About a Border

I’m very psyched about my new border, the one you saw earlier with the sod removed to make it larger.

What it was.  A bad case of the twosies.  There were four hydrangeas (two lacecap and two mophead), with scattered astilbe and scattered periwinkle in front of them.  The background, unchanged, includes two viburnum (a lacecap and a snowball), two dogwoods (a native and an Asian), plus a really big mistake, a Bradford pear that’ll blow over any day now. 

What it is now. In the midground are the Hollywood juniper I posted about, the two mophead hydrangeas, seven small nandina and six small pieris.  Along the front are a euonymous ‘Emerald Gaity’, a full-grown carex and a bunch of liriope.  And there are masses of perennials in here, too:  all the astilbes bunched together for impact, and lots of euphorbia amygdaloides.

I’ve always been unhappy with this border.  You all know the feeling.  My main complaint was its lack of evergreens.  So in April I picked up the pieris at Home Depot for $3.33 each.  After a season in the holding area, they’re not a bad start.  Ditto the seven nandina I bought on Ebay for $5 each but probably could have found locally for that price or better.  Including the new juniper for $50, this big improvement only set me back $105.  Having the large evergreen carex, the euonymous and the liriope all stealable from other spots in the garden sure helped.

This is the view from one of my green chairs.  Showing off nicely in the background is a three-year-old Deodor cedar, which I know will get huge but don’t ya love the blue? To its left are more viburnums and dogwoods, plus a bunch of 5′ pieris, all suggested by a nursery’s free designer 20 years ago.  Over the years I’ve mentally thanked that designer hundreds of times, easily.  Back then my entire knowledge of shrubs began and ended with azaleas.