What do you do when you have large new borders to fill and would rather not A, spend much money or B, wait forever for them to look good? Steal like crazy from other parts of the garden – if you’re lucky to have an old garden that has plenty of divisions and too-big castaways to spare.
So as I wrote about on GardenRant, landscape architect Billy Goodnick drew me this cool plan for my ex-lawn – greatly enlarging my existing borders and reducing the lawn-like area to not much more than a path. So, where to start? First I used stakes and then oran
ge marking paint to create the new border – that’s easy enough. But now it’s mid-March and time to fill ‘em up.
The first photo is of the right-hand border (seen from the house and also on Billy’s sketch). You see the orange lines and the junipers I planted there yesterday. They spent the winter potted-up on my front porch, and seem to tolerate being moved every spring to the back yard to make room for Fun with Annuals on my front porch.
Also on the right are two large, severely cut-back grasses of some sort (varieties of Miscanthus, now forgotten), which were too big for their spots somewhere else, and I envision them draping 
gracefully over this large pot that will be trying to fulfill Billy’s vision of a focal point. Then behind all that are 3 year-old Itea ‘Little Henry’ which don’t look like much yet and I’ve decided I need 3 more of same to fill the area and mimic the kind of massing Billy suggests. What’ll go along the front of the border is anybody’s guess at this point.
And any ideas for what to put in the big pot?
Then in the lower photo here you see the lefthand border where I’ve moved the full-grown spirea to another focal point, and the enlarged border now jumps over the dry streambed (something I’d never have thought to do). To fill up the new space I planted some large carexes (including some that are blizzard-battered but presumaby capable of recovering), lots of smaller ‘Ice Dance’ carexes, and a flowing mass of lamb’s ears along the new edge of the border. The stepping stones WILL be moved and relaid to follow the center of the new lawn-like path through the garden.
So, any more ideas for filling up new borders for the Impatient Gardener?
{ 5 comments }
