A little gardening project

As anyone who's seen my house knows, I've got more than enough projects to keep me busy. When things like a new kitchen and roof repairs are on my list, landscaping has fallen lower on the list of priorities. But a few weeks ago I picked up a bunch of perennials on sale and decided to ignore the urgent projects for a few days and convert one of my landscaping beds to a perennial garden.



Here's a picture of the landscaping bed in front of my house. It's pretty overgrown with lily of the valley and a bunch of annoying weeds that grow through the bed of rocks.



Here's the same bed after I removed all the plants, weeds, landscaping blocks, and a whole mess of flagstones that were hiding in there.


Now with 100% more plants! There's a variety of things here, which should blossom over the course of the summer and fall—ideally there's some color blooming at all times (though I think it's going to be hard to expect that in the winter). In the midst of everything on the left (kind of hard to see here) is a red elderberry, which will grow big white blossoms of flowers in the summer, followed by clusters of tart, red berries in the fall. I'm really excited to see this grow into a bigger plant—it should get close to 6 feet tall and fill out quite a bit. With any luck it'll hide the house.


And, lastly, the garden with mulch and flagstones laid out so you can walk into it without crushing the plants or the dirt bed.