During the last two days, my gardening hours have been spent tackling the Stepping Stone Garden. It is another garden area that abuts the dry creek area but on the other side, across from the shrub area that I was working on a few days ago. Some of my garden areas evolve from a creative idea and others evolve from some kind of need. The Stepping Stone Garden evolved from the latter as it is used as the main path to go back and forth from the backside of the house around to the walkout basement patio and on down to the pond. The hardscaping is nice. Large flat stepping stones, one of the white boulders that came out of the basement excavation, and a dogwood motif bench. I didn't have any ideas in mind when I started the initial plantings though. I mostly planted pass along plants with a few purchased plants thrown in here and there. Very haphazard and over the years there has been a lot of self seeding. A few years ago I purchased and planted a pink dogwood tree, with intentions of making it a focal point and doing something in that garden area as far as design goes. I did work on the smaller bed on one side of the stepping stones, but that is as far as I got. The large bed on the other side has continued to be left to mother nature's devices and getting more and more daunting to deal with.
Keeping with my goal to stay focused on the dry creek area, I finally started to tackle it. Weeding the stilt grass was only the first hurdle. What a job! It had woven in and out of all those self seeded perennials, engulfing everything, including the dogwood motif bench. I still have to remove stilt grass stragglers, but I am now able to see the bones of what I've got to work with. The plants that have self seeded the most are monarda fitulosa, scutellaria, silene, campanula 'Elizabeth', and obedient plant 'Vivid'. There are also mature clumps of hellebores, geranium macrorrhizum and iris tectorum, some columbine, downy wood mint, and brunnera, a really nice maidenhair fern, four pink peonies, and other odds and ends.
From a design perspective, my gardens look better to me when I group the same plants together. Having the randomness of self seedlings grow and intermingle everywhere is much more suited to a cottage garden. The monarda will be relegated to a large swath along the last ten feet of the dry creek and curve around into the back side of the garden. The scutellaria will be relegated to a large swath along the 12"x12" flagstone pavers that provide maintenance access at the back side, which by the way needs attention too. The pavers that are there need to be readjusted and I need to set more to finish what I had started. I'm going to be ruthless with the silene. It is everywhere now. I'll pull most of it except for along the stepping stones. The deer are eating the campanula 'Elizabeth'. How they find it under the stilt grass is beyond me. I'm going to pull most of it too. I'll keep a bunch to put in a large container and try to keep it safe from deer damage. I'm still on the fence about what to do with the obedient plant 'Vivid'. I could keep letting it go to eventually fill in the large space that it is self seeding in, or I can dig the plants up and relocate them to fill up a smaller space. Too hot to transplant now, so that is a decision that will have to wait for the September timeframe. I also want to make small delineations between clumps of perennials by pulling plants encroaching on each other or again, waiting for the September timeframe to dig, divide, and relocate some things. Still a lot of work to get this garden in shape, the story of my gardening life 
Discussions:
| Thread Title | Last Reply | Replies |
|---|---|---|
| So Nice by vic | Aug 4, 2019 9:53 AM | 2 |
| Lovely by slowcala | Aug 4, 2019 7:47 AM | 1 |
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