And Yet Another Flower Garden

Having gotten two and a half flower beds mostly under control, I can no longer justify putting off the worst of the lot. Unfortunately, this big, bad bed of weeds is also the most visible of our flower beds from inside the house and its been looking worse and worse all summer. Its time to do something about it.

So Many Weeds!

 

I’ve tried to turn this area into a perennial flower bed before. Last year I planted tons of perennial plants and seeds and had high hopes for this year but then this spring when things started coming up I couldn’t tell the difference between weeds and the plants I wanted to be there, so I just let everything grow. And, of course, the weeds grew faster and stronger and choked everything else out. The problem is that so many perennial flowers, especially of the “wild flower” type, look exactly like weeds until they bloom. It reminds me of the quote “One man’s weed is another man’s flower”. I can identify the echinacea, of course, and the large peony in the center front with the small yellow stella de’oro lilies on other side but otherwise its hard to pick out the remnants of all of the Asiatic lilies and other perennials that I put in last year. All but a handful of the beautiful gold Black Eyed Susans were overwhelmed by the weeds.

This is going to be the most difficult garden to clean out and re-do because I want to save as much as I can from previous years plantings which means I can’t just cover the entire thing with cardboard and weedcloth and start fresh. I’ve already bought a few new plants, like these beautiful Coreopsis, but before they go in I’ll have to decide what is weed, and what is flower.