Garden Fancy: Garden Timeline 2018

In 2018, I added one major new garden area, but removed two other areas, as I had promised myself I would do if I wanted to make any new gardens.

My new Paradise Garden inside my picket fence adheres to my general long-term plan of moving my more complex garden areas closer to the house, where I can see and enjoy them (and remember to maintain them), while leaving simpler, larger-scale plantings of trees and shrubs in areas farther from the house.

The Paradise Garden

The Paradise Garden: In April and May, my husband and I laid paving stones to outline four beds and built a small pergola in front of our enclosed front porch. I moved most of my roses and a number of other perennials from other areas to this new Paradise Garden. Inspired by exotic Islamic-style gardens, it is filled with scented and brightly-colored flowers, and exotic fruits (fig, orange, pomegranate) that are planted in pots and overwintered in the basement.

Due to a dreadful Japanese Beetle problem, by midsummer I draped a large net over the entire garden to protect my roses and other flowers. It worked quite well until a late-August storm with hurricane-force winds tore the net in several places (I was able to pin it together and keep using it until mid-September, when the beetle problem subsided for the year). The JBs have become a very serious problem for gardeners (and even more so for farmers and fruit growers), and I will be making future changes in planting choices in some of my garden areas in response.

By the end of the summer, the Paradise Garden looked better than I had thought possible, and was a wonderfully scented, butterfly-filled place to sit in, particularly in the evenings.

Reducing Garden Areas

I reduced several garden areas:

I eliminated the front, curvy flower border in the front section of the North Border, leaving just the evergreen Winter Border. The sod we removed from the Paradise Garden area fit perfectly into this area, and nearly all the flowers in this border were moved to the Paradise Garden or the Rainbow Border, leaving nothing wasted.

I also eliminated the Iris Border (on the left) and the Rose Border (on the right), leaving only the row of peonies that existed when we bought this property. All the roses and irises were moved into the Paradise Garden or the Cutting Garden, and these areas have been seeded with grass.

Pergola

We'd been thinking of building a pergola over the East Patio for the past several years, especially since we'd had the front porch enclosed into a sunroom leaving no shady place to sit outside, and my handyman and I finally got it done in June.