The imminent arrival of summer

A mid-June grand tour of the back garden

Summer really stuck to the schedule this year. Usually by mid-June, I am weeks into referring to the summer season as if it had already arrived. But this year spring held its ground and the chilly days persisted, making the coming summer solstice seem like even more of an event than usual. The first official day of summer (June 20 this year), which is also the longest day of the year, is a holiday worth celebrating in my world! And the celebration continues as I spend more and more time outside every day. From my morning walk through the garden to see how things went in the night (did we have any deer, rabbit, or groundhog visitors?) to my morning meditation in the greenhouse, to doing my computer work on the porch, and finally doing afternoon garden chores and having dinner at the long table between the perennial beds, I mostly let the inside of my house go quiet until fall.

The spring blooming trees are now lush with green, the fruits on the early flowering shrubs are ripening, and at long last the vegetable and cut-flower beds are filling in and starting to produce food and flowers for the kitchen and as inspiration for work in the studio.

~Now I think it is finally time to take you on a tour of the back garden~

The small shade garden
I call it the small shade garden because it is one of several shady spaces we have, and it is actually turning into a planned garden space. The space was beautiful when we moved in, but after substantial damage from an ice storm a few years ago, we lost a few large shrubs to disease. So this year we pulled them out, trimmed the redbuds that had begun to grow over the roof, and replanted with a fresh plan. We have added ferns, hostas, bleeding hearts, heucheras, and some black lace elderberries that I am very excited about!

The mixed flower garden
A rather nondescript name, I know. This garden is adjacent to the shade garden and has changed quite a bit over the past seven years due to the redbud trees getting so much bigger and creating more shade. It also has a funny mix of perennial grasses, joe pye weed, and few other perennials. The first few years I put in a lot of annuals and heraceous perannials for pollinators, but it never really developed a clear theme. Because it is a fairly large bed that can be viewed from so many different angles in the garden, I have started to work on it in sections, sticking with the mixed approach. It’s a little quirky, but I like it.

The dining room garden
A beautiful, sunny spot right in the middle of the garden, where there is a little patch of grass where the long table sits. It is the space where we have summer dinners and host workshops. It is bordered by the mixed flower garden, the sunny garden, and the greenhouse.

The arch leading to the vegetable and cut-flower garden

As you leave the dining room garden through the arch that is covered in clematis, and eventually a climbing rose (just planted) the feeling of the garden changes quite dramatically. The raised beds with the edible and cut flowers is to your left, and the sunny perennial garden is to your right. If you continue down the path, you run into herb mountain and to the rainbow arch.

The mostly flower beds
Until this year, the vegetables and cut flowers shared these four beds. We have since added two new beds for the vegetables, so these beds are almost exclusively flowers now. I say almost because the first bed still has a few veggies and some edible flowers. It is also right up against the greenhouse and so it’s a little shadier than the rest. I’m still figuring out what will grow best there, so it’s a work in progress. Bed number two is all edible flowers; nasturtiums, citrus marigolds, bachelor buttons, calendula, sunflowers, and some staked peas and beans in the middle. Beds number three and four have a variety of cut-flowers that I start in trays in the garden in late winter.

The sunny perennial garden
Another work in progress…the sunny bed, named because it is in the middle of the garden and gets sun all day long, used to have a large maple tree in it (the tree was removed before we bought the house). The trunk stump is finally nearly rotted away, leaving the middle ready for something taller — a statement plant, perhaps. The side facing the dining room garden is filled with peonies, daisies, and gets filled in with dahlias. The side facing herb mountain is ever changing, but is beginning to look like a perennial garden with a pink and yellow theme (…ish). Like the mixed flower bed, this one is big and has a different personality depending on where you are viewing it from in the garden.

Herb Mountain
It doubled in size this year! This space had a dead tree in it when we moved in, and the soil on this side of the garden is quite poor. So Mediterranean herbs were the obvious choice. I have amended the soil in some areas to accommodate some herbs that like a bit more TLC. This year, I doubled the size of the bed, both to get rid of more grass and as a design choice to balance out the new veggie beds and rainbow arch. I had so much extra space that I ended up using it for the last few cut flower starts that I didn’t have space for. Eventually, I will add more interesting herbs in that section of the bed.

The rainbow arch celebrating pride, always, and the new veggie beds
The big project in the garden this year (we try to do one big thing every year) was the addition of two big veggie beds on either side of an arch. The beds are built on very hard, compacted soil, so we added extra depth (a total of 2’) to the 4’x10’ wooden beds. They hold most of the veggies, and if all goes according to plan I should have a very impressive arch of tomatoes in all colors of the rainbow by late summer.

The fountain garden
This space provides the backdrop for the small porch and patio that are off the back of the house. We have a fountain there that serves as a watering hole for the birds, and wow, is it active this time of year! The sound is perfectly relaxing while sitting with our morning coffee or reading a book in the evening. The bed itself had become a bit of a mess as there was a tree that had overgrown the space. After a lot of discussion, John finally gave in and agreed to remove it. As painful as it was, the rest of the trees and herbaceous shrubs have a lot more room to breathe, and should fill in the gap nicely in a year or two.

The wilds
The wilds is a nice way of putting it. It’s the space that is overgrown with ivy, has an old shed that is serves as a home to way too many critters, and is piled high with my compost heaps. One day it will be the big project of the year:)