Specialty Gardening: Cottage Garden Seed Swap & Chat #13, 0 by dryad57

dryad57 wrote:
Hey everyone! Star, so sorry to hear you lost a beloved companion, big hugs and I hope the pig chase didn't do too much damage!!

Spent about 5 hours in sis's yard (her name is Jean, by the way, LOL) yesterday. Did a bunch of weeding, pruned some wildly overgrown azaleas, then planted elephant ears I'd started for her, some blue salvia, snaps, rose campion, blue delphinium, celosia, double cream hollyhocks, clasping coneflowers, agastache, canna, and my one lone geranium in a nice pot next to her other geraniums. Finished that up about 2:00 as it was too darn hot to do any more. I've promised her I'll get her back yard into shape this year, so it's a trip a week for a while to keep working on it (she's paying for my gas and feeding me in exchange for my time - even steven as far as sisters go). Here's a pic of it from a couple years ago from her upstairs balcony. The pool is being filled in for a koi pond and hot tub, the grasses are all gone (she hates them), and all the evergreens except for the 3 colorado spruce and the little clump in the middle were killed in last year's drought (she lost about 30 arborvitae, and easily 100 yews that were around the outside of the fencing). They've not had time to deal with that lovely brick path, so right now you can't even see it for the weeds and grass. The gorgeous fountain is still there, but a puppy chewed the wiring on the pump in the winter, so it's not running right now and needs serious cleaning before it can be back up and going. The two wispy purple areas are stands of flowering plums that were planted way too close together, and have been pulled out as they were completely unruly, overgrown and dying out in the middle. The area around the gazebo is a "no man's land" right now, we haven't even begun to address that. Next time I'm down there I'll get an updated pic from the balcony so you can see how much still needs to be done.

In the meantime, that white barn you see out behind has had a much larger addition put on, which is where she keeps some of the thoroughbred mares that she boards. The stand of pines behind that white barn are in front of a pond, and she keeps her Katahdin sheep in pasturage to the left of that pond. Right now that pasturage is a cedar field, and she walked me back there yesterday morning before I started working and showed me the most gorgeous stand of wild Asclepias, and another gorgeous stand of wild Joe Pye Weed. While we were standing looking at the Pye Weed all sorts of butterflies were flitting about. Pity of it is, she needs to mow that so that it can be pasturage, so we're trying to figure out where to transplant some of the Joe Pye Weed and Asclepias so she can continue to have the butterflies. I took pics with my cell phone, but haven't downloaded them yet.

Today, I've decided, I'm going to tackle that front cottage garden and start getting some plants in my own yard, right after I mow and egde a lawn and weed out a border and veggie garden for a client. Then I gotta arrange for a bunch of trees to be delivered and installed for another client - I'm not looking forward to that in this weather!