Our Garden Gate

Posts Tagged ‘woodruff’

My very first job, when I was 15 years old, was planting seeds at a local nursery. To me, it was just a part-time job that provided a little teenage spending money. Eight years later, I found myself married to a landscaper, living in a brand new home, with a brand new landscape to design.

It isn’t because I have a fantastic memory that I remember one of our very first fights as a newly married couple. It probably has more to do with the fact that my husband reminds me of it all of these years later. He doesn’t remind me to be unkind, nor to remind me that I was the one in the wrong. Instead, he reminds me because it is something we laugh at almost fifteen years later.

The Happy Couple, a Landscaper and a Garden Designer

We laugh at the memory of the ‘discussion’ we had over how to landscape a four foot wide flower bed stretching out along a 50 foot driveway. My husband, a LANDSCAPER, and me a new bride, who had six months experience planting seeds along a conveyor belt, and a few weed pulling sessions in her youth. To say we had very different views about the design is an understatement. I suggested a patch of grass would be nice.  My husband, putting aside all newly-wed sensitivity, laughed out loud at my suggestion, (I think that is when the ‘argument’ started) and instead suggested trees, shrubs and perennials.

I have thanked my husband for his wisdom ever since.

After my husband planted four beautiful towering oaks, and placed a few Spireas, Potentillas, and Barberry shrubs here and there, in a peace agreement of sorts, my husband left the rest of the design to me. I spent hours perusing greenhouses of a nearby nursery and became acquainted with Stella D’oro Day Lilies,  Echinacea, and what became my favorite, Black-Eyed Susans (Rudbeckia).

Within a year and a half our landscaped areas increased and I had three more good sized flowerbeds to take care of. Again after some careful placement of trees and shrubs by my husband, I was left to the flowers.

This round of landscaping, I fell in love with Forget-Me-Nots, Jupiter’s Beard and Woodruff. (And quickly learned to never again plant the ever-seeding Mexican Primroses.)

I’ll never forget that early summer day, just four years after our first fight as a married couple, when a city official knocked on my door and declared my yard as the recipient of the city’s ‘Yard of the Month’ award!

My husband is not often found sending me beautiful bouquets of flowers, but instead he has taught me an appreciation and love of flowers that last far longer than some store-bought flowers in a vase. I am a lucky woman.

And what a lucky man my husband is. He has beautiful flower beds AND a wife that can admit she is wrong.
 

Lavendar, yarrow, delphinium and prunnella

In case you don’t know, a perennial is a plant that comes back year after year, getting bigger and more beautiful each year. With perennials it’s sleep, creep, leap. They don’t do much the first year but gather strength. The second year they will began to put on more growth and the third year they take off.

The cooler temperatures have me searching the nursery sites and catalogs for some of my favorite plants. If you plant perennials now they will have a head start in the spring because they will have a stronger root system.

Here is a list of some of the plants in our yard and so I can vouch for their beauty and ease of growing. In my yard it’s survival of the fittest so if they don’t do well they kind of drop by the wayside on their own. There are so many more plants than this but these are some of my favorites.

Low growing Forget-Me-Nots and Sweet Woodruff,

LOW GROWING

Forget-Me-Nots

Creeping Phlox

Hyacinth

Pulmonaria (Lungwort) (semi-shade)

Prunnella

Lamium (semi-shade)

Sweet Woodruff

Nepeta (Catmint)

Lambsear

MID HEIGHT

Mid-growing plants - Mums and Wormwood (Artemesia) by picket fence

Tulips

Daffodils

Columbine

Sage

Chives

Astilbe (shade)

Heuchera (semi-shade)

Aster

Garden Phlox

Mums

Artemesia (Wormwood)

Agastache

Hosta

Salvia

Lavendar

Yarrow

TALL

Tall growing roses - Queen Elizabeth roses can get 6-8' tall

Centranthus (Jupiter’s Beard)

Delphiniums

Daylilies

Echinacea

Irises

Peonies

Roses

Clematis

Campanula – Canterbury Bells

Foxglove (semi-shade)

We’re in zone 6 and so this is what we can have in our yard. I use to live in zone 8 where I could have Angel Trumpets, Crape Myrtle, Plumbago,Hibiscus, Citrus Trees, Palm Trees and Gardenias.

I really do miss the Natchez Crape Myrtles. They were so big and graceful… but I couldn’t have peonies there.

Do you have any favorites in this list?

Flower bed and end of grape arbor.

Yarrow and roses

Google +
by Eliza Osborn