Then and Now... The Oval

When I first moved in, 2 1/2 years ago, the front yard was a blank slate. A SUNNY, southwestern exposure blank slate.  NO shade for the house, except by rolling down the blinds on the front porch, which ruins the view.   With our Georgia summers, that meant that from June to Oct, I basically never saw my front yard from inside the house. So I promised myself that as soon as I owned the house, I'd plant trees in the front yard and get some shade started.   I honored that promise to myself in March 2009, by planting 9 trees and as many shrubs in the front yard, and others scattered around the side yard.  The oval came after that, even though I'm telling its story ahead of time.

I had lived in a townhome before moving into this house, and had a pretty decent container-garden outside my front door.  So even while I was a tenant, I started transplanting some of the container plants into the yard.

I'd had three butterfly bushes in containers - a normal buddleia davidii (black knight), a really cool buddleia alternifolia (aka fountain butterfly bush), and a buddleia weyeriana (honeycomb butterfly bush).  The two unusual ones came from High Country Gardens, which remains the only place I can find them for sale.  I planted the Black Knight by the driveway, and put the Alternifolia directly in front of my porch.   I named the Alternifolia "Angie," in memory of my first greyhound, Wigwam Angela.  The Weyeriana was planted in the side yard, but when I found another one locally, I planted it next to my Angie plant, and I call it "Jessie" in memory of my first Italian Greyhound.

Last March, when I went on my first tree-planting binge,  I found a Forest Pansy Redbud at a local big box store, and planted it in the front yard, almost directly opposite the Angie/Jessie bushes.  In April, I named the Redbud "Alan," in memory of Yopon Alan Wag, a greyhound that was related to my Angie-girl, but belonged to a cyber-friend.  They planted a Forest Pansy redbud in their yard, in his memory, and I told them that I already had that same tree in mine, and asked if I could name it for him.

I added a mock-orange about halfway between Alan and Angie, and slightly off to one side of them, and that's how it looked for the summer.  This picture shows it shortly after planting them last 
March, before I added the Jessie bush.

In fall 2009, we sold my dad's house, and I got my share of the $$. I went to Nearly Native Nursery in Fayetteville to get a couple native trees to replace a couple new ones that didn't survive our over-wet summer, and came home with a ton of shrubs/plants, as well.  So I dug out the space between Angie-Jessie, Alan, and the mock orange, and built a big oval, approx 15x30 or thereabouts.  Planted native shrubs around the edges, put some daffodil/hyacinth/crocus bulbs inside and on the edge of it, and added some other plants, whose names escape me just now. Then mulched and mulched and mulched, and waited for spring.


I started in September, and it looked like this at the beginning. You can see that the plants benefited from our wet summer:

I finished the oval just in time for the first frost of the winter.

I anxiously waited for spring, to see how the bulbs would look.  I was not disappointed:





The hyacinths made me feel like I had a rainbow in my front yard.  But the bulbs bloomed & died, and the oval was bare, just the slightest bit of foliage as the shrubs started to green out... it needed something... but what? 

AHA!  Says I... I'll plant red salvia at key points around the perimeter of the oval - that will give color until the shrubs wake up.  But wait.. since it's all weedy around the oval, why not just dig a new flower bed... an 18" strip that borders the perimeter? That would look great!  (my poor back)


So here it is on May 4... as you can see, I still had red salvia to plant at that point.


I finished planting the bed about a week ago, but don't think I've taken any pictures of it since then.

Still to come....  The tale of the trees, aka how many holes can one crazy woman dig in her yard? And then, the saga of the side-yard strip, or:  how to recover from inadvertently blocking lawnmower access to a portion of the yard.