The second area to come together once the pollinator garden was finished is what I now call the perennial garden. The first year 2 years, I just referred to it as the large flower bed – combined with the area where the pollinator garden is beside it. The first year we were at this house, I had to use the area to store my greenhouse tables and plants since I had nowhere else to put them for the time being.
In summer 2020, I planted the first thing in this area, the Confederate rose I had growing in a pot. Honestly, I have no idea how anything thrives in this flower bed because I wouldn’t even call what’s there ‘soil.’ It’s more like chert/rock. I could not even dig a hole deep enough for the Confederate rose (or gardenias) with an electric TILLER, the “soil” was so hard/rocky.
But this is where I had room for these larger shrubs, so if they couldn’t survive here, too bad. By the end of the season, I had added the August Beauty gardenias (started from cuttings I took from the gardenias at our other house) and a Chinese snowball viburnum, along with some container annuals.
I expanded this area further down in 2021, adding a double pink Knockout rose. During this year, I started calling this bed the Confederate rose bed because that was the largest plant in this bed. You can’t tell by the picture below since it was taken in May. It was still fairly short that early in the season.
This was the year I started sheet mulching. A layer of cardboard with mulch on top to suppress weeds and for moisture retention.
To this day, this is the least weedy area of all my garden beds, even with lots of reseeding weeds behind it on the slope. These 3 pictures are from summer 2021. I had wanted to plant more sunflowers than what you see, but I could not even use a small auger drill to drill a hole large enough for a small sunflower plug ( 1.5″ diameter x 3″ deep).
In fall of 2021, I started working on edging this bed to make it more defined. I used high strength concrete mix to help make all the pavers even (it’s not level from one end to the other; I just made the bricks flush with each other). I used this type since I knew I’d be going over it with the riding lawn mower tires. This has helped keep the grass from growing through the bricks/pavers (over them is a different story, but those pieces are easy to pull up). I just used the hose to wet down the dry mix once all the pavers were done and then put gravel where I had to dig out some.
End of 2021:
In 2022, it became the perennial garden, and I started researching which perennials would do well in full sun in clay soil. However, what is here is not really clay. Close enough for planting purposes though. It’s hard as a rock. Here are a few pictures from 2022.
A lot of plants took a hard blow here in December of 2022 when we had below-freezing temperatures for 72+ hours. This is not normal for us. If we do get below freezing at night, we almost always get above freezing during the daytime. I thought I was going to lose the gardenias, and they didn’t bloom in 2023.
I added quite a few new plants in 2023 and designed and built the red planter box with a trellis for a climbing rose I was gifted by a friend through Instagram.
I also planted a few annuals to fill in some empty spaces while waiting on the perennials to fill in. And the gardenias did finally recover from the extreme cold the previous year.
Gardenias in June 2024!
They got their first major pruning at the end of July this year. I want those 2 gardenia bushes to form a hedge that I would like to keep no taller than waist-high. The snowball bush exploded this year too, so it got pruned back hard as well.
I actually did some moving around of quite a few plants in the perennial garden earlier this week because, as you can see from the picture above, taken 7/28/24, there isn’t much color. I didn’t take bloom time into consideration, so I’ve added several plants that have been needing a home anyway, moved several around, and got rid of a couple. Some of the seeds I started last month and this month are perennials that will bloom at different time frames (or all summer) for this garden bed.
This is what’s growing in this bed as of September 13, 2024:
- Amsonia (bluestar) – Storm Cloud
- Baptisia (false indigo) – Plum Rosy
- Cat Mint – Purrsian Blue / Walker’s Low
- Chrysanthemum – Royal Glamour
- Clematis – Josephine / Miss Bateman
- Confederate rose (Hibiscus mutabilis)
- Daylilies – yellow, variety unknown (NOT Stella D’Oro)
- Dianthus – mix, from big box store in 2021 – still alive, don’t know the varieties
- Elephant Ear – purple – variety unknown
- Gardenia – August Beauty
- Helianthus (sunflower) – Autumn Gold
- Heliopsis (oxeye sunflower) – Burning Hearts
- Hibiscus – Summerific Holy Grail
- Lantana – Miss Huff
- Phlox (creeping phlox) – Purple Beauty
- Rose – Coral Drift Rose / Marianne climbing rose / Pink Double Knockout
- Rudbeckia – American Gold Rush / Triloba
- Salvia – Blue by You
- Sedum – Autumn Joy
- Swtich Grass – Cheyenne Sky
- Veronica – Georgia Blue (will be moving this one next week)
- Viburnum – Chinese Snowball
- Yarrow – Summer Berries