A Garden Make-Over

We have a well-established flower bed at the head of the driveway, and last fall we decided we were going to make it into a large horseshoe shape surrounding the fire pit; essentially tripleing the size of the existing garden. We (rather, my darling husband) rotatilled the area, but then left it pretty much alone until the spring. After adding piles of sheep manure on it, and still leaving it alone, the weeds took over. I also didn't do anything with the established bed, so the weeds took over there crowding out the perennials.

Yes, that is the garden right there. You can see the lamb's ears but not much else. Granted, there wasn't much of anything blooming earlier in the spring, but clearly it has been overtaken by the not-so-desirables. My dearest mother commented around this time that perhaps we shouldn't expand the garden until we get what we have under control.

So, several weeks ago, my husband got sick of just looking at the dirt and weeds, and he made one end of the horseshoe into a herb garden. While there are several annual herbs in there (parsley, basil), most of it consists of hardier herbs (lemon balm, sage, rosmary, lavendar, stevia).

Now that one quarter of the garden was dealt with, it looked silly leaving the rest of the horseshoe as dirt. So, I finally decided to dig in after our vacation south, and for three days I weeded, separated, transplanted and mulched. I went to the local garden nursery and bought several perennials (russian sage, false indigo, black eyed susans, astilbe, sedum) and then separated out some of the goosenecks, daisies, phlox, and lamb's ears from the established garden. The pictures below are the finished product working from the established garden to the left around the horseshoe.

It will obviously take a couple years for the garden to mature into something resembling a beautiful garden. The Russian sage is a huge space filler and is rather pretty as well. We'll see what happens in the coming months and years. It is, however, a start.