Tabula Rasa

It's Mr. Mulch's fault, really.

Last week we planted our new Bradford Pear tree.  It's a lovely specimen and is in a prominent place, halfway up the hill in the back, just above one of the large rock outcroppings and bordered by a nice swath of lawn.  It stands watch over the rock and the beginning of a bed where we marooned two variegated azaleas last year, intending to someday surround them with other later blooming plants.


Now would seem to be that day.


Because while the tree planting guys were here, Mr. Mulch had them tidy up the border around the tree, and then set them loose on a second, larger bed  below, surrounding the azaleas. The result: two big, beautiful blank brown slates begging to be filled in with color and life.    

Border bed 

Larger bed below with two lonely azaleas

When we first moved here, I tried to approach planting an area like this systematically -- researching which plants were suited to which kinds of locations, compiling my target list, and then searching for those specific plants.  I drew elaborate diagrams and planting schemes, annotated with photos of the selected flora. This process produced impressive maps, but always led to frustration.  Local nurseries never had exactly what I was looking for, and I'd search catalogs in vain, finding that anything I had figured out was desirable was already sold out.  The few things I did find generally failed miserably.  I tried for three years to grow lupines in various locations, for example, and never even managed to coax a single plant through one growing season.

These days I have a far more satisfactory approach. Satisfactory, that is, to my local nursery -- Gossett Brothers Nursery -- where everyone recognizes the sound of my car approaching, and where the cash register shivers in delight when I approach the checkout.  It's a technique best described as swoop and snatch.  Armed only with the knowledge of the light conditions I'll be planting in, I swoop through the rows of new arrivals -- perennials, that is -- listening intently for something to call to me.  It might be a particularly interesting foliage, the promise of specific bloom times, or an unusual flower.  Sometimes there's a dim awareness that I once wrote the plant name on a long ago landscape plan.  

Then the snatch part:  I buy all they have of that particular variety.  I used to buy two or three, come home and put them down to watch the garden literally swallow them up.  With the amount of space we've got -- and certainly with the new bed Mr. Mulch just gave me -- I need 5 or 6 of anything before there's enough to even notice.  Which is why the cash register quivers when I arrive. Today's haul certainly looked  impressive, and seemed as though it would cover a lot of ground.

The cart holds plants to surround the pear tree: 5 Plumbago, a ground cover (that sounds like a sore back) that blooms lat summer to fall, and 5 dwarf goat goatsbeard that send up feathery plumes in midsummer;  companions for the azaleas: 5 Potentilla Fragiformis, with strawberry-like foliage and bright yellow blooms; and 5 Penstemon Digitalis, tall and foxglove-like with beautiful dark red foliage that shows off its white late-blooming flowers.  Oh, and there are also 7 pots of sedum to for the crevices in the rock outcropping.  

Here they are, all laid out.

I know what you're thinking -- that's an awful lot of holes.  Yeah, I was thinking that too.  And I'm also thinking that there's still an awful lot of empty space there.  And since I bought all Gossett's had of these plants, maybe I'll make a lightning strike tomorrow and see what else they've got.  It is Mother's Day, after all... maybe Mr. Mulch will dig all those holes!