I'd say we're in phase 3 of renovation of Two Turtles Garden. It all started about a month back, the first warm weekend we've had. I decided to dig out the rake & clean up the blanket of oak leaves in my little square patch of dirt (with a tree that really deserves more room, it's got to be about my age considering the vintage of my little house; about my age, which is thirty somethin'.)
So armed with rake and a stack of yard bags (which I had to actually insert myself into to reach the bottom to open them up... I'm sure that was amusing for the neighbors. Dang! What's that nutty lady who lives over there doing now?!) I spent several hours defoliating my plot. Not only did I rake the leaves, I weeded and painstakingly extracted the few plants I wanted to keep (several liriopes that were a legacy of some former owner, some violets that grow under my tree, a few struggling plants I put in last year; vincas, a stunted lavendar [note to self: watering helps this] and a scraggly little sedum).
Next stop, one of those little temporary gardeny-center places that sprout like so many weeds in the parking lots of strip malls everywhere (OK, at least around here they do, I can't vouch for the garden center habits of say, Hokkaido.) We get the guy to point us in the direction of the perrennials. (Why do people go out every year and buy a flat of boring, monotone annuals and plunk them down in their flower beds the same damn place they put the same damn plants last year? That kind of makes me sad for them.)
My garden is trying very hard to be shady, what with the tree presiding over it. I call her Grendel, and yes I know Grendel was not a she. My tree is a she and she's a Grendel. She's my tree; I pay the mortgage, I can call her George W. Bush if I want. But I wouldn't do that to her; I like her and I think she is more intelligent than the aforementioned shrubbery. Anyway, back to shady. For some reason these strip mall gardeny places (and places like Home Dump, for that matter) seem to think that we all live in houses ever-lit by full noon sun without anything resembling flora of the arboreal kind. Maybe in some strange sci-fi future, or when global warming has deforested the planet, but not today, Mr. Weasley. (I try to channel Dame Maggie whenever I say this... Little Turtle is typically not amused, as she is not a fan of hearing the no.) Oh yeah, I was discussing shade.
So, very few plants at this stripmallgardenythingy like the shade. I settled for primarily ones in the variety of full sun to part shade, reasoning that all of my yard gets sun at some point during the day, but I also took a risk & went with some just plain full sun plants too. And one shrub, Juniper, who I put in a shady corner, dammit. She's my juniper, Juniper, and I'll put her where I want, shade be damned. If she stays miniature, I will tell people she's a bonsai and I did it on purpose.
So, home we go with our little batch of perrennials, plus a few annuals such as some highly cheerful Gerber daisies, celosia and some (yawn) marigolds that Little Turtle (LT whenever I'm feeling too lazy to type it out) picked out to fill some planter boxes that have been home to a succession of wolf spiders in my back yard since I moved in. No more will I doubt LT's eye for flowers. They look smashing together, inclusive of the marigolds. See?
So, we bring our little treasures home and I start setting them in likely looking places, meandering around with my glass of red wine (it's cocktail hour by now and I worked damn hard raking and whatnot) shifting my little plantses around. Call it Turtle Feng Shui, if you will.
Being extremely grubby from my day of garden prep, I decide to wait until the next day to settle these babies into their new homes. Plus, I know I will need to take a trip to Home Dump for some good garden soil & mulch first, so they can get to know their new neighbors from their containers until tomorrow (I went with mostly singles of each type of plant I selected, so their neighbors would not have been housed in the same holding pen at the gardeny place, hence new neighbors). It's cocktail hour and I know for a fact plantses like to kibitz at this time of day, so they should be OK with that. Plus, being cocktail hour I'm in no mood to face the morass of Home Dump or all the suburbanites grabbing up their annual quota of pansies and impatiens (bleh). Let's let the sun go down on Two Turtles Garden for now.
Stay tuned for the saga of planting. It's a gripping, cliffhanger of a tale.
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