Garden Timeline 2026

We made several improvements in our gardens in 2026, which needed to be done in May, because I had determined that I would finally open my gardens to the public in early June. I had been hoping for many years to have an open garden, and I'd had a few small groups visit before, but I'd never announced my garden being open to the general public before. But June 6th was the date.

The pressure was definitely on to get my gardens shipshape, although the spring weather wasn't ideal: April was cold and rainy, so I did hardly any garden work, and then the summer blow-dryer was suddenly switched on at the end of April, with no rain and hot winds for almost six weeks. But we still managed to do some necessary projects and improvements:

Fixed Displaced Pavers

Most of the paving stones and steel edging around my Paradise Garden were displaced by the new fence we had installed in Fall 2025 and needed to be re-laid. Our 20-year-old son very kindly helped me fix things. 

In the southwest corner of the Paradise Garden (far left in the picture below), we had to excavate and then install a large wood 6"x6" treated timber, 11 feet in length, to support the pavers on an even level, as the ground slopes away at that corner.

My Paradise Garden looked pretty ragged on May 1--and you can't even see the worst of it in the back left corner, where the entire outer row of pavers was displaced and sagging.

You can just glimpse the outer row of pavers in this corner of the Paradise Garden. The wood board that had helped support them had been pulled out by the fence installers. We replaced that flat board with a 6x6 treated timber that spanned the entire distance from the sidewalk at right to the end of the fence. And I moved a boxwood to the spot outside the fence corner, to disguise the supporting timbers and change in level.

New Paver Paths

Another bigger project was adding pavers between my Herb Garden and my east patio beds. I removed the sod with a shovel and leveled the area, and our son laid the pavers over gravel and sand.

Our son has gotten pretty good at doing this....

This is the new "Superhighway" to the Herb Garden. My son also dug out two of the boxwoods to make a new, second entrance into the Herb Garden closer to our house. (It used to have just one entrance at the far end at right, but my husband suggested making this entrance and that was a good idea.) I hope this new sidewalk will keep grass from invading the flower beds around the patio.

Here is the new paver sidewalk from the opposite angle. We also leveled up and laid pavers between the Herb Garden and this side of the flower beds around the patio. There used to be a strip of lawn and more fence between them, and grass and weeds constantly invaded that bed, growing under the fence. (The fence used to entirely enclose this area, with a gate at the sidewalk at left, and another gate in the distance near the corner of our house. But we liked the open, un-fenced view on this side of our house, and I also wanted to connect the Herb Garden with the patio and pergola--plus keep out the grass.)

New Ornamental Rock

We bought a new ornamental rock for the West Island,
and placed it in front of a sumac tree (rhus glabra) cultivar we planted
a couple of years ago. The edge of the rock echoes the shape of the trunk.

A closeup of the rock shows the interesting silvery places in the orangey-pink
rock. I'm not sure what kind of rock this is, possibly feldspar with mica.
But the silver glitters in the sunlight and it's really pretty.