PUTTING FLESH ON THE BONES

While Jeff is primarily interested in the history and restoration of the house itself, I am very interested in the garden as well as the furnishings and wall treatments. This blog will cover developments in that arena.

When taking over an old garden, one must be mindful that one doesn't know what plants are in the garden until one has observed the garden carefully for a full year. With that in mind, I didn't do too much planting or tilling for the first year we lived in the house. The garden has very good 'bones' as they say. It has several garden rooms, with many well established plants.

However, as previously posted elsewhere, there were large, overgrown, arbor vitae in front of the house that needed to be cut down early. Here I planted a number of David Austin roses and threw in some seeds to see what sort of plants would be happy there. The seeds included foxglove (digitalis), dames' rocket (hesperis matronalis), money plant (lunaria), shirley poppy, flanders poppy, and calendula. Interestingly, a healthy crop of volunteer forget-me-nots appeared unbidden, but welcome none-the-less. The poppies didn't do very well, but the foxglove exceed all expectations!