This garden has been a loooong time in the works. Right under one of the windows in my home was this huge ugly yew or was it canadian hemlock? Not sure. But it was wrong for the spot, needed constant pruning (which I hate to do) and just had nothing interesting to offer, year after year, season after season.
One fine day, it met its end under the chain saw.
I toyed with various plans for that spot while the spot started to grow weeds and look like this.
Not pretty. Still, not very threatening. A few years passed and it started to look a lot worse. Crazy weeds, crazy grasses, everything. So finally this past weekend, I decided to start work on this. One of the big hurdles was the root of the old yew (or canadian hemlock? Either way, it was mostly eww...). It was getting in the way of my cinder blocks.
I finally got my reciprocating saw and cut the root out and started to lay the first course.
If you look at the right hand top corner of the pic (inside the cinder block perimeter) you can see the remnants of that root. And similarly the left bottom corner of the photo has another portion of that same root.
I am beginning to believe in the saying that "there is a time for everything". As in, sometimes, no matter how you try things don't work and then out of the blue, everything just clicks into place.
My raised garden is clicking in to place.
I started with demolishing an old cinder block raised garden (see here) that was overgrowing with ivy and built a more contemporary looking raised garden out of cinder blocks (see here). Even after I built it, I had no idea what I was going to plant in there. Nothing really came to me except, I thought that I should fill up those protruding cinder blocks with hen and chicks.
When I went to the nursery to buy these plants, I landed up also buying some aloe for my office. I had set the aloe out on the raised garden, meaning to let it get some real air and light until the weather gets cooler.
Walking past it every day sort of gave me an idea for the garden.
First of all, all that demolition had left the soil in uneven mounds in the raised garden. Secondly, only the very outermost couple of inches see any water at all due to rains. Since I normally select plants that can do well with what nature provides in terms of watering, it would be tough for the plants away from the edge to get any water at all! These situations are however, great for a rock garden.
I had some large rocks in the backyard, where I planned to source my rocks from. Walked up all the way only to find this:
What? Where are the rocks? The ivy, the poison ivy and other weeds have swallowed them whole!
I had to rip out whole long list of unidentified creepy things to discover some. The one in the photo turned out to be useless, because it had rough edges and I was looking for the more rounded forms.
Anyway, I waded through the poison ivy and several unmentionables and removed some rocks and arranged them in the rock garden. The idea was to create a flow in the garden. Like in Zen rock and sand gardens.
The idea was to create a flow in the garden
Here the rocks represent the flowing river.
... where the rocks are the river and they are flowing down a hill
Finally I was happy with the placement. So filled in some soil and added my plants
I decided to put the bird feeder right on the bed, so that the cats can view the action from the window
I "naturalized" the now dysfunctional solar lamp into the creeping euonymus plant.
The spurge that you see in the forefront came in an interesting biodegradable pot
A closer look at the two hen and chick plants
Although the white rock is an oddity in terms of color and shape, I think it will highlight the pink flowering plant better.
View from the door step, with the little aloe that started it all in the forefront
I think I am in love with this garden
View from the house
Apparently I am not the only one in love with this garden. Wait until the birds discover the feeder. Then we will have a party!
