New Gardens!

I have been a busy weekend-gardener these past two weeks, creating, digging out, planting, and mulching 2 new perennial gardens! At the top of our driveway on the left, before you would turn in to "park", there is an area that is all fill (very rocky fill, I found out) with random patches of grass, dandelions, daisies, and lupine. I wish I had some "before" shots to show the difference, but I don't, so hopefully you can tell the "before" by the landscape around the beds. Both of the new gardens are on a slope.

I made this garden last weekend- the majority of the rocks used for the border were in the soil... talk about fun digging. I dug it all out by hand, using my handy screwdriver to pry out rocks. I had already planted 2 sedum here last year, just kind of mixed in with the grass/weeds/etc., those are the the bottom and top plants. The 5 plants in the center are the newly planted ones: 2 stonecrops,snow-in-summer, sandwort, and an ice plant in the center.

This next garden I made today. This one was fun but A LOT of work... I basically completely dug out the side of the hill by hand (that means no shovel, just hands and screw driver), went searching around for flat rocks (there are plenty of rock piles along the edge of the pasture), and got some help carrying and moving a couple of large rocks (for example the one at the top- that is all one rock and it was very heavy). So, in this garden, I planted a white butterfly bush at the top, 3 purple salvias, 2 bright yellow-green stonecrop, 3 smaller yellow-flowering sedum, and then 3 lobelias (the annual kind) on either side. Oh yeah, Sasha made it into this picture too.

Here is a close up of this last garden, showing the great rock I found! My mom saw me carrying it and thought it was a board because of its great shape.

So here's what that slope area looks like now:

I still have some cleaning up to do (for example all of the rocks I dug out of the soil that didn't make the cut for the borders), but I think it looks pretty good so far!