Northeast Gardening: Show us your garden beds!, 1 by bbrookrd

bbrookrd wrote:
Here in the deer and rabbit yard. Not fenced and planted with as many things that I hope they don't eat. But they do. There is a peak at the new bed, started a few years ago. It took me so long to dig that it has been dubbed the "slacker bed". It is still very sparse. I will have to sort it out this summer.

We have planted many viburnums and have been slowly clearing the jungle around some good plants like scrub oaks that look wonderful when pruned and the bay berry. The cedars and high bush blue berries are wonderful old trees once we cleared around them and got the virginia creeper and poison ivy off of them. We have added shad, sweet fern clethra, inkberry, Tupelo, holly, beach plum, rosa rugosa, Fothergilla, vitex, Hamamelis, mugo pines, rug juniper, iris and other plants that the deer and rabbits aren't suppose to like and that will meld with the natural flora. But that's a joke.

I ordered a couple of Cotinus, a Abelia 'Silver Anniversary' and an Quercus robur 'Concordia' to plant along with all the winter berry which I will plant this spring. We planted a Cornus kousa dogwood a year ago along with a pin oak and a big holly hybrid called 'Nellie R. Stevens' which the deer have munched on all winter. I should have caged it. At the moment I have more things caged than not. Not so pretty. Patti