Port Potager

Yesterday I wrote about the half of the perennial border that runs along the driveway . Today we'll walk around the corner to see the rest of it along the path that leads across the yard to the front door. Around the corner from the climbing roses, Siberian irises, and sedum ground cover is some white salvia. Behind the salvia is some red bee balm, which is just starting to bloom. The bees love  this section of the flower garden! There's also a male holly busy and another smallish peony (I really like the way these look even when the bloom is over, so I have a lot of them). Across the front is a wide swath of hardy mums that will bloom in the fall. Like I said, there are a lot of chrysanthemums here. Behind the mums are white lilies, Shasta daisies, and the female holly bush (that's the one that will have the berries in the winter). Beyond the holly the border widens near the front door. Across the back is a boxwood, rhododendron, and a big clump o...

All those giant piles of snow from the historically blizzard-prone Winter of 2015 left behind a lot of damage. Though the snow was initially very light and fluffy, it compacted into a heavy block of ice as the season wore on, and all those piles pinned down the branches of shrubs and garden plants. Not all the branches were able to withstand the weight of the melting snow, as I discovered this week when I was finally able to take a proper tour of the garden without snow boots. Starting in the perennial border, our tree peony took a big hit. Many branches were broken, and I'm not sure that it will be worth saving. It will depend on what it looks like when it blooms this spring, but I feel like it might be so lopsided that it will need to be replaced. This section of the border took a big hit, as it took on snow blown from the driveway and  snow shoveled off the music room roof. Here you can get a better idea of how lopsided the tree peony is (it's the plant on ...

When we moved into our house, the perennial border needed a lot of work. I've posted "before" photos of the border before, but these were really process shots showing what it looked like after we dug out or trimmed back a ton of overgrown stuff. I guess you could call them the "blank slate" pictures. One of the worst parts of the border back in the winter of 2010 was the holly bush, which clearly hadn't been pruned for several seasons: The tall tree in the front was a flowering pear tree that we chopped down a few months after this photo was taken. (Who plants a pear tree that doesn't produce pears? Clearly, that didn't belong in our future orchard space.) Behind that tall tree, against the house, are the holly bushes. The male one (against the porch to the right) is nice and compact, and needed only a trim to shape it up. But to the left of that (on the corner of the house where it meets the porch) is the female holly. Here you can see th...