Fear This Gardener

Lovely but overgrown

When we first found this house on 49th street, back in April of 2011, it had a bleak looking overgrown tangle of muddy weeds in front. As we visited the house and the previous owner, I watched as the flowers and plants grew and grew, flowering here and there. There were peonies in the late spring, lavender in June and a huge bright pink Easter Lilly in late June. I imagined myself keeping all of these flowering plants, rearranging them and keeping tabs on them.. Learning as much as I could about when things were in bloom and what to trim. 

Vivid Lilies

Fast forward one year and we have a mess of weeds, ground cover that is competing for attention, trees that are falling over with the weight of ill-proportioned branches. It's a nightmare for anyone who wants a simple, organized garden that doesn't require a ton of watering. (I personally feel watering is as bad as taking a too-long shower. Wasteful and decadent, only to be done on hideously hot days in July.)

One single solitary bloom

As I mentally moved all these plants in my planning last week while on vacation (aka working, but at home), I sketched tall plants (waaayyy to many of them) to the back, ground cover to the front and a nice organic flow to the patches of things that I massaged around the yard. After 4 days of digging rooted, overgrown hostas and awful naught ivy, I gave in.

 

 

I am going to remove it and start over. I feel awful.

 

It's a mess

I have grown to love the little blips of blooms that come and go, but they are killing each other! There isn't enough of anything to make sense design-wise and I'm sure the neighbors think I'm crazy for trying to tame the crazy "Victorian" mess.   Were the Victorians insane?

So this last weekend, I Googled common Midwest plants to see what I had growing in my jungle, to make sure I wasn't getting rid of anything too unique. Yeah, that didn't really work. Then, I went to a far more useful source, my kind gardening neighbor Sara. She told me that the big luscious flowering plants I was waiting to move were goldenrod. Evil evil goldenrod of the I am so allergic varietal. So it all came out. And then with a sigh of relief, I felt so much better that I had decided (with some prompting by others) to clear the slate. Save a few lively plants that had  great blooms and would move without giving me too much headache.

Now, we have a mud slide for a front yard, but man, I feel better! So once again, much thought and obsession turns me into a nutcase, but I do hope this yard looks stunning....next year.

NEXT YEAR!