Spring Refresh

Updating the garden 

Spring weather means a run to the garden center. I spent an enjoyable morning at The Natural Gardener's, which is probably the best nursery in Austin, both in terms of wide selection and price. I visited with some friends and their children, and the nursery is fun for kids as well. They have goats and chickens, a labyrinth, and lots of display gardens.  

Sun-loving plants 

• White Yarrow - 2-3' tall, spread somewhat aggressively, good for cottage gardens. part shade or sun 
• Tropical Salvia - 2-4' tall, sun, part shade; 
• Pink Skullcap - Low water use, in fact recommended for a rock garden. Good for a border, as it only gets about 10" tall, spreads 12-18" wide. I might put this in my new garden bed that has some black dalea in it. It gets full sun, and needs a good border.

Shade: 

• Texas Betony - 3 ft tall, red flower, part shade, moist soil
• Gulf Penstemon - 18" tall, purple flower, sun or part shade, moist soil, clay. Will reseed. Good companion with yellow columbine. 
• A few more pigeonberry - working on a shady part of the front yard under a newly planted mountain laurel. 
• Coleus for planting in some of my pots. 

Herbs: 

I needed to fill in some more herbs. Also, I like to give over a few herbs to swallowtail caterpillars. I got a few basil plants, but I couldn't find dill or chives. 

Trees: 

I have been wanting to plant another tree in the backyard to screen my view of the alley with dumpsters directly behind my house. Also, after last summer I just want more shade. They had Mexican plums, which have beautiful fragrant white flowers in the spring. 20-25' tall. 

I have a Mexican buckeye which produces a lot of seeds and seedlings. I am attempting to transplant a few of the seedlings to a few other spots that can use more trees. I think they're fast growing once they get established. But, also, they'll probably require a lot of maintenance given how prolifically they reseed. They are multitrunked as well, and in some spots I'll probably need to do some pruning to keep them manageable, near the house. 

Can't wait to get these all in the ground! 

New Garden

Here are some more photos of the side of the backyard. There used to be several indifferent seeming irises and daffodils back here. I dug up several, and meant to replant them, but forgot. I don't know if there's too much shade, but many of them didn't bloom. So I dug them up, and it's probably too late to replant them. I hear bulbs can't stay out of the ground for too long. 

Anyway, I put cardboard and mulch down to facilitate creating a new garden scenario back here. It's not super well-planned. It's quite shady, with some late afternoon sun. I placed some yellow Indian grass; we'll see how that does. I transplanted some coral berry from the other side of the back yard (see photo below). That stuff is a great groundcover for a shady spot, and it's spread all over my woodland, so I had to dig a lot up. I tried replanting over here, but it's not looking super perky, even after the 4 days straight of rain. 

will it survive?

I also transplanted turk's cap, which grows like gangbusters, so it'll probably take over within the next two years. I also transplanted a tropical sage, which was super easy to transplant, and two yellow columbines, only one of which survived. The rain def helped there.

I bought a Mexican honeysuckle and a beauty berry. I guess I'm aiming for a garden grounded with several large shrubs, and salvia, coral berry and twist leaf yucca for ground cover. It'll probably come out fairly eclectic, but I guess that's okay. That's more or less what I did in the front yard, and I'm enjoying that a lot.