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Great Garden Combinations

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Japanese maple and Hosta Gold Standard

The year after we landscaped our backyard and created our raised garden beds we purchased a lovely Tamukeyama cutleaf Japanese maple. As you can see from the photo above it’s branches cascade downward, it’s leaves are narrow and delicate and bright burgundy – red most of the growing season. It’s absolutely gorgeous.

It will never be a very big tree. I believe at most it will be five feet tall. At this point it’s only about three feet tall and because it’s branches create a shady area below the tree I decided to grow shade loving plants like the Hosta Sum and Substance that you see growing beside it in the above photo.

The Japanese maple and the light green hosta leaves make a lovely combination don’t they?

I think this year I’m going to try to move a few of my plants around to see if I can create a few more stunning displays of plants that compliment each other beautifully.

What are your favorite plant/color combos in your garden?

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Perfect combination

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I was uploading photos to my new dragonden’s home page Photrade account, going over older garden photos and I came across a few photos that I really loved.

One of them was this photo of Golden Hosta leaves (which ironically are chartreuse) and Grape Hyacinth (muscari). Isn’t it a lovely combination of colors?

If you want to see my garden here’s a sneak peek

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Warning! My garden is very small. It’s jam packed with plants, but it’s small.

Here’s a view of the garden. I took this photo while standing with my back against the edge of the house. In other words I took it from near the base of the back stairs.

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As you can see I utilized every space available!

To the immediate right there’s a small storage area. Basically it’s a large grey wooden box that’s attached to the stairs. We keep our garbage containers in it. On top of that area I have several balcony planters where I grow everything from lettuce to tomatoes. I’ve also got my Jasmine or Camellia or whatever it is (see last post) in that area, as well as a Christmas cactus, ornamental pepper and a passion flower.

Immediately in front of the garbage storage area and our enclosed back porch is our small patio area. You can only see a portion of this area in the photo. We have a nice patio table that takes up most of the patio space. We’ve also got raised flower beds surrounding the patio. You can’t really see the central flower bed well in this photo but it’s behind the table.

So the patio table is surrounded by lovely plants. This gives the area the feel of being a separate garden room. Yes, I’m growing some tomatoes in pots on the patio. I’ve also got containers with cucumbers, green beans and tiny tom or cherry tomatoes growing on the other side of the table.

The rest of the garden is a mass of roses, lavender, balloon flowers, brown eyed susans, spring bulbs, hostas, lilies, daylilies and at least a hundred other types of perennial and annual plants.

Our neighbors house is behind ours. He actually lives on the adjoining street so his driveway is at the end of our garden. We also have very close neighbors on either side and can in fact see at least four of our neighbors backyards from our garden. I suppose that’s why I’ve tried to grow plants that are 3+ feet tall along the edges of the garden. It creates the illusion of privacy even if our yard is not the least bit private.

Oh yes I said the garden was small. It measures about 17 feet wide by 30 to 35 feet in length from the back of the house.

There. So now when I talk about my backyard garden you’ll have a good idea of what I’m talking about.

BTW if you click on any of my photos it will take you to my flickr account where you can click on the words “all sizes” above the photo to see a larger image if you want to see the photo in greater detail.

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