Yesterday was a day of gardening – of soil chemistry and strawberry plants. We also made a trip to a nearby garden centre to make a start on planting that curve between sections 4 and 4b.
I had a list of ideas, but when I got there, I still felt lost and aimless. They didn’t have some of the bushes I wanted, even though they are quite common ones. Of other species they had the “wrong” varieties. Or their estimates of final size didn’t match up with what I’d read online. And with all those changes, I just couldn’t picture the whole thing in my head.
Still, I bought a few bushes to at least make a start. Later in the evening Ingrid and I went out and made a more serious attempt at a design. IKEA’s Trofast boxes made great stand-ins for plants: durable, stable, visible, and mud-proof.
Ingrid was great help in this! “What if we swap these two, so we get a more interesting height variation here? Should we have something dense and ball-shaped here next to the flowering one?”
Armed with this new, much clearer design idea, we made a new, more confident shopping trip today and came home with plenty more bushes. Our shrubbery curve is starting to become reality!
From yesterday: one Cornus mas, one Amelanchier alnifolia, one Cornus sanguinea ‘Midwinter Fire’, and two blackcurrants ‘Delikatesnaja’.
Today the pink Trofast box turned into a Hydrangea or two, the three white ones into Spiraea japonica and the three green ones into Thuja occidentals ‘Danica’.
I’m not convinced of our ability to keep Hydrangea bushes alive. The internet says they die if you’re not really diligent about watering them. But Ingrid has been fascinated by them for years, and it is the one and only bush she really wants to have in the garden, so we’ll give it a try.
[…] still working on getting those bushes planted. It’s taking time. I’ve replaced several of my lunchtime workouts with […]
[…] The bushes that I planted behind the house are coming along very nicely. They mostly don’t look very impressive, but all seem to be growing, which is all I can ask for in the first season. The hydrangeas, which I’ve seen described in various places as “extremely thirsty” and prone to dying because of lack of water, have behaved like any ordinary newly planted bush and not been particularly thirsty at all. One of the spireas has been much fussier and shown signs of wilting several times. Maybe all the talk about thirsty hydrangeas comes from people growing them indoors. Both hydrangeas are currently flowering with blue flowers. I wonder if that’s because the soil here is slightly acidic after all, or if it’s due to the soil they came with. I guess next summer will show. […]
[…] with buckets and IKEA boxes again, to plan and design the new flowerbed. I first did this for the bushes and shrubs behind the house and this approach worked better than anything I’ve tried before. It gives a much better idea […]