Mid-Atlantic Gardening: Yardening Summer 2013 Part 2, 1 by happy_macomb

happy_macomb wrote:
Catmint 20906 asked me to post photos of my awful front hill, so here thy are -- photos taken this morning. The first is an overview -- the rest march from left to right. You can see this is very much a work in progress that is not yet ready for show time!

With regard to the flagstones I painted to mark the columns and rows, typwc, yes, I'll put them out eventually.... The neighbors have been very kind, but they are long-suffering since THEY have to look at this awful hill whereas I can ignore it when I'm not working on it -- that's why it took me so long to attack it -- I just didn't see it. Plus balancing on that hill in the blazing sun isn't much fun. Before I planted it, it was just ivy and vinca and Virginia creeper (plus ditch lilies at the bottom). Very nondescript. Now it screams! The landscape guy who works on the house across actually stopped me today to say it was "very" -- then he paused a long long time, and finally he said "ambitious." But he was in truth very sweet. He said he's been watching it all season. I asked him how he figures out where to locate plants when he does an installation and he says he just does it by instinct. That's the problem -- I couldn't do it by instinct because I get lost in the hill, and I need to make sure there are some fairly large drifts of plants so it doesn't look too patchwork-y; moreover, I couldn't lay out plants and think about how they'd look before planting them, because they'd roll down the hill.

This message was edited Aug 2, 2013 11:48 AM