shady area

My replacement roses are doing great this year

Welcome to all the new Green Thumb Sunday members that I finally got around to adding yesterday! I hope you enjoy our little group.

Earlier this week I went out into the garden with my camera and I took a number of great photos of the plants that were blooming and new ones that were growing, but I’ve had such a busy week I didn’t get around to transferring them from my camera to my computer yet. That’s the trouble with photos, especially if you take a lot of them at once – it takes time to prepare them for posting.

Anyway … I do have some photos to share that I took two weeks ago. Just imagine the plants being bigger or having more leaves now. 😉

This is the Climbing Iceberg Rose that I bought last summer to replace Antique ’89. Antique ’89 must have had too much winter damage in 2007 and died in late spring. Well as you can see Climbing iceberg is doing great:

This rose is over 4 feet high already and I’m sure it will only get bigger in the next month. I have a standard iceberg rose shrub at the front of the house and once it gets going it’s covered in blooms all season so I expect that the climbing version will do the same.

I had replaced a few roses last year and all of the replacements seem to be doing well. The majority of the established roses (2 to 5 years in the ground) all have long green stems and seem to be ahead of themselves in growth compared to other years.

The Astilbe is also growing well. I have several clumps of it in shady areas of my garden. I think I’m currently growing three different types.

Basically everything in my garden seems to be doing well this year with the exception of one rose – Dr. J H Nicholas – it’s struggling. Hopefully it makes it, but if it doesn’t I guess I’ll just replace it with a hardier rose.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms out there.

Gardeners, Plant and Nature lovers can join in every Sunday, visit As the Garden Grows for more information. GTS participants remember to check in at As the Garden Grows each week so that we’ll know you made a new post!

Hens and Chicks in the garden

by Tricia

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When we first moved into our house it had a garden, but not a great garden. It had a lot of weedy plants that spread throughout the garden and even into the grass. I can’t remember the name of this simple green leafed plant, but it was everywhere and it’s notoriously invasive.

Other than the weedy plant that took about four years to completely get rid of, there were mainly veggies, rhubarb, raspberries, strawberries, lilies and what appeared to be a fairly young apple tree and pear tree – planted in the middle of the yard!

I know I’ve got a few pictures of what the garden looked like before we started landscaping, but I think they’re on my other computer. Anyway … you can probably picture it. It was pathetic!

At the front of the house, beside our very narrow driveway there’s a very small garden bed. This was filled with hens and chicks. They were straggly as they were trying to grow in a very shady area.

When I was planting new plants in my newly created raised garden beds in the spring of 2002 I moved most of the hens and chicks to the back garden beds. As you can see from the photo above they are thriving in the sunny backyard. Click on the photo for a larger view if you’d like – the larger photo is quite nice.

The Hens and Chicks (Sempervivum), particularly in this especially sunny area have spread out and grown into the crevices of the interlocking stones. They look lovely … even better after I’ve picked out the dead leaves and mulch that get stuck in them over winter!

As for that very shady garden bed? Once I removed the hens and chicks I planted shade loving plants like Bleeding heart, lily of the valley, a fern, hosta and in a less shady area a Stella D’ora daylily, plus a few other plants.

Actually, I spent some time today adding new plants to that small flower bed and later today I’ll be planting more plants (that I purchased two weeks ago!) in the front boulevard. I’ll tell you what I planted in a new post once I’m finished the job. Hopefully I’ll have a few photos too.

In the meantime … if you want to see an older picture of what my back yard garden looked like in July of 2003 – one year after most of the plants had been added to the garden, here you go:

The garden has matured quite a bit since that time and I’ve managed to add more plants! Oh and I’ve moved a few around too. So it looks similar … but different … better maybe.

Tidying up the garden beds

by Tricia

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Last week I said that it was such a nice day that I thought I’d go out and start cleaning up the front garden beds. Well I did. As much as I could anyway, given that there was still some snow on the lawn and in some of the beds:

Now do you believe me when I say we’ve got a small front lawn? Look at that, the grass area which is still covered in snow, is smaller than our compact car! It’s actually a good thing that the front boulevard was covered in very deep snow most of the winter because it was really a sight for sore eyes once the snow melted.

In case you’re wondering the boulevard was still full of hard woody sunflower stalks and the stakes that held the tall flowers up last year.

A few hours in the increasingly cold afternoon and at least three yard waste bags later and the front boulevard looked like this:

I didn’t take after photos of the front garden beds, but they and the back garden beds were a lot tidier too with most of the leaves that had blown on them removed and some of the old dead foliage cut down.

We even took about 45 minutes and ducked out to Home Depot where we bought the stone edging for the front boulevard. That will help keep grass from growing into the flower bed. I also purchased several new spring plants to fill up some empty shady areas in the garden which I hope to plant later today.

By Tuesday all of the snow was gone and any growth that we’d discovered in the front and back garden beds when we were cleaning on Sunday had pretty much doubled or tripled in size.

Most of our crocus’ are happily blooming away now too:

Have you been busy cleaning up your garden and perhaps even planting new plants?

My replacement roses are doing great this year

Hens and Chicks in the garden

Tidying up the garden beds

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