Each Little World

Pond-redesign update: The little gravel garden goes away

Garden projects like re-doing the pond are never quick or easy. They also create related projects that need doing at the same time. That's the case with this secondary project that we finished last week. This shows the area as it looked in the early years as you came around the house to the back garden. The old is deck on the left and the pond on the right. 

In 2008 we decided to turn this discreet area into a raked gravel garden to relate it to the one out front. Mark removed the grass, made a sinuous rock wall and put down weed barrier. 

It got topped off with fine gravel, raked and looked perfect. 

Thirteen years later, it is less than perfect with construction debris — limestone pieces and an old wood bench — taking up space. Both shrubs had seriously deteriorated from bad winters and bad bunnies. Mark and I decided that this raked gravel garden made no sense if we were turning the big pond into one as well. This smaller one would detract from the pond re-do, so it had to go. To revert this area back to a planting zone, meant that everything that had gone into its creation now had to come out.

First Mark removed the best gravel off the top and added it to the front gravel garden. The rest went into the pond (below) as filler. 

Then he pulled up all those pieces of weed barrier to reach the soil level.

But before we could add more dirt, we had to pull out the stone wall. 

Despite being smallish stones, they were heavy and not easy to just grab and pull out. I know since I helped on this part of the project. 

As stones were being pulled out on one side of this slope below the Tea House, they were being used to create a new wall on the other side. Previously logs delineated the path. 

First load of soil goes down just before the mostly dead shrubs were removed. The one on the left is a Burning Bush so I was fine with seeing it go.

Glad I left the flags in place as I never would have been able to figure out where my spring ephemerals were planted once the rock wall was gone. 

A second load of dirt and the area is ready for me to plant. The rock piles on the back right are for a different project. 

I used two bags of our chopped leaf much to keep the dirt from blowing away. 

I more or less have a planting plan; I just need to get up and out early enough to have energy to do the work. 

A new water feature

It always seems to me that gardeners in the UK have so many options for garden items, both practical and decorative. In the US, there are lots of things for the garden that are cute and colorful, but not many items that appeal to our taste. Here is the kind of water feature I keep seeing in British gardens, but no one is selling anything like it that I could find here.

It may not look like much at the moment, but we are both thrilled with our version of the above water feature. This is what's known as a "tank end" from the end of a tanker truck.

A friend of ours who is an artist blacksmith, suggested a tank end as an option for our water feature. He found us one and cleaned it up and did some repairs. We picked it up from him Sunday. It weighs 100 pounds so Mark did an elaborate setup to get it out of his truck. 

It's currently resting on a dolly in the driveway, but we've already decided where it should go in the garden. We have never made a joint garden decision so fast in our lives, which shows how excited we are to get it in place. 

It's 39" in diameter, so it will make a significant statement when it's flipped over and filled with water. It has a valve on the bottom with a plug so we can empty it easily if we need to clean it etc. More pictures once it's place.

The Ginkgo gives in

The big Ginkgo biloba finally acknowledged that it was cold enough and windy enough for it to bow to the weather and release its foliage. Love these pale yellow leaves against the silver blue spikes of Juniper 'Blue Star.'

The ground directly under the Ginkgo is thick with fallen leaves. Note the foliage of the Itoh Peony on the left. It is still almost perfect; the only Peony that never has fungal problems. 

The surface of the pond has so many leaves floating on it that you can't distinguish it as water. 

Garden reality

My garden was going to be one of the stops on the 2020 Garden Bloggers Fling in Madison until the pandemic put paid to such group events. Now I am glad it got postponed as it seems like it's been one problem after another in the garden.

First up was a leak in the stream between our pond and the header pool above it. Mark managed to find that leak and fix it. All was well until we realized there was yet another leak which still has not been identified. In the meantime, the pond is turned off so we can monitor the water level while Mark continues to investigate.

Mark promised me that he would give me ten years of his time to create a garden. He's devoted the better part of twenty years to it, but is more than ready to leave things up to me. I have never really managed the pond in all those years, so I just left the lilies that a critter upended out of their pots to float upside down on the pond. It does not seem to have stopped them from blooming. 

The garden is full of vignettes like this: plants in pots where you least expect them and where they don't add to the charm of the landscape. On the upside, all my loose pots are nicely caged to protect them from the bunnies. 

Finishing a project does not mean putting away the things you used — like buckets of rocks from the pond. There are no visitors coming to the garden, so who needs to clean up as they go? 

Our Japanese maple that we thought was killed in the polar vortex of 2018/19. It is coming back but looks pretty ridiculous at the moment. Still undecided if it should stay or go. 

The floral stalwarts of the garden did not make an appearance — or barely so — this year. Lilium landini is totally MIA while the Martagons got hit by the late frost and did not perform well at all. So there would have been no big floral display for the Bloggers if they had come. 

But the really big problems are the big items in the garden like our Arborvitae hedge that has been destroyed by the last few winters. The plants probably need a truck and a chain to put them out which can be done via our neighbor's driveway.  They will be replaced with a fence to obscure the sight of their vehicles. But Mark is much less interested in designing a fence than he once was, so we just walk by this mess and ignore it. 

In addition to this major problem in the front garden, it appears verticillium wilt has killed half of one of the trees that keeps my garden in the back from frying up in the late afternoon. None of this would feel so overwhelming if we were comfortable just called various folks to deal with these problems. But we are really limiting contact with anyone but a few close friends. 

So I am just trying to ignore all the problems and enjoying planting, cutting flowers for the house and even weeding which has been a breeze given our endless rain in June.

Home through the Hasselblad

Mark has spent his time during the past four months photographing with a variety of cameras: Digital, Pinhole and large format. Over the weekend, a friend loaned him a medium format Hasselblad camera. He used it to take these photos of our garden after spending time reading the manual, a big hardcover book! I love the mysterious, almost haunting quality of the images this film camera produced.

My English imitation

Euphorbia wulfenii is a mediterranean plant for Zone 7. No way it will grow in my Z. 4-5 garden. But I have been crazy for it since the first time I ever saw a picture of it in an English garden. 

It's only a couple of years after planting Euphorbia palustris at the edge of the upper pool that I realized how similar the effect is to that of E wulfenii.

An unexpected but very pleasant surprise. 

A note of normalcy

At 5:43 p.m. Friday afternoon, our pair of Mallard ducks flew in. Fred and Ethel, as we call them, typically appear the minute our pond is iced out enough for them to land. This is the 22nd year they have visited our garden.

Given the typical life expectancy of ducks which are not in captivity, this is probably not our original pair. Since we did not "band" them, there is no way of knowing for sure. 

But we prefer to think that they are our first Fred and Ethel, behaving as though the world was its normal, old self.

Blue Monday

Freezing rain on Friday evening with a bit of snow on Saturday has done little to provide protection for the garden from the single digit temperatures forecast this week. Nor did it glam the garden up the way a heavier snowfall would do. That means my focus for the foreseeable future will be the gardens I visited last summer.

It is rare to see a bottle tree up north, but this one looks completely natural as it repeats the intense color on the trellis in the image directly above.

Betsy True and Danny Aerts garden on one acre with mushrooms, fruit and flowers, a pond and a prairie, bees and chickens, a pizza oven and more. This is a shot of their fenced veggie garden which also contains pears, quince and espaliered apples. 

It's inspirational — and educational — no matter where you look. That's Betsy between me and another WHPS member. 

Tell the Truth Tuesday

This is the view from the deck to the hill at the rear of the garden a number of years ago. We've always called it the "Buddha Mound" in reference to the stone grouping on it.

This is what it looks like at the current moment. Not too bad from a distance, though the afternoon sunlight is making the evergreen trees look silvery and sick. Twenty years of increasing shade has put paid to all that lovely green sod in the image above; last winter's cold killed the Bloodgood Japanese maple.

The bird is standing on the rock that is in the pond. Look closely behind him and you will see what the hill looks like in reality. This hill and its partner across the path are perfect candidates for Tell the Truth Tuesday, the meme originated on Bonney Lassie's blog. 

I decided to take a black and white photo to help me figure out what was happening on this slope and what interventions were necessary. The four areas circled in pale green are the plants that can stay (from left): green Hakonechloa grass, a European ginger patch and groups of ferns.

When you take a closer look this is what you see. This patch with wild strawberry, violets and Aguga is as good as it gets on this hill at the moment. 

There's Virginia waterleaf (lower right), a plant that would be ok in a woodland setting, more violets and a grassy looking weed. 

The most prolific ground cover on this hill is this unknown weed which has tried all summer to take over my garden. Look closely and you will see it is present in many different sized generations. 

It's easy to pull out but keeps returning. I can't denude a slope without instantly re-planting it — which is what I've started to do on the back side of this mound. 

The back side of the Buddha mound is less steep and easier to work on since it is next to an accessible path. The green circles mark new ground-covering Junipers, the orange notes a patch of moss and the pink arrow indicates a swath of assorted ferns. All of these are keepers. The purple circle is a dwarf Mugo pine that died after two miserable winters. When I dug it out, I realized it was quite root-bound which is this gardener's fault. I am admitting partial responsibility but letting the weather also claim part. 

The ferns, central dark green moss patch and some of the shrubs are all clearly visible here. I replaced the Mugo pine with a boxwood from elsewhere in the garden. 

The whole curving top of this mound is covered in the same weeds growing on the front side. I am slowly pulling them out and replacing them with assorted varieties of Carex. 

I'm planting different Carexes on the adjacent Turtle Mound which is smaller, less steep and accessible on all sides. These are planted on one foot centers and I'm hoping a few of them will fill in enough by next season that we won't be stuck staring at bare dirt for years.

This is the reality that even many visitors don't quite notice let alone you folks who are looking at garden images on your digital devices. Proof that our garden is not as perfect as I sometimes make it look in my photos. 

IVOM: A late summer bloomer

This last week we've had a few more visitors stop by to see the garden, so I wanted to freshen up the Tea House flowers. The orange lily stem that I featured for our recent big tour group had given up the ghost. But I wanted to keep the lichen-covered stem and the glaucous Hosta leaf.

My garden is almost empty of flowers at the moment; lots of things in bud but not much blooming. I added a trailing berry branch that I clipped before it took root in my garden from my neighbor's big patch. 

Arrowhead (Sagitaria latifolia), which grows in our pond, was about the only flower available but it proved up to the task.

To see what other gardeners have found to put in a vase today, visit Cathy at Rambling in the Garden who hosts this long-running Monday meme.