So…  after reading our last post, you know that we now know what we like.  Now what?    Sherry can grow anything.  Really, she can.  It’s amazing to watch.  But neither of us had ANY experience with planning a garden.  There’s so much to consider:  zones, shade, sun (morning sun?, evening sun?),  heights, colors, bloom times, rates of growth, ph levels, costs, and on and on.  It’s really complicated.  (As it turns out, we kind of like that about gardening.  It’s this big mystery that has to be solved if it’s going to work the way you want).  But at the time, we just felt so overwhelmed that we hired someone to design it for us.

WAIT.  NO.  WE DIDN’T CHEAT.   Well…. we tried to, but it turned out that, even with a degree in horticulture and coming from a family that owned a nursery, he didn’t have a clue about designing a garden.  Or, rather, he didn’t have a clue about listening to someone and designing the garden they wanted.

We only wanted a plan for the back yard.  We had several problems that needed solving.  Here’s one, just as an example:  as you can see in the photo above, as you come off the deck, there is  fairly steep little slope.  When it was all grass… well, when it was all grass it was mostly dirt.  Mud when it was damp.  And very slippery.  More than once, one of us slid to the bottom of that little hill.  We TOLD him that we needed to solve that.  We told him that we wanted little separate gardens and what kind each needed to be (shade, etc).  He came back with a plan that not only was nothing like what we asked for (it had a cutting garden – we didn’t ask for a cutting garden), but it didn’t even address the slope problem.  So we fired him.

Back to the books.  This time it was books about planning gardens.  Graphs.  Maps.  Color wheels and color charts.  And you know what?  I’m glad it turned out that way.  This is our garden now.  We designed it, we built it, we planted it.  It’s ours.  We’ve made a few mistakes.  Okay, we’ve made a LOT of mistakes.  We’ve gone through several ideas that were great ideas but just didn’t work.  But that just made it even more “our” garden.

So we drew up a plan.  We bought stone.  We made paths, put in two patios (an upper and a lower) with tables and chairs, built two arbors and a trellis and started amending the soil and deciding on plants.  We bought our statue “Gus” at a local nursery.  You can see the difference in the two photos above in just two years.  And it wasn’t finished yet.  It took a couple of failures (especially in the mounded area in the photo above) before we finally hit on what we liked best.  But we did finally decide.

In the photo above, the path to the left is that slippery little slope.  Problem solved.  The path to the right just goes down and around the lower patio and comes out where the picture with the mound was taken.  The flowering cherry (there are two) makes you think it’s snowing pink snow when they start dropping their petals.  The trellis has white roses, and the red bush behind Gus is a Japanese weeping maple.  The stone is the foreground today has ivy growing between the stones.   When we sit in this area (it seats 6) you would never know that you were only a 5 minute drive from downtown.

Next Post: the (award winning) front yard (and they didn’t even see the back).

Filed under: Our Garden