It’s been a busy month in the garden. Two posts ago I talked about the dog memorial garden we put in, which is now starting to fill in.
We’ve also been rejuvenating our two front gardens (driveway and patio—so named because one is beside the driveway and the other—across from it—was originally meant to be a patio). They had stagnated in the time since we first planted them five or six years ago. The driveway garden was bogged down with bugleweed and dianthus, which crowded out the existing plants who were no match for the bugleweed’s onslaught. The garden had no vertical shape except for a red maple at the end of the bed, surrounded by dunes of matted groundcover.
The patio garden had run out of nutrients; the soil was dry and almost hydrophobic. The bee balms were stunted and the daisies less than prolific. Some plants like the blue oat grass were dying. Last year we had top-dressed both gardens with sea soil, a high nutrient amendment with salmon and mulch in it. But it needed more. Plus there were some bully knautia plants in the patio garden, which bloomed nicely but when they hit a foot tall they fell open in a radial pattern and crushed any surrounding plants. There was also some lavender that we hadn’t pruned properly so it was crowding out a rhododendron in the corner of the garden.
We moved a Korean dogwood from a too-sunny spot to a more shaded spot at the edge of the patio garden, and while at first it wasn’t happy, it settled in and bloomed nicely. But that was just part of the garden renovation. I was in Ottawa visiting my mom when D started the great garden reconstruction of 2026.
First he dug out all the bugleweed and dianthus. Then he dug out the knautia, some of the grasses, and the lavender. He planted a bunch of bee balm we’d got from a backyard gardener, and moved a few of the existing plants around.
When I got home we went shopping and got a whole bunch of new perennials to fill the now-empty gardens (especially the driveway garden). We even got milkweed! Which I’m so excited about but I don’t think it will mature until next year. Then maybe we’ll get some butterflies! We also got sea holly, a deep blue spiky flower with thistle-like leaves and a ruff around the flower like some kind of torture device. They’re like thistles, but more polite. We got a hibiscus bush to put in the middle of the driveway garden; hopefully the azalea next to it will recover from being moved (and pruned) for both of them to make a good show next summer. D planted blanket flower and Echinacea and all sorts of new flowering plants. Each in its own hole in the ground enriched with sea soil.
Right now the driveway garden looks a bit odd, with plants here and there and spaces in between. It’s not as bad in the patio garden because we already had a number of plants in there. But it’s particularly obvious in the driveway garden where we had to remove all the groundcover.
The next step is to run soaker hoses through each garden and top-dress everything with sea soil, then see how it all grows over summer. One of the reasons we focused on these gardens was that watering all of them used too much water and took a lot of time. We’re focusing on the gardens we can see and enjoy from our small front deck, rather than keeping up with the lower perennial border.
We’re already seeing the fruits of our labours. There was a moth on the white mock orange blossoms in the memorial garden, and a bee of some type on the orange globules of one of the buddleias. A gorgeous pale yellow and black butterfly flittered around one of the rhododendrons in the patio garden for a few minutes, while a bee was busy throwing themselves into the rhodo flowers, emerging coated in pollen. I was watering the perennial grass in the memorial garden and a garter snake slithered out—I had disturbed their basking spot. The hummingbirds have been whizzing across the yard; one of them tested out our fuchsia hanging baskets.
At night we still hear the frog chorus, sometimes overlain by the hooting of the barred owl. I’ve seen cats out hunting in the back-40—there are four cats in our area and they apparently don’t get along (D has heard the catfights). I’m happy to have cats to kill the rats (who made their way into our garden shed again), but I also know they kill songbirds. We have so many more songbirds than since we moved here and created habitat for them, so any time one dies it’s a tragedy. We haven’t seen any carcasses, but who knows where cats hide them. Or if they take their kills home with them. I wish they would just stick to rats and rabbits.
It’s been a busy time at Stonehill Acres (unofficial name lol), and we are eagerly awaiting the filling in of the garden as the summer progresses.
