Put it to Bed

My goal this spring was to FINALLY finish the flower bed in front of the house. We built this bed summer before last and I’ve slowly been adding plants to it over the last two years. So this year, I was going to fill any leftover space, call it finished and move on to the backyard. Above is a photo of our house when we moved in.

Then we built a flower bed:

Then my mums went crazy:

But as you can see from the photo above, there were still big empty spaces on either side of the rose bushes, so last month, I planted a handful of hearty perennials and a few colorful annuals. And they are growing like crazy!

So what did I plant? Well, I added lavender and sage to my herb garden, which is growing out of control right now!

And I made a point of planting colorful perennials so that they will hopefully come back next year. I stuck with a purple/yellow/pink color combination (something about red flowers makes my house-with-a-yellow-front-door look like a McDonalds) and planted Blue Salvia, which have gotten really big and add such a nice color, shape and texture contrast to the other flowers.

I also planted foxglove, but they probably won’t bloom this year. Just a reminder when you’re landscaping: if you are planting multiple types of plants, put the tallest ones in the back of your flower bed – just like putting the tall people in the back row of a photograph – and the smallest ones up front. Foxglove will get very tall, taller than my other plants, so even though it’s in the back, it’ll still be visible from the street.

In addition to all these new plants, my mums are coming back again, so I alternated the daisies and some creeping phlox between the leafy green mum growth. Probably pretty soon, I’ll have to trim the mums back, so they aren’t quite as big as last year when, after the first big rain, the flowered branches weighed so much they snapped! And of course, our knock out roses are killing it, once again!