Gardened Up

The gardeners finished their work today, and it looks amazing.

I should add here that one of the prices you pay for hiring gardeners -- and I knew this going in -- is that they will inevitably rip out some plant you love. That definitely happened here and I'm not 100 percent happy about it but it all looks so amazing that I can forgive a little carnage.

The front garden

The gardeners suggested getting black dyed mulch -- apparently it is just dyed with iron oxide, not something totally toxic (I know nothing about other colours). It does look pretty fancy, a lot nicer and cleaner than the arborist mulch we have gotten before. We picked it up at the Davis Street transfer station in the big truck, $28 per generous yard.

Path to the back

They laid mulch for us in the part of the garden they worked in -- we basically divided the lot in half diagonally because there's a lot going on in the other half that means any landscaping would be in some trouble, anyway. Also I need to do some grading work near the chicken yard because the little jerks have been making dirt piles outside their doors, so I didn't want gardener interference over there.

The rain garden and orchard

What they worked on looks amazing. Just amazing. Of course, I did lose some plants -- a favourite dianthus or two in the rain garden. That weird Australian mossy thing that was slowly climbing my laughing buddha statue. Nothing rare (not like the rare bulb the chickens ATE over the winter, damn them). Nothing irreplaceable.

Buddleias lifted up

The pruning they did really helped, too. They lifted the canopy on the Buddleias and lightened up both the big fence roses. You can actually see the other shrubs planted under there now.

From the front door

The front was what really mattered a lot to me. I am tired of it looking half-built there and would like the front of the house to look more gardened, and this made it 90 percent of the way there.

The big side upper garden

My longer-term plan here is to put in a flagstone patio out front. I'll have the soil actually dug out, so the roses and the tree end up in slightly raised beds, and we can hang out here and yell at the neighborhood kids.

Rosie and the pile of plants

I thought the pile of weeds was intense on Wednesday, but this is two more days of work, and it is something else. I will spend quite a bit of time moving that this weekend, let me tell you.

Ready to start over with overplanting