Some Garden Success!

Those of you who read my blog may remember that last spring, I completely replanted the garden in front of our house. This is what it looked like shortly after installation. (You can see the whole ugly story here.) The plants did well over the summer but then in August, we had our house painted and many of them got stepped on repeatedly. I didn't know how many would survive.

But I'm happy to report that virtually everything I planted has done well! I'm going for a cottagey/woodland type look, and the garden is coming along just as I hoped it would at this point. The dwarf Chinese astilbe ground cover is slowly filling in the openings between plants. This ground cover needs a lot of water but is beautiful when in bloom. This week, I added a few begonias to fill in some of the remaining gaps. Begonias are far from my favorite annual, but they seem to do well in this garden.

The one problem is the Japanese maple tree, which is actually our second such specimen. In spite of the pampering I've provided, only the bottom half is leafed out. But since the tree appears otherwise healthy, we've decided to leave it in place for now and see what happens this summer.

I tried a few new plants in this garden, including these foam flowers. They look a lot like astilbes.

Another plant new to me is cranesbill. This particular one has deep purple accents on the leaves and dainty flowers of a similar color.

And the best part of this garden project isn't even in the garden. It's the new paint color on the house: No More Pink!

Here's to a bit of garden success!