pathway garden | MissingHenryMitchell

The plants

I installed another Hydrangea paniculata ‘Snowflake,’ a variegated Fatshedera lizei ‘Aureosomething’ (the tag, of course, is in the shed), perhaps two dozen or so displaced crocus and daffodil bulbs, and three Disporopsis perneyi, or Asian fairy bells. The Disporopsis were an impulse buy, a kind of horticultural checkout counter Toblerone. The evergreen foliage looks like that of Tricyrtis, another shade plant I love but which my voles apparently love more. I hope the Disporopsis‘s stiff vertical form will contrast nicely with the floppy, broad foliage of the hydrangea, and perhaps blend gracefully with the Fatshedera which I intend to cover the fence. As I mentioned before, in my mind it looks fantastic.

And, hoping that very late is better than never, I transplanted some winter-sown seedlings of Anemone virginiana and Mitella diphylla. The pathway may prove too damp and shaded for the anemones but I expect this site is marginally better than the milk carton in which they were ~~growing~~ sitting. If they do want more direct light than they’ll get here, I’ll move them to the white garden, but that bed expansion is further down on the to-do list. The mosquitoes back there are the size of hummingbirds, I swear.

It’s time to tackle a new spot in the garden. Actually, I have two areas that need reforming, but I’ll get to the second, and larger, area another time.

Here is the wasteland between the rain garden and the property-line fence.

The excuse I offer as to why I haven’t done anything with this spot is that it’s an easement for the power company. Of course, if you take a look at the post oak that’s sitting in the top of the photo, in the middle of the easement, you’ll see how often the power company makes use of it.

The space is 10 feet wide from the fence to the bricks that line the back of the rain garden. It’s time to do something here.

We’ve had 10 inches of rain over the past week, and rule number 1 of gardening is to never work the soil when it’s wet. A footnote to that rule, however, states that gardening in wet soil is permissible if one has been shut in the house with two bored children for a week, going steadily mad.

What luck!

Step 1: Layout

Using a garden hose, I laid out an outline of the path and bed. The path will echo the curve of the back of the rain garden, and the bed will be everything that’s not path. I used a scrap piece of lumber, about 4′ long, to help guide the hose and ensure the path’s width is even along its length. Then, using a flat-edged shovel, I dug a smooth edge behind the hose.

Step 2: Soil prep

Compacting the already-tiny pore spaces in my heavy clay is not an optimal way to start off a new garden bed, but working in 3 inches of leftover grit-manure mixture to improve the drainage seems like a reasonable compromise.

I tilled in the mixture only for the first third of the bed, because it was 92 degrees and steamy out, and clouds were on the horizon. I took a soil sample of this area a week ago, so I hope I’ll have a response after the holiday weekend. But guess what? I know it’s going to be impossibly acid and void of any nutrients, since that’s the condition of the rest of the unworked garden, so I sprinkled in a very light mixture of lime and a balanced fertilizer. I’ll add more as appropriate when the test comes back.

Step 3: Install edging.

I still have plenty of salvaged brick lying around. Some bricks have more mortar on them than I want to chip away: The return on the labor involved isn’t that high, particularly in the current semitropical conditions. But those bricks are perfect for garden bed edging: Set them so the mortar will be on the planting side, and no one will know.

I dug in the trenched space marking the edge of the bed, and laid the course of bricks. If you look closely, you’ll see the bubble in the level is high on the right. That means it’s not remotely level.

This isn’t surprising; the lot slopes downhill to the north, and the fence runs along the north border of the property. What was surprising was the amount by which I needed to raise the bricks to make them level.

By the way, like many projects, I am doing this one backwards. I should set the pathway first, and save the bed for last. But that’s not as much fun, and I have plants I shouldn’t have purchased now waiting to get in the ground that’s too soggy to be worked.

I leveled the bricks, to each other and to their mates across the way, using a layer of rubble. Then I packed everything firmly in place with lots of sticky mud.

Step 4: Plant those things you couldn’t resist buying last week.

When I stopped off at Big Bloomers last week and hauled away three flats of perennials, among them were 2 oakleaf hydrangeas (Hydrangea quercifolia ‘Snowflake’) and three Japanese beech ferns, Thelypteris decursive-pinnata, which may be semievergreen here. Crouching on a scrap piece of wood to avoid compacting my fluffyish new garden bed, I planted one of the hydrangeas, adding a mulch of chicken grit around the crown to help stave off rotting, two of the ferns, and a handful of seedlings of Iris tectorum that I grew in my winter sowing adventure. I mulched with a layer of shredded leaves on the newly tilled section.