So I live next door to a house that has a wonderful front garden. It’s densely planted with bulbs and shrubs and flowers, it’s thick and tangled and overgrown in the way that established cottage gardens get, and is generally just awesome.
The house just sold, and the new owner wants to tear the whole thing out and put in lawn.
I cringed when I heard this. This is terrible! Lawn! The horror!
But…the new owner is a pretty nice guy, apparently, he’s just not a gardener at all, and he knows he has no hope of keeping this thing from becoming Weed Jungle. So he has given the gardeners in the immediate neighborhood–four women, including me–carte blanche. If we can dig it, we can take it. Take it all. Take everything.
This is an excellent way to ingratiate oneself with the neighbors.
We four have met and made loose plans–“save me some glads. I’ll take those lemon lilies. I can fit a sweet william bush–you, take those daylilies! Take as many mums as you can fit!” Since I have the least established yard, however, I have far and away the most room, and the most eclectic color sense, so I’m the designated ark. (I get the impression there’s a lot of plant swapping in the neighborhood, which is how it should be! Already I’ve been brought a vicious little thorny orange tree and a clematis, and have offered free run of my hostas when they next need to be divided.)
Today I took my trowel and went over and went to work.
I have mums. I have daylilies. I have echinacea and gladiolas and lilies and iris (iris! good god! there are few plants on earth I love as much as iris!) James hauled me out to cool off, since it’s about 90 degrees here, and I am acquiring the coloration of a postmortem lobster. (I’m drinking lots of water and sweating like a pig, so hopefully I’ll stave off heat stroke. I don’t even care. Heat stroke would be worth it.)
Once I have shed some heat, it’s back out for gayfeather and passionflower, more glads, more daylilies, creeping thyme, cannas, spiderwort, hostas! (Passionflower and spiderwort get to live in Mr. Pot.) I may be all this all day. It’s not a great time to transplant plants, ‘cos of the heat, but since it’s that or get mowed, they’ll thank me later.
I am both sweating and giggling uncontrollably. This’ll get that flower bed established in a hurry…!
