week, we had some snow fall overnight.  And flurries flew during the day.  It didn't last long, but the temperatures have hovered around freezing all week and I keep hearing people talk about how we're experiencing a "late Spring" this year.  The grass has green'd up, some of our ornamental grasses (the feather reed grasses) are up, tulips have pushed foliage (but no flowers) and I'm seeing some buds swell on our shrubs.  And, I keep going outside to do little garden tasks, but I haven't taken on any large scale ones.  Planting a few things, cleaning some parts of the garden up.  But, mostly....waiting.  Waiting for the weather.  Some of our perennials are moving ahead - despite the temperatures.  I see hosta tips (some cultivars), Brunnera tips and (as I posted yesterday) even peonies. But the trees?  They're still bare.  I wasn't sure how *normal* this is:  to have no leaves at all on any of our trees in mid/late April.  I don't

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 wall with no windows.   Here

We brought home four treeform DoubleFile Viburum a couple of weeks ago and once the Green Giant Thuja planting project (and Lilac transplanting), I got busy digging these Virurnum in the ground. Two went in along the north side fence, one went in back the fire pit and one is going in (not yet) in the front yard bed in front of our porch.  Last Fall, I planted two Arrowwood Viburnum along the fenceline after finding them on an end-of-season close-out .  The plan calls for a number of them, but four in a line where I've planted two (meaning...two more) and a few more along the back - some of which I've sub'd out (for now) for Lilacs.    Starting out with the two additional ones along the north side fence ( see this post showing the location ), I needed to put in a pair between the two existing and the spot where the Canadian Hemlocks (which....are TINY, still) will grow.  Like in the Lilac transplant landing zone, there was a scrub shrub standing which needed to come out s

I've been giving the " in between two driveways " strip some thinking lately - how to edge it ( boulders ), how to extend the beds to have them make more sense, looking at what worked/didn't work there since last year and what a color palette for this area could/should be. Frankly....I don't have a TON of flowers in any of my beds - as I've been MOSTLY a foliage gardener up there up to this point.    It is #4 on my 2022 to-do list:  "Enhance the IB2DWs Strip" .    I already have some purples with the Serendipity Allium and the five BIG Pinball Wizard bulbs that I planted last year .  And, taking what I've learned from Amy at Pretty Purple Door about color combinations, one path forward is what she calls an 'analogous color scheme' - that includes three adjacent colors on the color wheel.  In this case, it would be using the three colors of:  purple, violet and blue in those front beds.  And, maybe beyond - like under the Norway Maple -

Last Summer, we had a Rabbit create a little baby bunny burrow right on the edge of our patio .  While it sure was fun for the kids, it created some problems with the dog.  Frankly... as I said back then :  it was a bad spot for stashing some tiny bunnies.  All Winter long, we've had rabbit damage, so they're not on the top of my 'invite list' when I think about critters making a home in our yard.  But...I have to remind myself that one of the criteria for a "Certified Wildlife Habitat" is having 'places to raise young' .  So, I suppose having our yard used for a second-straight year as a place to raise tiny bunnies speaks to the conditions. I said second-straight year.  Yep.  They're back.  But, this time, the Mamma Rabbit picked a MUCH better spot:  tucked in against the house, behind our air conditioners.  Here (below), you can see the little fur she's provided as a blanket in the corner and how she puts the leaves and other landscape materi

Earlier this month, as part of a series of garden bed 'slices', I did some shrub exploration posts including the 'Lilac Replacement' section and the ' Northside Mixed Bed ' that kind of worked together.  They both required some upright evergreens, but the Lilacs needed to be transplanted from one section to the other.  Earlier this week, I got started by planting the upright evergreens - three Green Giant Thujas - in each section.  From there, I dug up and transplanted the four Lilac shrubs (2 Nocture, 2 Common) in the Northside bed. Before I did the planting, I removed some of the lower, but still large limbs on the Hackberry tree to make sure these were getting the most sun they could get in this spot.  Below is a look at the couple of cuts I made with my extension saw: Here's what the newly planted area looks like with three evergreens, four flowering shrubs, an existing scrub shrub and a small London Planetree (below): And, here's an annotated versi