05.19.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:44 am by woodyoak
I greatly enjoy spring bulbs but do not like the ’screaming for attention’ harsh yellows, oranges and reds that are common. They do not suit my garden’s more mellow color themes. Over the past number of years I have settled on a ‘recipe’ that I find gives me a relatively long bloom period, colors that are both mellow but striking, bulbs that are naturalizing well, and companions that compliment the tulips and provide cover for the fading tulip foliage. My tulip ‘recipe’ is as follows:
Ingredients:
Tulips:
- Turkestanica botanical tulips (or possibly Dasystemon Tarda - I have planted both over the years and am no longer sure what is what!
- ‘Concerto’ Kaufmanniana tulips
- ‘Ivory Floradale’ Darwin tulips
- ‘Queen of the night’ single late tulips
- ‘Angelique’ double late tulips
Other:
- Pasque flower (Pulsatilla vulgaris)
- ‘Bowl of Beauty’ peonies (or double pale pink peonies)
- ‘Thalia’ daffodils
The earliest tulips are the Turkestanica mini botanical ones. Their cheery, vivid yellow and white faces, not much taller than the larger crocuses, appear in early April. They multiply easily by both bulb division and seeding so in a few years, you will find you have sheafs of tulips:
You may even find they start seeding into the lawn!
The foliage of these tulips is relatively narrow, strap-like leaves that die back without much mess so any nearby plants will cover it satisfactorily.
The next tulips to appear in my garden are the ‘Concerto’ Kaufmanniana tulips (which are often listed as Fosteriana tulips). They are a creamy white that goes nicely with the Turkestanicas and early spring flowers like the Pasque flowers. The ‘Concerto’ tulips are shorter than the common hybrid tulips but have more of the traditional tulip shape, which makes them a good transition type. (Many people don’t recognize the Turkestanicas as tulips when they first see them!) The foliage of ‘Concerto’ is also the larger, coarser tulip foliage so some companion plants are a good idea. I frequently plant them with Pasque flowers. The flower shapes are remarkably similar; I like the color and texture contrast, although the Pasque flowers don’t do as good a job as I’d like when it comes to hiding the dying tulip foliage, so you might want to try an alternative, more vigorous companion perennial. Here are ‘Concerto’ and Pasque flowers:
The Turkestanica tulips are long blooming. In my garden, I’m lucky that their bloom time overlaps for about a week- 10 days with ‘Ivory Floradale’ Darwin tulips. When they bloom near each other, I call the effect ‘the essence of sunshine’!
On a sunny, spring day it a combination to make your heart sing. I’m not sure if, in a different zone, these two might not have overlapping bloom times but it’s well worth planting them near each other in case they do.
‘Ivory Floradale’ is a very interesting tulip. The first spring after I planted them, up popped these soft yellow tulips and my reaction was ‘Where did they come from?! I planted tulips that were supposed to be Ivory white…’ But, have patience, because the yellow is just a phase. By the time the ‘Queen of the Night’ and ‘Angelique’ tulips are opening, ‘Ivory Floradale’ is living up to the Ivory part of it’s name:
The ‘Ivory Floradale’ unfortunately starts to fade as these companions are peaking but they still make a striking combination together.
Peonies are a valuable part of the mix because the vigorous, abundant foliage does a great job of hiding the dying tulip foliage. But, before that utilitarian purpose kicks in, the peonies first play the role of attractive companion. The Angelique tulips are a double pink that looks vaguely like a peoney bloom. If you plant them close to a peony, when the tulips bloom, it looks a bit like the peony is blooming early!
The dark flowers of Queen of the Night tulips blend in with the dark peony foliage - at times, they almost disappear against it but, on sunny, warm days when the tulip flowers are fully open, they are an unexpected, pleasant surprise. If you look closely on the right side of this picture, you can see some Queen of the Night nestled in the peony foliage.
The other element in the recipe is ‘Thalia’ daffodils. The remainder of the recipe works on its own but ‘Thalia’ adds some nice scent (makes great cut flowers!) and a delicate white that harmonizes with all the rest. Some of the white flowers you can see in this picture of under the wisteria tree, with the main front bed in the background, are from ‘Thalia’ daffodils.
The combination of all of the above caries the garden from early-mid April until late May when the perennials take over. The combination is also long lasting through the years. The Turkestanica naturalizes vigorously. ‘Concerto’ is a reliable returner, although it hasn’t multiplied as much as I had hoped. ‘Ivory Floradale’ is multiplying freely. ‘Queen of the Night’ also multiplies but more moderately. ‘Angelique’ has been returning reliably but increasing slowly.
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04.30.08
Posted in Uncategorized, front garden at 12:07 pm by woodyoak
And I mean that literally! One of the things I have realized over the years I’ve been gardening here is that the garden looks very different depending on how/where you are looking at it. That may sound obvious in some ways but less so in others.
We all, I think, carry around in our heads a sort of composite picture of our garden. That composite is made up from looking at it in different seasons, from different angles, from different elevations, through a camera lens, in pencil and ink on paper, or even in the ultimate distance view - from space via Google Earth! Some of those views match the image in my head better than others. And I’ve also come to realize that what I see when I look at my garden is often quite different than what others see - and other’s view of the garden an be the most startlingly at odds with my own internal composite picture. You don’t have just one garden; you have as many as there are ways of looking at it - and people doing the looking!
Recently, while planning changes to the backyard garden layout, I’ve been thinking about what all those points of view mean to me in a practical sense.
First of all, it has made me aware of how often I look at my garden from above - from the front porch, from the back porch, from the living room and office windows (which are several feet above ground level). From those elevated positions, the things that I ’see’ best are the largest shapes - particularly the pattern of the lawn and beds and the background shapes of trees and structures. Color is very impressionistic - individual colors take a back seat to the overall color theme, although jarring colors scream for attention (and removal!) Paths that line up with the viewing point are intriguing - calling you to come and follow them. If the lawn/garden bed shapes are pleasing to my eye, they evoke a sense of peace but, if they aren’t, they evoke dissatisfaction!
Secondly, it made me aware that the view from the ground level is entirely different. At the ground level, the details are more important - the foliage and flower colors plus scent, and the combinations of them all have priority. They set the feel/mood/atmosphere of the area and draw you into and through the garden.
The garden through the lens of the camera can be a stranger. The camera can be both a means to lie to yourself (only take pictures of the things that look good!) or be an uncompromisingly honest assessment by allowing you to put some distance between what you think you see and what is truly there! Or it can be simply a tool to document what various plants are doing at various points in the season. At various times I use the the camera all three ways.
Thinking about the range of possible points of view adds a bit of complexity to the planning process but one that is valuable for me. If I find myself thinking too hard about close detail, I remind myself to step back and think about where the area will most often be viewed from a distance and at what elevation. Things will look different from there. Two dimensional ‘bird’s eye’ view drawing can help with visualizing that but are less helpful for me as a tool to place the finer detail. My drawing skills are inadequate to attempt to depict a cross-sectional view at the detail level - that part is planned in my head and modified as necessary once the plants are in the ground and growing.
Your garden as seen through someone else’s eyes can also be a stranger to you. Everyone brings their own preferences and horticultural preferences and design biases to bear when they view the garden. And those are often different from yours! Things you overlook, maybe because they are unimportant to you or because they are on your planned list of changes and so are already changed in your internal view or simply because you haven’t thought of them, may be a source of either approval or criticism for someone else. Conversely, things that irritate you may be things that appeal to others. So part of the garden planning process for me is deciding whose point of view I’m trying to appeal to - and the answer may be different for different parts of the garden. The saying ‘you can’t please everybody so you’ve got to please yourself’ misses the point that maybe what pleases you is to please others - even if ‘others’ is just a small subset of ‘everybody’.
Enough with the rambling on… Let’s look at my garden from some different points of view. Barring hiring a plane and flying over it, one can’t get a much better ‘bird’s eye’ view of the property that the one you can see from looking at it via Google Earth! Obviously they use satellite images from either late fall or early spring when the trees are bare so more detail is visible. And the images are not current in many cases. This one appears to be several years old but is interesting nonetheless:
The backyard woodland garden does not show at all in the image. Interestingly, the front garden is partly visible. In particular, the general shape of the main front bed and the concrete bench in front of the cedar clump. The pots on the driveway also are visible. The image is a few years old I think because there are other beds there that I would expect to appear, especially now that they are edged in brick, plus the shape of the main bed is now slightly different than in that image. From the point of view of that image, you can get some sense of the overall space (lots of trees in the back; a house with a big roof!; and more open space in the front.
Since the front is more visible and can be seen from so many ‘public’ points of view, I will focus on that. Here is another two dimensional view with a closer look:
. This is a rough plan of the current beds, scribbled on a section of the property survey
From this image, crude and not quite to scale as it is, you can see that the overall space is a bit of an awkward shape to deal with. The beds were planned to turn the lawn into paths. But it doesn’t provide a very good feel for the detail of what things look like during the growing season. (A larger, more elaborate, properly drawn to scale plan using those standard landscape plant symbols might do a better job of it but it beyond my patience!)
A better feel for that, while staying in a bird’s eye perspective, is gained from photographs taken from the garage roof! I find them useful to give me an overall perspective on the color changes in the garden through the season as well as suggesting changes to layout of plants and paths. Compare this view of the point where the three paths of the center bed meet with the drawing:
Tthe photo provides a somewhat closer view with lots more detail to bring things alive but still see part of the larger pattern:
A point of view from a standing position at the beginning of the center path puts the attention more on the plants although the path still is an important part of the pattern to lead your eyes:
The least satisfying point of view of the garden has been laterally, from the road. This picture is from two years ago before we edg
ed the beds with brick, extended the driveway border to swing around and incorporate the wisteria tree on the south end of the lawn, and added the small bed that marks the north edge of the property and contains the new wisteria tree to pair with the wisteria tree on the south.
On the whole, I’m not sure whether the changes we’ve made have improved things or just made them too busy. The plantings in the new areas need some time to mature and the plantings in the main bed need time to soften the new brick edging before we conclude whether further changes need to be made. And then we need time to consider it all from many points of view….
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04.09.08
Posted in Things Made, Uncategorized, backyard at 4:49 pm by woodyoak
About 20 years ago, I saw an article in a garden magazine about building a planter bench. I really liked the bench and made a mental note that it was something I’d want in my garden some day. In the fall 2005 when we were asked to be a host garden on the 2006 local garden tour, I figured it was time to put that bench in the garden at last. Of course, I had long since lost the article but still had a clear memory of what the bench looked like. An internet search immediately turned up multiple sources of U-Bild plans that looked pretty much like the bench I remembered.
The first step, after getting the plans, was to get and cut the wood. We used cedar. Since many pieces of the wood needed to be cut in two lengthways, it was beyond my abilities with a handsaw! Fortunately a friend’s boyfriend with a table saw was willing to cut the wood for me. (We estimated it would only take him an hour or two… Eight hours later he finally finished! We did provide him a nice lunch and lots of thanks though :- )
We are lucky to have a mostly unfinished basement where making a total mess is not a problem! The wood was cut in the late fall 2005 and we started building the bench in the basement in December 2005.
The original plans called for three boxes and two three-foot benches that, together produced an L shaped bench. I thought it would look better and fit the space on my patio better if we only built one three-foot bench and made the second bench a longer, six-foot one.
When I had the wood cut, I had adjusted the materials so that we had 6′ lengths for the longer bench. But the longer bench would obviously require more support underneath.
So I added some extra cross-braces under the seat and jury-rigged legs in the center using 4×4s cut to the appropriate height with a 1×4 stretcher between them and some metal brackets as additional braces between the legs and the stretcher board. I also added small metal furniture brackets on the underside of the bench to hold the facing boards to the seat, in addition to the glue that the plans called for. (In fact, I used a lot more screws and hardware than the plan called for because I wanted it to be very study.) You can see the legs on the long bench in this view of the final set-up in the basement when we finished it. We gave the completed bench 4 coats of satin finish exterior varathane.
It was clear that the bench needed a matching coffee table to complete the picture and increase the usefulness of the bench once it was set up on the patio. After much looking around, I found a small table that had the right ‘look’ but was the wrong color wood. So we painted the table green
and had cushions in a matching color made to fit the top of the bench. So the final set-up looked like this:
The plants in the planter boxes are just big pots of spiderplants that are houseplants for the winter but look nice in the boxes for the summer. The baby spider plants are easily harvested in the fall to start new plants for the boxes for the following summer. The bench area is shaded by the ash tree behind it but the spiderplants seem to be very happy in the shade.
The seat cushions are not waterproof so are only put out when they are actually going to be used. Over the winter 2006/2007 I decided to use the painted coffee table as a model to make a cedar table to match the bench so things would look more coordinated when the cushions were not in use. This was the end result:
The planter bench is a comfortable and practical addition to the patio. The laundry drying rack is just behind the shorter end of the bench so the bench gets put to practical use for more than just sitting!
We are quite happy with the addition of the bench to the patio. The patio is part of the woodland area of the garden. The patio is small and is rarely used for dining - because the mosquitoes are too plentiful in the evenings! The bench gets more use for socializing than the patio table ever did and it fits more comfortably in the landscape. 
(We do store it inside for the winter though…)
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03.30.08
Posted in Uncategorized, backyard, front garden at 2:31 pm by woodyoak
You will not find much bare ground in my garden - and no mulch either! If you are a ‘neat freak’ that enjoys the look of soil raked clean of all debris and/or plants displayed individually, positioned on a backdrop of smooth mulch, you will hate my garden. My ‘no bare ground’ philosophy has two main aspects: the first relates to the soil and maintenance and the second to planting.
Soil and maintenance
I have always believed that spring and fall clean-ups that strip the garden bare of old foliage is both a waste of physical effort on the part of the gardener and a waste of resources for the plants. All that biomass that gets cleaned up is moisture and nutrients that were taken from the soil (and air) and should be returned to the soil to keep it, and subsequent years’ plants, healthy.
Composting it is certainly a better alternative than disposing of it in regular garbage. But even composting, while a desirable and necessary part of gardening, requires, in my opinion, unnecessary labour on the gardener’s part when it comes to spring and fall clean up. You cart all that stuff off to the compost heap, probably turn the heap one or more times in the year and, when the compost is finished, cart it all back to the garden bed again. Far easier to leave it all in the bed in the first place and let time and soil organisms do the composting on the spot!
As a bonus, the material acts as mulch as well, holding moisture and helping reduce weed seed germination by blocking light from reaching the soil and by reducing soil disturbance that might expose more weed seeds to the light. Some people will argue that leaving the plant material in place offers shelter to pests and diseases. That may be true in part - but it also offers shelter to ‘good’ bugs. I find that the ‘good’ bugs rapidly come to be the dominant ones. And, if the soil is well fed and healthy, the plants are healthy and hardy enough to withstand all but the worst of disease infestations.
In the spring, the only clean-up I do is to remove the coarser flower-stalks that didn’t disintegrate over the winter and pull dead foliage back from emerging new growth if it looks like the new growth needs a bit more light exposure (it usually doesn’t). The previous year’s oak leaves only finish falling the following spring so those we usually vacuum up with the mulching leaf blower and spread them on the fern bed in the south alley.
In the fall, I remove any diseased foliage or foliage that can be prone to disease (I always remove the peony foliage in case of botrytis). Autumn leaves are chopped with the lawn mover or mulching leaf blower and the chopped leaves added to the woodland beds. The white pine needles that fall in the autumn needle-cast are raked off the paths and the lawn and added to the woodland beds.
During the growing season, deadheads, prunings, and foliage of harvested vegetables gets added to the compost heap.
The garden is on fairly heavy clay soil so added organic matter is definitely beneficial. I have physical disabilities so digging in soil amendments is not really an option. The worms and other soil organisms do a fine job without my help!
Planting for soil coverage
The second key part of my ‘no bare groun’ approach is to plant abundantly so the plants merge to form a single mass or tapestry of foliage and flowers. The two main approaches I use are to (a) take liberties with recommended plant placement and (b) use desirable self-seeding plants.
Plant labels include information on mature spread of the plant. It is generally considered desirable to place plants with sufficient distance to their neighbours to allow for the plant to reach mature size without being crowded. I take that all with a rather large grain of salt! In my primary garden beds, I do not plant any plant that is an active spreader. The foundation plants in my beds are trees, shrubs and clumping, long-lived perennials. The notable exception is ‘Becky’ shasta daisies - in my garden, they gradually die out on one side and spread on the other! That is an improvement in my opinion to the older daisy varieties which tended to die out in the middle. 
‘Becky’, in my garden, gradually flows through the bed like a river carving a slightly different channel each year!
With a foundation of stable perennial plants 
(e.g. peonies, daisies, Russian Sage, daylilies, Siberian irises, Persicaria polymorpha, selected perennial geraniums , gasplant, baptista, hardy hibiscus, coneflowers and others), the next step is filler plans. These ones are largely self-seeding or easy to grow from seed indoors for spring transplanting. A few key self-seeding ones include blue flax, columbine and Jacob’s Ladder. Biennials like hollyhocks and forget-me-nots also fall into this category. The big advantage of self-seeders is they fill in all the small spaces effortlessly and provide swaths of color for little or no cost and minimal effort. If you select plants with a range of flower times, they also extend the bloom season of the garden.
Delphiniums and lupins are key easy-to-grow-from-seed types. Both can be short-lived in the garden so need regular replacing. Lupins can be treated as self-seeding if you let some seed mature and ensure it is spread in the fall where you want them to grow. Seedlings of both these plants will usually bloom in late summer in the year they are planted but in their normal earlier summer bloom time in subsequent years. If you plant new plants yearly, you get the added advantage of a double bloom season from them.
The single most important plant for my no bare ground policy is feverfew. It is a vigorous self-seeder that some people consider too aggressive. I consider it invaluable! It appears to be a mix of annual and biennial types. It gets off to an early start in the spring and quickly covers the ground as the tulips are flowering.
and does a good job of hiding dying tulip foliage until the larger perennials can take over the task. By the time the bigger perennials have hit their stride, the feverfew is starting to get a bit leggy. At that point, I cut it down by at least a half, laying the cut foliage on the ground to act as mulch/green manure. Feverfew has fairly scented foliage and I suspect it might also discourage insect pests because I don’t have very many in the garden. Cutting back the feverfew also keeps it shorter and bushier and delays its flowering time a bit.
The cut-back feverfew start to bloom just before the ‘Becky’ shasta daisies and continues in parallel with them. So there’s an extended period of daisies and small look-alikes.
(Apologizes for the bad picture taken in bright sunshine in mid-day - the worst time and light to take pictures!)
When the feverfew flowers start to fade, it gets unattractive so it all gets cut to the ground, with the cuttings left on the ground yet again. The spent flowers drop seeds to start the cycle again for the following year.
There has been a noticeable improvement in the soil in the big front bed over the years I’ve been using the no bare ground approach. During last year’s extended drought, I ran the soaker hoses only once on one side of the bed and otherwise only did spot watering of more recently planted things.
While feverfew is a key element in the no bare ground approach in the sunny front garden, fallen leaves and pine needles are a key element in the shady woodland gardens in the backyard. Woodland plants seem to thrive on being buried in a few inches of decaying leaves and other plant matter. They seem to have no problem coming up through a layer of material.
If you find the sight of unraked leaves in a bed unattractive, you wouldn’t like this picture but, to me, it’s a sign of a healthy garden. Once the snow goes and the days warm, it doesn’t take long for things to green up and the leaf litter to start to disappear as green takes over.
By mid-summer the only bare ground in the woodland garden is on the paths.
Everywhere else is a tapestry of foliage and flowers.
An
d then the leaves fall in autumn and the cycle starts over again.
I have been gardening this way for a number of years now and find it works very well for me. Interestingly, my husband this Christmas gave me a book called ‘The Self-sustaining Garden - the guide to matrix planting’ by Pete Thompson. It describes my garden approach almost exactly! So now I have a name for what I’m doing….
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03.23.08
Posted in alleys at 6:25 pm by woodyoak
On either side of the house, the alleys are only 8′ wide. By the time we finished the renovation and addition in 1999, the gates had been taken down, cut down in size, and put back as best they could as a temporary measure to keep the dog in! The alleys were the main routes for construction equipment so, while they had been grassed over at the end of the construction, the ground was not in good shape. On the south side, the alley is relatively short - 25′ or so - bounded by the house addition on the north side and a tall wooden fence around the neighbour’s patio on the south side. The north alley runs along the back of the garage as well as the side of the house so that alley is longer - about 55′. All of the utilities are on that side of the house - air conditioner, gas meter, furnace and heat recovery ventilator intakes and exhausts.
The alleys were low on our priority list so we didn’t start work on the south alley until 2003. We deferred doing anything in the north alley until 2005 because the neighbour to the north intended to do an addition on their house and needed to use our alley as access.
Our plans for the alleys were simple - put in a new gate/fence across each one; put narrow beds on the sides and a path through the center. We started with the south alley in summer 2003. In the beginning, we left the path as a grass one:
and added a gate with and arbour across the top. The arbour has a ‘ladder’ at the back to allow us to weave climbing roses through it. The back view of the arbour gate in early fall 2003:
As you can see in that picture, the fence side is shady, so that became primarily a fern bed with other shade plants mixed in. The house side is sunnier and planted with more sun-loving perennials and a few shrubs.
We planted the arbour gate with annual vines the first year while more permanent vines were getting established. Currently, the arbour is a combination of New Dawn roses with a pink Clematis montana and Jackmani superba clematis. Outside the gate there is a dwarf Korean lilac on one side and a mock-orange on the house side. The mock-orange also has a clematis (Nelly Moser I think -we lost the tag…) growing through it. C. montana is marginally hardy here so does not bloom each year. When it does, as in the spring of 2006, it makes a pretty show on the gate with it’s companions:
The Jackmani superba and New Dawn roses carry the flower show into early summer. This is the open gate on July 1 2006, the day we were a host garden on the local garden tour:
Looking through the gate, you can see that we eventually replaced the grass path with one made from 3 parts pine bark mulch and one part concrete sand. Having to edge the grass path several times a year was getting to be a tiresome chore! The mulch path looks good, stands up to traffic better and requires minimal work.
The Jackmani superba has quite a long flowering time - it was still putting on a good show on July 22/2006:
Outside the gate, where the house meets the front porch, The President clematis puts on a good show each year:
The fence on the south side has become covered in clematis over the years. ‘Summer Snow’ on our side migles with Jackmani from the neighbours in mid-July. Along with vivid orange ‘ditch’ day lilies, it makes for an attractive, if vivid! - picture when viewed from the office window.
Rose of Sharon pruned to a fan against the house wall adds color in late August/early September:
We are quite pleased with the colorful development of the south alley.
The north alley development started in September 2005. We had been in no rush to work on it as we rarely used that side for access to the backyard. But, at the end of August 2005, we were asked to be a host garden on the local garden tour for 2006. I was reluctant to agree as I thought the garden needed more time to mature and the north alley was a mess, boring and not easily accessed. The Horticultural Society representative talked us into it and I agreed, conditional on us having the north alley in reasonable shape by the following spring. So we immediately went to work. This is what it looked like before we started:
Having just removed the grass path in the south alley because it was too much work to edge, the first priority was removing grass and leveling the ground for a 55′ path down the alley. This view is actually looking up the alley towards the old, rickety fence and gate that was reinstalled after the neighbour’s addition was complete:
After the path was laid out, all the grass that had been removed was piled on the sides where the future garden beds would be, sprinkled with compost accelerator, covered with newspaper and, when all the leaves had fallen from the trees, covered with chopped leaves and left to rot down over the winter. The north side was lined with logs as the bed is slightly raised on that side. The house side was treated the same but not raised much as the basement windows are fairly low to the ground and we didn’t want to cause drainage problems. The neighbour’s property is higher than ours and the downspout from the roof of their addition drains towards us near our patio. They did install a drainage pipe at the lowest point between our properties - the drainage pipe runs under the north alley path. The path was covered with our standard mix of pine bark mulch and sand. This view show the narrow fence bed before it got a topping of leaves:
The old gate would not open, partly because the ground needed leveling - which we did with the path construction - and partly because it was no longer hanging straight as the support post had been shifted with the neighbour’s construction. So the next priority was a new gate and fence for the top of the alley. I wanted the fence to be open and airy to let more light into the alley and allow the view to flow between the front and back gardens. So I decided to make the gate and fence from copper pipes in a wooden frame. The gate completed in the garage and waiting to be hung:
The fence and gate was installed at the end of October 2005:
The view of the gate from the front yard spring 2006 when the Bridalwreath spirea was in bloom:
Something needed to be done to disguise the air conditioner without blocking air flow around it. I designed and built a three-sided cage for it using a wire mesh that had a mesh size that allowed 75% airflow but enough visual screening to detract your attention from the air condition unit. The copper touches were added to link the screen visually to the copper fence and gate nearby.
The fence was planted with Sweet Autumn clematis and Harlequin honeysuckle. The back porch lattice was planted with golden clematis and morning glories. We planted the house side with Beacon Silver lamium and other shade and drought tolerant perennials. The 24″ roof overhang keeps that side very dry. The fence side gets a bit more sun and is moister because of runoff from the neighbour’s property so there is a greater variety of perennials there. In 2006 we had to plant some annuals in the mix to ensure the area looked filled in by the tour date the first weekend of July. The area filled in quickly and was looking quite lush by September 22 2006:
Eupatorium ‘Chocolate’ puts on a big show in October and does remarkably well on the dry house side all the way down the alley:
The Harlequin honeysuckle was mature enough by 2007 to put on a wonderful show of scent and flowers:
From being boring, largely unused, narrow grassy spaces, the alleys have become very pleasant spaces that we regularly walk through. They are also very low maintenance and functional. It is easy to move wheelbarrow or wagon loads of material through them. A regular part of our daily routine in the warmer months is to make a circuit of the yard to inspect and enjoy the gardens. The alley gardens are a very pleasant part of that daily circuit.
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03.19.08
Posted in front garden at 3:58 pm by woodyoak
The gardens in the front yard are the showy ‘public’ face of the garden, planned for maximum flower power. This post describes the evolution of the main bed in the front garden.
We bought this house in early 1999 after a major medical crisis made it a very good idea to move from our former split-level home with stairs everywhere to a more access-friendly bungalow. We were looking for a bunglaow on a reasonable sized lot where the hose was suitable for renovation to meet my needs and where the lot was suitable for gardening. This is what the house looked like when we bought it in March 1999:
And this is what it looked like in September 1999:
1999 was totally taken up with the renovation and addition with not much thought given to the garden.
In the following two years we only tinkered with gardening in the front - adding a few plants in the tiny bed in front of the porch, adding a narow bed along the north side of the driveway and attempting to grow something - anything! - under the old white spruce beside the garage. By 2002, I had concluded that the spruce had to go. Removing the spruce was the first priority for 2002 so serious gardening could begin. March:
Once the spruce was out of the way, the nice old cedar clump (one trunk, four tops…) became the evergreen highlight of the front lawn. We weren’t entirely sure how we would ultimately lay out the beds but wanted to get something started while we thought more about it. So we took the simple route and cleared a roughly tear-drop shaped bed that in the ‘footprint’ of the old spruce:
and then added a path to make access easier:
To cover all that bare ground quickly, I sowed seeds of things like shasta daisies, columbine, blue flax, Jacob’s Ladder, purple Coneflowers and added some seedling mallows (which I still regret!) and delphiniums. A ‘Huntingdon ‘ artemisia that had languished in the skirt of the spruce became a magnificient specimen by August (but succumbed to the cold the following winter unfortunately). We added two small magnolia trees, a few purchased perennials, and a few potentilla shrubs over the spring and early summer. By August the bare ground had disappeared and the bed looked like this:
Since most of the seed-grown plants did not flower in the first year, color did not really appear until 2003. July 2003 (can you tell that I like blue and white?!):
The following year the focus was on enlarging the bed, changing the shape a bit - widening it all around and particularly broadening it at the back and extending it beyond the cedar, replacing some of the seed-grown plants with better varieties, and working on other projects.
By 2005, it was time to start adding something other than plants! The first thing in April was a place to rest when taking a break from garden tasks. A bench in front of the cedar:
We also had reached the conclusion that the entrance to the path needed an arbour. We wanted an iron one but couldn’t find any ready-made ones that looked very sturdy. Se I drew what I wanted and took the drawing to a local iron craftsman, who made it for me. This is what he worked from:
We liked his work and had him also make us two iron tuteurs to flank the bench. They are planted with clematis - although one clematis has died and needs to be replanted.
By June 2006, we were reasonably happy with how thing were looking:
We were a host garden on the local garden tour that year and were lucky that weather conditions were ideal all that spring so things were in good shape. But a garden is never finished (thank goodness!) so it continued to evolve in 2007 - but that’s a tale for another day….
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03.18.08
Posted in Things Made at 2:21 pm by woodyoak
On foxykitten’s blog, she has beautiful quilts. I have - years ago - tried quilting but lacked the patience for it! I do love the intricate colors and patterns though. About 10 years ago I saw a Kaffe Fassett sweater pattern using the tumbling blocks quilt design. I loved the pattern but didn’t like the colors or weight of wool he used. So I decided to modify things to suit my preferences. I think it turned out well:
But, oh! the endless sewing-in of ends! I quickly realized that the ends needed to be sewed in as I went. If I had left them all to the end, I never would have finished it! I would never do a project like this again. It took me months…
While I was knitting it, Randy kept muttering about it being gaudy :-) (He’s a gray and beige sort of guy in his clothing taste…:-) But once it was finished, it became his favorite sweater! 10+ years later, it’s still in good shape (good quality Rowen wool…)
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03.15.08
Posted in backyard at 4:23 pm by woodyoak
When we bought this house in 1999, it came with an ugly (in my opinion!) old garden shed. It was a very impractical shed - the door was only 68″ tall; fine for 61″ tall me but not so good for 72+” tall DH! He could only stand upright in the very center. On top of that, the roof leaked; there were no windows so it was very dark inside; the wooden floor was rotting; the base of the walls was also rotting; the siding didn’t line up evenly between various parts of the walls and door; and some critter (skunk we think..) was determined to take up residence underneath. Clearly, a new shed was called for! But other priorities put it on the back burner until 2006 when I decided that I couldn’t live with it any more. The living room window looks directly out at the shed and it is a very prominent part of the view from the office window as well so it was always ‘in our face’. On the plus side, it did blend in with the woodland-style garden we were creating in the backyard, especially in autumn when the leaves were on the ground:
But we were happy to say good-bye to that shed in mid-October 2006:
Key things we considered in planning a new shed were that it be taller so a normal height door could be used and that there be windows to let in more light. We also had the shed built on the same ‘footprint’ as the old shed so the property survey remained valid. That also restricted us to the same size - 10′ wide by 8′ deep. At that size we did not need a building permit to construct it. We later decided to add a window in the door for more light and left the side windows as continuous panes of glass, but this was the starting plan we gave the contractor:
We wanted to avoid a wooden floor as the shed area is damp. The shed is built on top of a patio stone base, laid on top of a rather large quantity of compacted crushed gravel for drainage:
I am from the east coast of Canada and White Cedar shingles were common venacular siding when I was growing up. (Sadly, vinyl siding made big inroads in the past 30 years or so to the detriment of the charm of houses!) I decided, in a nostaligic moment, to have the shed sided with cedar shingles. I forgot that they are relative uncommon siding here in southern Ontario. What the contractor first though I meant was rather crude ‘rustic’ shinges or perhaps cedar roofing shakes. Finding the right product took a bit of hunting around and ended up being a custom order from Quebec. Since we started the shed project late in the year, the delay in being able to obtain the shingles meant the shed looked a bit like a tar paper shack over the winter - I’m sure the neighbours were thrilled by the view!
The shingles we ordered come in panels that fit together tongue-in-groove fashion and could be ordered pre-stained. (We chose ‘Ocean Gray’.) To simplify the installation of trim, we decided to prime and paint that too so, when the shingles arrived and were installed in the spring, the shed would be finished, with only touch-up painting required. I spent a fair chunk of time over the winter 2006/07 putting two coats of primer and two coats of paint on the shed trim in the basement. (It’s a good thing there’s a lot of unfinished space in the basement where I can feel free to make a thorough mess!)
The shingle panels arrived in late February and were installed, along with the trim, during March. By early April 2007 the shed looked like this:
The back of the shed is not visible so we saved some money by using vertical tongue-in-groove cedar strips which we will let age to a natural gray:
The next issue was what color to paint the door. I waffled about whether to go with black, a deep, burgundy red, Royal Blue or another dark blue. In the end we went with a dark blue, although it took two attempts before we got a color we liked. Here is the finished shed, as seen from the end of the south alley, looking across the south woodland area, in mid-Junie 2007:
We had to do some modifications to the paths around the shed to adress drainage - the yard drains down towards the shed. When the snow melts in spring, there can be water laying near the shed. We decided not to plant around the shed in 2007, leaving planting until this spring so we can see whether the drainage changes are sufficient to drain the snow melt off quickly. And there’s a fair bit of snow to melt and drain away this spring:
The shed project will continue in 2008 with the planting….
If anyone is interested in a more detailed photo diary of the shed project, you can see it at:
http://www.PictureTrail.com/gid13868448
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03.14.08
Posted in backyard at 3:52 pm by woodyoak
There’s a garden under therae somewhere….
South woodland March 9 2008:
Shed March 9 2008
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Posted in backyard at 3:42 pm by woodyoak
It’s starting to melt finally here today but this has been a very snowy March so far - definitely ‘in like a lion’. One can only hope the lamb is on schedule…
The patio March 9 2008:
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