I haven’t written/shared much about my garden this year, although you’ve been seeing photos of it in my “views from my camera roll” posts throughout the summer. Basically, it’s been a very good year in the garden. A bit hot, of course. But we’ve had more rain than a lot of places in the country. My plants are thriving. And – best of all – the deer have not been around this year. At all. (While welcome, I also wonder . . . where they’ve gone???)

I have this big, shady corner of my garden that I’ve always pretty much let . . . go wild. For years and years, it’s just done its own thing back there. I mean . . . I maintain it. I weed and we do some edging and mulching, and I plant things, but there is no real “design” . . . or even a rhyme or reason. It’s always lush and shady and filled with “volunteers” and ground cover that (sometimes) runs rampant (and sometimes doesn’t). It’s almost never the star of my garden-show (except lately, in the spring), but it’s been easy and Just Fine from a maintenance standpoint.

Until this past May . . . when a couple of HUGE limbs from a big, old nuisance mulberry tree came down in a storm and wreaked havoc in my shade garden! One big limb took out a white pine and half of my bottle brush buckeye . . . and smashed plenty of smaller plants, too. It was a mess . . . and, eventually, we had to take out the whole troublesome mulberry (which caused even more mess). The resulting “hole” in my back garden caused my formerly shady corner to be, well . . . a whole lot sunnier.

Tom (who says he’s not a gardener, but has become a gardener despite himself) and I spent a lot of time walking around in that mess of a corner this summer after the tree was gone . . . just thinking and plotting and planning what we could do to heal that space and make it beautiful.

Now that the weather has cooled down . . . and with fall on the way . . . we’re taking action to transform our sad, damaged back corner into something wonderful.

Bring on . . . my wrecking ball!

That’s Tom, of course. With a hoe and a shovel, he has no trouble at all just . . . digging in! (Of course, with any wrecking ball situation, there will be some collateral damage, but that’s the price you pay . . . ) (So long, little primroses . . . )

In a couple of sessions, Tom dug out most of the ground cover (I’d like to say “all,” but for any of you who have dealt with “happy” ground cover, it’s never “all”. . . ) while I pulled out the “undesirables” — those plant volunteers that, well . . . it’s just that you no longer need their service, y’know?

Tom created a new path through the corner garden, and then mulched it all up. As you can see from the top photo, the whole thing looks much more manageable now. Not finished — not yet — but we can, at least, see where we want to go from here.

We’d decided to add three new trees to the space, and had identified (generally) where they’d go, but it was too hot this summer to plant trees. Now that it’s cooler . . . we headed off to our reliable local tree nursery to scope out the selection. (Did you know that the fall is a GREAT time to plant trees? As long as you water them WELL throughout the fall, they will set good roots before the ground freezes and then be ready to grow in the spring.)

We ended up with FOUR trees (one – a tiny larch – will go elsewhere in the garden). We’ll be planting a small serviceberry (you can actually see it, still in its nursery pot, in the top photo), a native dogwood, and a Canadian hemlock (NOT the poisonous variety of hemlock) in the back corner garden. (The small serviceberry and the tiny larch came home with us in my car, but the hemlock and the dogwood are too big for my Outback and need to be delivered. These are photos I took of the trees in their nursery environment, though.)

             

Once the new trees are all in place in our garden, we’ll start digging up existing plants and moving them around. (And next spring, I’ll replace those primroses. . . )

Things are really taking shape now. It’s been a good experience for me – and for my wrecking ball, too – to work through a big, unexpected – and most unwelcome – garden challenge this summer; to remind ourselves that good things – better things – can come from disasters.

Onward!