Nothing worse than an overly ambitious gardener between jobs. Yet, there I found myself this fall. So I conceived the glorious Project 5 (don't even ask about one through four).
My inspiration was Gertrude Jekyll. Her book "Colour Schemes for the Flower Garden" was part of my summer reading. I was taken by her lovely expanses of colors, her generous use of masses of plants ordered in wave after wave. Then, I noticed a fallow patch of dead lawn on one corner of my property, and a new garden was conceived.
Much of the pleasure was in the planning. I had a 30' x 8' border of southern exposure lawn, bordered on the north by trees. I drew up a rough sketch, then filled in details by selecting plants for color scheme (primarily blue and yellow, with some white), bloom time, and height. In the end I bought graph paper and designed it down to the foot. I tried to pick plants that could stand some wind (there is quite a bit here) and could tolerate dryness and other vagaries of the San Francisco climate. I also focused on relatively carefree perennials.
The ends of the sward are framed by a ceanothus and a viburnum (there's your blue and white). The design uses dozens of asters, campanulas, arabis, euphorbias, aubrietas, geraniums, coreopses, flax, anemones, solidagos, aruncus, agastache and a few other odds and ends.
Digging up the lawn was tedious backbreaking work, but I survived it. Then I had the rare pleasure of watching several yards of lovely new soil being dumped in the street, so I could then move it by shovel the few yards to where it was needed. I put down landscape cloth to keep the weeds down, only to watch it be blown away by the first winter storm (then replaced with much sturdier stakes and bricks). Most of the plants got in the ground in November, though a few won't arrive until March.
We've had a lot of rain, massive wind, and overall cool weather. Most of the babies are doing just fine, though a few have suffered a bit from winter. Still, many are putting out lots of new growth.
The most worrying element of all of this is my new job. Will I have time to tend all this come spring?
Posted by rich at January 6, 2003 9:28 PM