Weekend project

(Click on any of the photos in this post to view larger versions.) I have worked for the past couple of days on yet another flower bed project. Why do I always seem to get these ideas during the hottest parts of the year? :) At the far edge of my yard where the lawn starts to slope down and meets the driveway, I have a few large shrubs and trees and over the years I’ve created flower beds around and between these — a long narrow bed filled with irises, tulips and other spring flowering bulbs along with annuals during summer, a round bed surrounding a white butterfly bush, a square bed with a birdbath. This square bed was originally planted with green and white bishop’s weed and stargazer lilies (I have since transplanted most of the stargazers to other areas). The square bed has a thick wood edging surrounding it and embedded a few inches into the soil, and this has worked well at keeping the bishop’s weed from spreading into the yard.

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Celosia and white gomphrena flowers at the edge of the curved border

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Every spring and summer I have added a few perennials to these beds, and they have gotten thicker and thicker. I liked the look of these flowers and shrubs against the fence, but after adding more here and there at different times over the past 5 years, it had gotten a little disconnected, and looked like what it was: odd-shaped beds of different widths spaced out against the fence line, with grass between them. I decided to connect all those little squares and the long narrow border, and make them all into one long, curved bed against the fence. I laid out a garden hose in a sweeping curve along the line of the fence and made the edge, and then dug out the grass, turned the soil a little, and used large rocks from the woods to make the outer border around the entire bed.

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Connected flower bed border

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I left the timber edging around the patch of bishop’s weed inside the bed to keep it from spreading, and then planted a few annuals throughout and filled it all with pine bark mulch. Since I just planted most of these bedding annuals to try and fill in the bare spaces and connect the sections to make it look more like one large bed now, they are very small and don’t look like much yet, the entire border is a little sparse. It will hopefully look better later on this summer as these plants grow thicker. Next year, I’ll plant annuals much earlier and the bed will fill out by summer. I’m already looking forward to planning and planting this large bed next spring. :)

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