Our front garden is looking a bit disheveled these days. We have been talking about doing a full overhaul on it for quite some now but have always held off because of how daunting the task is.
Plants aren't inexpensive either, and we need a lot of them. So there has been a lot of little things holding us back.
Neither of us are very good at designing a garden. At best we can strew together a hodge podge of random plants that we like but don't necessarily go together coupled with whatever is inexpensive at the store.
Our gardens have always lacked cohesion to say the least.
Our neighbor across the street has a beautiful garden and I tried to take a photo of it from inside our house to give us an idea of something to emulate (photo below).
I also tried to research garden templates online to give us a guide. The templates were helpful in a way, and together with the neighbors plant selection I figured - maybe we can come up with something decent this time around.
We recently found a nursery that sells perennial plants at a very reasonable price, basically for a just a fraction of the cost that our local nursery sells them. They are much smaller than the other location but that's fine, it's worth the huge savings to buy them there and allow them to grow in the garden this year and next. When you start a new perennial garden it always seems like you're planting for the next year anyway.
We wanted to buy hostas because of how how hearty and low maintenance they are and how well they generally do in our region. We also like that they are easy to split and replant in other areas because we need a lot of plants for our backyard as well. It will be nice when we can cut our existing plants and put them in the backyard. The challenge to hostas though is that there are literally dozens upon dozens of different varieties, with different colors and sizes, so choosing which will go well together in a given space still remained very difficult for us. It was even more challenging because every potted plant at this particular nursery was the exact same size so we really needed to rely on the description of how large they would eventually get when we were making our decisions. The idea is that we would border the hydrangea tree with very large hostas, then border those ones with medium sized ones and end the garden off with a row of small hostas intermixed with some colorful flowers to create a border.
All in all we chose primrose for the perennial flower, and a large variety of different hostas including fantasy island, tongue of flame, valley glacier and touch of class, again all arrange largest to smallest. We had four existing hostas already planted in there too, which helped a little.
We spent our entire Saturday digging up the old plants (mostly Black eyed Susan) and putting these new ones in the ground. We moved the Black eyed Susan to the backyard just for some color and ground cover for the time being.
It was actually a lot of fun and I really enjoyed the day. I find gardening to be a great way to get outside, do something creative and feel productive. I like the feeling of accomplishing something.
Eventually we will go on to do the back yard in the same sort of way but that probably won't be until next year.
We may be able to get some cuttings from some family members to get things started like we did last fall as well.
I figure that we need about 50 plants to start making a dent in the space. The hilly berm that we want to turn into a garden is deceptively large and will need a lot of plants to cover the majority of the space.
These last two photos are from a while back in the early spring and may have already been posted. I'm adding them here for visual context to show what I'm talking about.
