Checking back in on the meadow

When we started the meadow last summer, we just had a smallish area where we cleared the sod.

I took a trip to Wind Dancer with Scott and bought five Schizachyrium scoparium 'Blue Heaven', three Panicum virgatum 'Shenandoah', three Pennisetum macrourum 'White Lancer', and a Pennisetum alopecuroides 'Redhead.' 

I've been slowly chipping away at the area, removing more sod by hand and sneaking things in.

I've snuck a lot of things in, probably too much. Now it looks like this. Behold, my MS Paint skills!

WHAT.

I know, it makes your head hurt. Starting in the front, by the sidewalk, I have two types of sedum. I really needed Sedum 'Matrona' but no one was carrying it this spring. Scott would text me anytime he found some but he'd inevitably say something like, "They have two at Portland Nursery . . . but they're $15.99 apiece."

I randomly discovered that Bluestone Perennials was running a sale on them for $3.75 apiece so I bought 12. I've scattered them throughout the front of the meadow, as well as elsewhere in the front garden to try and unify to the different spaces. The plants from Bluestone were in great shape, beautifully packaged, and they shipped super fast, whew!

Established 'Matrona' that I planted last summer

I added three Sedum 'Sunset Cloud' to my Bluestone order, a low-growing sedum that supposedly looks nice with purple sedums. I'm really liking it so far.

The next height level moving back is made up of the five little bluestems. The coloring, so hard to photograph when they're still so small, is gorgeous.

I wanted a color blocked scheme to this planting, so we have the three Panicum 'Shenandoah' behind them. The idea was to get big swaths of color, sort of like this. Scott designed this scheme, I could never do this on my own.

So here's where things went awry. I thought I planted three Shenandoah behind my little bluestems. But then one of them put on a lot of growth during the cool season and started to bloom. This one just didn't look like it was the same grass.

And then I was going through my stash of nursery tags (I snap photos and keep them in a folder online so I can access it from my phone when I'm shopping) and I discovered that I had purchased Pennisetum 'Foxtrot.' Um, where did I plant that?

Maybe I put the Foxtrot here instead of the third Shenandoah? But here's why this is stupid: the grasses were IN BLOOM when I planted them. How on earth did I confuse this?

Anyway. I moved the blooming grass to the backyard and moved what I think might be a Shenandoah to this spot. Everyone cross your fingers!

I tucked in a lot of Sesleria autumnalis on the north and south sides of the meadow, since this area will be viewed from both sides. I love the bright green color and Carolyn (of Wind Dancer Garden) says it's tough as nails. It can handle shade or sun, drought or soggy conditions. And it's smaller, so you needn't worry about it eating your garden.

On the back side you'll have a nice view of the Blue Hill salvia and Sesleria planted here. You should also get a nice view of the Molinia caerulea 'Stahlenquelle' I recently acquired. On the right side I've got a swath of Bouteloua gracilis 'Blonde Ambition'.

At the suggestion of intrepid gardener/reader Lynn I installed some rue, in the hope that swallowtails will find it and use it as a host plant. Go ahead and eat it to the ground, caterpillars! I don't care. I tried to find parsley (another host plant) that hadn't been treated with the chemical BT and haven't had any luck. Thank you Lynn, for all your advice.

Now I'm on the lookout for a bench to put under the tree. We don't seem to have a problem with theft on the street but I'm reluctant to drop a lot of money on a bench that could be stolen from our front yard. I was at Ikea recently and they had a reasonably nice one for $99. That would buy a lot of plants/rock/pots so I'm still thinking on it.

In the meantime, I'm plotting what kind of plants I might want to put here. It's going to be dry and deeply shaded in the summer. I'd love a shrub or something taller to screen out my neighbor's yard. Because I lack imagination, I'm considering what I did under the cedar: a ninebark. I wish there were big grasses that could do shade. Has anyone had any luck putting a ceanothus in deep shade? I had the dogwood professionally pruned recently, so I don't think we can open up the canopy much more. Any input is welcome.

I made you a gravel wasteland

Sod removal happened this weekend, which is how our side yard went from this . . .

. . . to this.

We used YardRents again, who are great. The YardRents guys showed up promptly and showed us how to use the sod cutter. They knew it wasn't going to take us very long, so they didn't even bother to leave. One of the guys snapped photos of the garden (he was so fired up, which was wonderful) and chatted with me about the evils of Round Up while Greg zipped through removing the sod. It took 30 minutes to remove the area along the driveway and the side yard where we bumped out the fence.

Sod cutters are the best. 

The YardRents guys packed up and were on their way and we got work rolling up the sod and transferring it to a pile in the driveway.

Then Greg leveled and regraded the soil so water will hopefully move away from the house, instead of toward it. We also removed the plastic that had been layed down years ago. A previous owner must have tried to keep water away from the house by laying down plastic sheeting and planting sod on top of it. I don't know why this seemed like a good idea but I'm sure a future homeowner will wonder why I put all this gravel in. Ugh, gravel?! Why not some nice lawn?

I headed down to Oregon Decorative Rock and picked up some gravel. I love gravel pathways. I love the sound they make and their persistence. I love the way your wheelbarrow sinks into the gravel, making it impossible to move, pissing off your boyfriend. (I didn't believe Greg when he warned me that would happen.) I really wanted gravel in this part of the yard but I wasn't sure how to handle the transition from the cedar chip pathway that will run through the front yard, and the transition to lawn in the backyard.

Neither of us are happy with the state of the side yard right now because it's a wasteland of gravel. Grey house, grey A/C unit, an eight feet wide expanse of grey gravel. Ultimately we're going to set up the rain barrel and a stock tank for tomatoes against the house, so it should only feel like five feet of gravel instead of eight. I popped some colorful pots over here (and that stupid wheelbarrow) so we'll have some color. I'm hoping to train a vine along this fence and Greg has plans for a trellis of some sort atop our fence. I'm hoping to find something vigorous enough to cover the fence but restrained enough not to pull it down. Any suggestions?

Currently gravel gives way unceremoniously to lawn. My thought right now is to ease the transitions with rock. I was so tired and sunburned by the end of the day that I couldn't handle a third trip to Oregon Decorative Rock. So I plopped it down and called it good.

But I'm fuzzily thinking something like this. Behold, my amazing MS Paint skills!

Eh, I don't know. Next I need to dig down the soil here (it will go in the bottom of the new stock tank), edge the plants with rock, then put down cedar chips.

And then we still have a fair amount of sod to remove by hand, underneath the dogwood's drip line where I was too nervous to use the sod cutter. But I can see the finish line with sod removal!

I want an oompa loompa NOW.

I have a number of projects that I want to take care of this summer. A lot of them hinge on other projects, like bumping out the fence on the west side of the house. This area, which I call "the lab," has been taunting me.

I'm planning on removing the sod here, possibly edging the plants in stone, then replacing the sod with cedar chips. A couple of times I've even signed into YardRents and ordered a sod cutter, only to cancel it five minutes later. I want to remove the sod from the west side of the house (where the expanded fence is going in) and it makes sense to do that at the same time that I remove it here.

Then I can list the sod on craigslist once and deal with YardRents fees once. That's the smart thing to do but I want to remove it NOW. It's riddled with weeds and it serves no purpose. We don't bag our lawn clippings, so we end up with dead grass scattered all over the driveway and sidewalk, which drives me crazy.

But once we get this removed we'll have almost no lawn in the front yard. Huzzah! I think I'm going to save Greg so much time mowing the lawn that he'll have extra time to rub my back. Back me up on this.

Happy accidents

Last fall I planted two types of Camassia in the rain garden, one blue and one white. I thought they would bloom together but the blues popped out in April and the whites are just now opening up.

Thank goodness for these kinds of misunderstandings. It's so much nicer to enjoy them individually.

Also filing under things-I-didn't-know, the Korean lilac smells amazing right now. I don't remember it having a very powerful fragrance last year. It's planted outside our kitchen door and walking outside right now is such a wonderful experience. I love spring!

Checking in on the front yard

We're having an unusually sunny spring and the front garden is really appreciating it. Even though the cannas are just starting to poke up and the zauschneria is still pretty tiny, everything looks so much fuller than it did last spring.

2013

2012

2011

My Verbascum bombyciferum is going to bloom, which makes me a bit sad, since the rosette it formed is so, so nice.

I can't wait to see what it will look like when it's actually filled in at the height of summer. If we're being honest, I'm a little fearful too. I have crammed so many plants into this area that I think it's going to be a little nuts. I'm going to be moving some plants in the fall, I think.

Just FYI

If you give a castor bean plant water and fish emulsion every three weeks and plant it in a sunny place, it will look like this.

And the root ball will be so thick and sturdy by the next spring that you'll have to clip the roots and then hang your whole body weight on the trunk to get it out of the ground.

I planted a Chionochloa rubra in its place, along with some annual tidytips (Layia platyglossa) to fill in.

Greg was so insistent that this grass not poke into the driveway (the castor bean did) that I planted it too close to the Mahonia. Now the question is, can I plant another castor bean here for the summer while the grass gets up to size? Maybe I won't give it quite so much fish emulsion this time.

Bad lines, bad code, bad blogger.

So the other weekend I decided to smother more lawn, resulting in this mess:

After work one day I decided to smooth out my lines by removing some of the surrounding sod, this time with my edger and pick axe. I decided to free hand it, instead of using a hose to guide me to a straight line or a smooth parabola. And it started POURING, so I looked like this.

And my jeans were soaked through and it was getting colder, so I didn't even get everything done.

Blind children could make better lines.

So it still looks stupid. But! I got my little Cistus 'Elma' in the ground and it's very well watered-in.

I ordered some Linaria reticulata 'Flamenco' after seeing it on Kaveh's blog. I love his blog so much.

Photo source: Annie's Annuals

If I put the Linaria here, this is what it will look like with what's already planted there. I need to check back in with Scott (who designed this whole scheme) so I don't get too off-course.

I'd love to incorporate (my new obsession) red tussock grass (Chionochloa rubra), blue grama grass (Bouteloua gracillis 'Blonde Ambition'), and a yellow echinacea cultivar or some sort, which would result in something like this.

I'm not great with color combinations, so I need to tread carefully. Is the Chionochloa going to be out of place? I think it might be out of place. If you're feeling opinionated, would you weigh in in the comments? 

And if you're having trouble commenting, would you shoot me a message? (heather [at] justagirlwithahammer.com) Loree has brought to my attention that she's getting blocked with Chrome and Internet Explorer but I can't reproduce it on my computer. I think I monkeyed with the Disqus code and made everything worse. How surprising.

The plants now control me and my weekends

It all started so innocently with a plan for a daphne purchase. I'd read on Growing Steady about Sean Hogan's plant talk at the Yard, Garden and Patio show, where he mentioned a daphne that flowers for 12 months.

Oh my god, I could smell daphne all year long! That's my version of the American dream.

So two weekends ago I headed out to Cistus where I picked up the most beautiful plant in the world and two Daphne odora 'Aureomarginata Alba'. The only problem is that the daphne Sean mentioned was Daphne x transatlantica 'Everblooming Alba'. So I called up Cistus last week and asked if they had the everblooming version. They told me they were still quite tiny and not yet out on the tables but they would pull a couple for me to buy. So I headed back to Cistus this weekend and picked them up. While I was there I stumbled on a couple of groups of grasses that weren't yet labeled and didn't have prices on them. I knew they probably weren't for general sale but I grabbed some anyway. When I got to the counter the guy was like, "Yeah, those are for a landscaping job and you can't have them."

They were Chionochloa rubra (New Zealand tussock grass) and Carex dipsacea (Autumn sedge) and I want them so badly it hurts.

Look how beautiful!

New Zealand tussock grass. Image source.

I also eyed a chartreuse bear's breeches (Acanthus Mollis 'Hollard's Gold') but decided to wait on buying it. But! I finally had the everblooming daphne in my hot little hands, and you know what? It doesn't smell like daphne. It smells very good but it's closer to honeysuckle. I'm glad I have it and I'm glad I have two standard daphnes to get my fix in the spring.

I'd been planning to put the daphne to the left of the front door, in a planting bed I'd build sometime this spring. When I moved in there was a rhododendron here with a bunch of buried bricks marking a curve around it.

The weather was really nice on Saturday so I thought I'd start clearing the sod and bricks from this area. The soil level was all over the place and graded toward the house, so I had to fix that.

Then on Sunday I headed down to Oregon Decorative Rock and picked up some edging stones like I used in the agave berm and some quarter-ten crushed basalt. I started leveling everything and laying the stones down . . . and then I got tired and hungry and decided to go plant shopping instead.

This is a tricky spot because very close to the house is almost always in the shade and it gets partial coverage from the eaves, so toward the house is drier. As you get to the outside of bed it gets sunnier and wetter, though it's still in shade for the hottest part of the day.

I ran down to Portland Nursery and picked up a Mahonia x media 'Charity' and three Carex dipsacea. Suck it, Cistus. I got my autumn sedges!

BUT. I had decided that I needed some Acanthus mollis 'Hollard's Gold' here. It tolerates drier conditions than the straight species and it would brighten this dark area up. Portland Nursery didn't have any 'Hollard's Gold' so I went back to Cistus (40 miles round trip). For the third time in two weeks. Global warming? MY FAULT. I'm so sorry.

I planted three because I'm impatient. Anyone who grows Acanthus mollis is tsking right now because they get big and they tend to spread and three is so unnecessary. At some point during the planting of this bed I pulled a muscle in my back, so now I'm miserable and my bed will be buried alive by bear's breeches.

And the daphne? It's so little you can barely see it. The mature size is 5x5 but it may get eaten alive by Acanthus mollis before then. I also tucked in the new hebe I bought at Joy Creek.

I still need to get more rock and finish the base layer, add a second layer, then top everything off with gravel. I also want to reposition the bear's breeches a bit. I was trying to keep them in the shade band, hence them all being squished together. I've since read in a few places that Hollard's Gold can take quite a bit of sun, so I'm not as worried about them getting scorched now.

Then I need to remove more sod because the area adjacent to this bed will be the new pathway to the backyard. But first I need to rest up my back a bit (it's getting better!). Send Advil. And go ahead and chastise me for planting so many bear's breeches. I can take it.