A Different Type of Garden Part 2: The Plan
As I mentioned in a previous blog post, Matt and I have decided to take on redoing the landscaping in front of our house. We are creating a space for both a flower garden and an herb garden and are taking on the flower garden first. In order to ensure we made the best use of space and selected the correct types of plants we have done a lot of research online. Through our research we learned that the “best” way to ensure you have a flower garden you are happy with is to draw out the design. So we did just that. Because I am hopeless when it comes to drawing, Matt sketched out the basic shape of our space, and I filled in blobs that were in the approximate shape of plants we want. You can see our sketch below.
As part of the design process we also selected a handful of perennials we thought would fill the space well. Our hope was to use some existing hostas from our yard, a hand full of hostas from a friend’s house, and a number of other plants that won’t need replanting next year:
List of plants selected:
- Hosta
- Cherry Bush
- Phlox
- Ornamental Grass
- Hyacinth
- Tulip
- Primroses
- Lilies
Unfortunately, a lot of the plants we researched online and thought would work well were not actually available at our local garden centers, so we had to improvise.
List of actual plants purchases:
- Purpleleaf Sand Cherry Bush
- Winky Double Dark Blue & White Columbine
- Winky Mix Columbine
- Neon Star Dianthus
- Purple Picotee Dianthus
- Cranberry Ice Dianthus
- Red Wing Creeping Phlox
- McDaniels Cushion Creeping Phlox
- Hyacinth
- Tulips
- Hostas
We also decided to use lava rocks in place of mulch to keep from having to replace the mulch every year. The previous owners of our house used mulch for all their landscaping, and by the end of the summer last year, most of the munch had been washed away. We are hoping that rocks will be much more permanent. I also like the look of the red lava rocks more than the mulch.
The last part of our plan was to put down gardening paper to keep out weeds. For us this is a no-brainer, as neither of us have time to spend weeding our flowers. We don’t have any previous experience with putting down this type of paper, but hopefully it will come with directions.
Stay tuned to see how it actually turned out.
October 25th, 2010 at 8:32 pm
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