Editing

I love clematis. My fence allowed
me to add several around.

Things are of course progressing apace in the garden. I've mowed the lawn twice already - and the second time, it was too long to mulch, I had to bag and compost to avoid having it mat down and kill the other stuff. I started seeds, some veggies and annual flowers, from scratch. Until just now, it was too early to plant tomatoes and other tender things outside, but it's time to get going on that now. 

I'm starting to get an idea of how I want the yard and the gardens to evolve. I've got several distinct areas on my corner lot - inside the fence front and back, outside the fence front and side and back. I've got a few ambitious ideas I have made little progress on. But I've decided that "gardens" will be in the front - inside and outside the fence - and the rest will have smaller raised beds and containers to be planted, with the balance lower maintenance grasses and shrubs. And in the gardens, I intend to be very dense with plants, so that there is not so much area for weeds to take hold. I am thinking about views from inside the house and from seating areas outside. 

A collection from the longest-planted part.

Some of this thinking has grown from the way my oldest garden - the shady front inside the fence - has evolved. I started twenty years ago, a less affluent novice, putting in single plants, or sometimes going all the way to three at a time. Now, those individuals have either died off or proliferated. Most of my time inside the fence is editing. I either weed something out completely, or, often, serve as a referee for a border dispute between types of plants. I like having a patch of something, though they are often interwoven. But every year, something takes off and doesn't play nicely with the others and it has to be pulled out. Not necessarily excluded from the garden entirely - I actually spend some time moving things around. The entrepreneurial aggressive plant of the year differs year to year - a few years back it was Joe Pye weed, this year it's green-and-gold, weaving a complex pattern of sprawling stems along the ground. 

Golden groundsel

My current thinking is something that likes my garden well enough to be a thug probably can find a place where I'm fine if it just takes over. I'll leave it there, and try to police it's ventures elsewhere. But where it is, it becomes much less work. A good example is golden groundsel (Packera aurea). I added a few to a shady, damp spot a while ago. It took off and took over, both seeding nearby and spreading. I'm ripping it up inside the fence, but outside the fence (and downhill) it is also thriving. It has these composite yellow flowers for a long time in the late winter and spring. The rest of the time, it is a decent less than 6-inch groundcover. It will stabilize the steep slope, as long it is thriving. Outside the fence, I'll do almost nothing to it.

 

This moss phlox requires full sun,
scarce around here. This patch is huge!

 

Known as flea bane, this wildflower showed up.
It's welcome some places, not in others.
But it's easy to pull up.

 

This is green-and-gold, where it can stay on the steep slope.