The ever evolving flower garden

This is what our front garden looked like when we bought. Huge, overgrown, oddly placed bushes, along with some moderately sized rocks. At first I thought it was great. I thought it was really nice landscaping. Then I lived with it for a year and couldn't wait to tear it out and do something more practical, colorful, and balanced.

There used to be another yellow green bush right where the impatiens are that I took out. That year, the impatiens did fairly well there. However, they did get quite a bit of sun and suffered towards the end of the summer.

Fast forward to this past summer and we obviously tore out everything. Even the huge crepe myrtle and replaced it with a smaller one that we can prune to a nice tree look. If we live here that long. The overall look of the garden is still evolving though. It is quite large and hard to imagine it all filled up with mature perennials because everything is still so new, only about a year old. I have found though, that the impatiens are forever going to live in that little but long space against the wall...in the shade. One little plant mounded up to about 3' wide last year. It was fantastic. We have some great wildflower looking plants that should show off a bit this year like, coreopsis, echinacea, and blue daisy.

This spring we moved a couple of things. We moved one boxwood tree down about 4' and moved our hydrangea to the boxwoods' old home. It will really be in the shade then, and hopefully will bloom this year and not get scorch

ed.

And this year, we decided to get rid of our dwarf alberta spruce tree and replace it with something more tolerant of our summer heat. I loved this little tree because it would have filled out the space, and provided a great evergre

en look year round. However, as you can see, the little bit of sun it got, and our summer heat took it's toll. Another year of the same, and the tree was just not going to make it.

We have until the end of march to take it back to TLC and exchange it for something better. So we're on the lookout.

We were drawn to these two plants:

Purple Lilac

Golden Forsythia

I love the bright yellow, and the lilac is so pretty. However, we think these two plants will compete with the rose that is in close proximity, and they are not year round evergreens or very tree like. So...we're going to look some more this week.