The front perennial border, between the front walkway and our home's foundation, is our oldest flower garden. In fact, when I first created it, I was a pre-novice gardener who thought that "amending the soil" meant digging about half a shovel deep, and mixing in a small bag or two of purchased top soil. The results of this misjudgment are still with us, since it got developed as a perennial border and I've never had the urge to dig it all up and start over. As a result, this garden still has most of the all-clay-all-the-time characteristics of our native soil, and, with the garden facing South, this clay is baked brutally in summer. Still, we manage to grow enough plants to keep us from throwing up our arms in despair and redoing it. To stick with the foundation planting stereotype, we have a couple yews planted in this strip - but to our credit, we don't prune them into stark rectangles. Stage center is taken by an aging lavender. We love its fragrance and flowers, so we put up with its ornery behavior - the bare branches and unelegant form that come with old age. Other woody plantings include a skyscraping skyrocket juniper (with a couple Blue Carpet junipers providing counterbalance), a crape myrtle, and a girl winterberry holly who wishes she lived near a boy so she could decorate herself with berries. We tried to oblige her once, but the young chap didn't survive. Since this was our first plant playground, many of our early favorites grow here: lamb's ears, blue flax, red oriental poppy, creeping phlox, maiden pink, candytuft, and Dragon's Blood sedum. Maybe that's another reason we've resisted that major make-over... A partial list of the plants growing in our front perennial border
Last modified:
September 20, 2008 |
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