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Garden journal entry

 

March 27, 2010. If you ever decide to build a rock garden - be bold! Since I built ours about five years ago, I've overhauled it twice, making it bigger and taller both times (the last time was just two years ago!). As I discovered again yesterday and today, overhauling a rock garden is no small task. Literally nothing stays in place: all the plants have to come out, all the rocks get moved, and every time it gets larger in area or height, you need many more rocks and wheelbarrows full of soil. But undertaking the job has its advantages as well: over the years, some thugs take over a lot more space than they were originally allotted, and it's easy to misjudge just how out of proportional the plants are until you pull it all apart and have to decide how much of each to replace. I decided to leave three perpetual offenders out of the garden altogether in this round, and reduced the bulk of several others. The final result: a rather empty-looking rockery - which is fine, with the results of this and last year's NARGS seed exchanges, I should have extra rock-citizens aplenty when we get a bit futher into spring. Although I added a bit of extra area, the main direction of extension was up: the southwest-facing side of the garden (left in the picture here) now slopes up much more strongly, giving the whole area an additional 10" or so of height. That means that the back side has more of a slope too, which makes it easier to create planting pockets, for keeping plants in their space. The sunlight will also be less intense on that side, which will be nice for the rockery plants that prefer not to be baked.
And although it still is a far cry from a natural-looking rock outcropping, the new version looks a bit less like a wedding cake!


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