Mid-April: The gardening season begins!

Cherry blossoms in Washington, D.C.

Greetings! After returning from a wonderful trip with my family to Washington, D.C. and Colonial Williamsburg, I'm back in my gardens, starting to make some of the many changes that I have been planning since last fall. While in D.C. and Virginia, I was able to visit many beautiful gardens:

• Williamsburg's numerous Colonial-style formal gardens
• several Smithsonian Museum gardens
• the iconic cherry blossoms planted around the tidal pool in D.C.
• the U.S. Botanic Garden's magnificent conservatory
• the reconstructed gardens of George Washington at Mount Vernon
• and the stylish gardens designed by Beatrix Farrand at Dumbarton Oaks in Georgetown. 

I took many photos and got a number of ideas, and have returned inspired to work in my own gardens.

Being away for the first ten days of April, I could really see a difference in my gardens when I returned -- spring had sprung while we were gone! I'll share a few scenes from what's been happening around here in the last couple of weeks in this post, and show some of the areas I'm working on.

One area that has looked good is the early spring bulb border I planted a couple of years ago in front of our house:

Tulips, daffodils, and grape hyacinths in the early spring bulb border.

From the other direction, showing the crown imperial fritillaria and basket-of-gold. For some reason my fritillaria are only about two feet tall, when I know they're supposed to be 3-4 feet in height. Does anyone else have this issue?

Fritillaria michailovskyi, a much shorter fritillaria.

Tulips, hyacinths, grape hyacinths and alliums coming up in my front border. I completely re-did this border last year, after problems with invasive (so-called) obedient plant. I'll mostly plant bulbs and annuals here for a while.

There are a number of nice things blooming in other areas of my gardens now, but there are also some areas that don't look so great because I've been digging and transplanting things in them, as well as downsizing several areas.

I'm redoing my east patio garden beds. I plan to make a scented garden area, with mostly plants that smell nice (and hopefully look good too). 

A few days later, after everything has been sprayed and then cleared out of the left two beds. I'll wait a couple of weeks, have my husband spray any weeds that come up once more (we have a real problem with runner grass and creeping charlie in many of our beds that I'm trying to get a handle on -- I'm thinking of installing deep metal edging around the beds to try to keep it out). Then I'll start planting the many scented shrubs, perennials, annuals and bulbs that I have been planning for this area.

I reduced the length of my Rainbow Border, to make it easier to maintain, and I've been moving the plants around to fill in the space more closely so that weeds have less room to get started.

Another view of the end of the Rainbow Border, showing the removed area. I'll install the edging bricks properly in the next week or two.

I did the same thing with the Yellow Garden, reducing the size to make it easier to care for and planting more densely. The extra stepping stones have since been moved to another area.

Another view of the back (north) side of our house, showing the large area that has been removed and seeding with grass. I'll leave a narrow bed against the house to make mowing easier.

The past two weeks since we returned from our trip has been an orgy of digging and moving plants around for me. It's hard work but it's also very satisfying, because I've been planning these changes since last year and thinking about them all winter, so it's great to finally be able to start doing them. There are still numerous projects I want to do, but I just need to keep working on them little by little before it gets too hot to move plants (or to move myself, for that matter).

Hope you are enjoying a lovely spring and getting a good start on your own gardening projects this year. Thanks for reading!  -Beth