As is usually the case, I accomplished far less than I planned to.
After our pear tree died we tried moving an oak sapling from the front yard. That didn’t survive last year’s drought so we replaced that with a sugar maple. We wanted a Legacy but ended up with a Green Mountain. Both are supposed to deal better with heat and drought. While we were buying the sugar maple an Acer ginnala ‘Flame’ caught my eye. It had the most bright, beautiful, red leaves. So we bought that too, and put it where we have fewer serviceberries than planned, since a couple died.
Sticking with the theme of dead and dying trees, we need to think seriously about replacing our Canada Red chokecherries. They’ve had fireblight for years. We trim it off every year but it doesn’t go away, and it’s getting to the point where we’d have to remove entire branches. So I think they have to go. Now to figure out what to replace them with … That area is a kind of faux orchard, with four crabapples and two more recently planted apple trees. So probably another flowering tree of some kind?
We also tried to rescue the ninebark we planted a few years ago for a hedge. They’ve never done well; we thought moving them to a corner of the veggie garden might help but I don’t know that it did. I think the daylilies that we rescued from a spot where it’s become too shady for them are faring better.
One of the larger tasks that I wanted to accomplish didn’t get completed. I plan to redo the perennial garden next year and wanted to have the bed prepped for planting in spring. We didn’t get that far, but we did get all the perennials moved that need to be removed, and did some work on removing weeds and adding soil amendments. So we got part of the way there.
Part of that effort was finding new homes for perennials. One of the things we did accomplish was removing the plants between the sidewalk and the yard in front of the house. It was overgrown with cotoneasters and carpet blue spruce that overgrew the sidewalk every year and the decorative boulders in the bed. So we removed most of the cotoneaster and severely pruned back the rest — I will keep them pruned this time — moved the Nepeta x faassenii ‘Walker’s Low’ (catmint) from the perennial garden, and planted some new spring bulbs:
- Crocus vernus ‘Pickwick’ is a striped crocus I’ve been wanting to grow for years. I finally found a spot!
- We planted some Iris reticulata ‘Painted Lady’ (rock iris) on the little berm between our boulders. We’ve had some for years and enjoy watching it come up very early in the spring.
- We added two new kinds of daffodil, Narcissus ‘Llanfair’ (hey, we went to Wales!) and Narcissus ‘Pheasant’s Eye’ because I like poeticus narcissi and didn’t have any.
- And we’re trying tulips again. I planted some when we first moved here and they only lasted a year. Let’s hope these new Menton tulips last longer. We surrounded them with daffodils hoping that will keep the critters away. We’ll see.
And we tried a new experiment in the meadow: we mowed random paths through it from side to side. So far we like it. It makes it easier to get from one side of the back yard to the other and it’s kind of fun to walk through the middle of it. We’re trying to gradually reintroduce more flowers to the meadow.