Here is the back before we dug the new foundation for the addition.


(yes, I know  this is about moving my roses, but you need to see how their placement came about and how I had to learn to put the pieces of the puzzle together... light, soil, area etc... so bear with me through this rather long tale...)

The addition has begun, the river rock bed has “Big O” under and slopes toward the back corner of the garden where a deep rock well was dug to keep any water run-off from draining into neighbouring gardens.



I think this river-rock bed is a clever and attractive way to hide a drainage pipe. I cannot take credit for it, but I love how it looks and how it serves a good purpose too.

The large stone at the end of the ‘bed’ is on top of a 4 foot deep hole filled with gravel and stone.  

One day, we will put a water feature of some sort here, so in order to do that, we needed to move that stone. Once the gardens are in, we will not want the digger crawling down through them to move it...imagine it smashing roses, and tomatoes and sweet little peas !  Ack !  So it has to be moved soon.  We’ll just have him move it to one side, plant something lovely down there, with a statue or other feature.  But that remains for another creative day.

This is the way the south-west corner looked before the work began in the  Spring.  The cedar hedge is ours with a very large  Black Walnut in the background - in the neighbour’s garden.  I have researched what will grow under it and the list is quite extensive but for my purposes, all I have to plant will be happy.

This is the same corner, during the rock placing act.  That big rock in the corner, actually came out of the hole from the foundation.  The top split off and so the boys thought it would be a great sitting rock - they dubbed it the ‘Love Rock’.

I plan to put Hydrangeas on either side with Astilbes in front of them.  I have 3 large “Endless Summer” that I fed Aluminum Sulphate to keep them blue; one called “Claudie”, one “Lace Cap” and a “Nikko Blue”.  

As for Astilbes?  I brought at least 20 in shades that vary from white to  mauve and pink. Some are a few years old and some, I started from bare roots this past Spring.  In fact, I bought them in May, got busy and forgot them until the end of June. They were pretty dried out, but I doused them with water and two days later plunked them into the soil.  Guess what? Of the 18 in the bag (a real deal)  15 survived.  Except for the 2 the bratty squirrel dug up.   Yuk.

But on to more about gardens.