The Side Garden
No discussion of the garden would be complete without my describing the Side Garden, a strip of land on the other side of the driveway. Since I am on a corner lot, I get this extra strip of land to work with. It delighted me, as it meant I could have two front gardens. But, ah, what a tortured piece of land it was! Weeds, rocks, sunshine, thistles and lurking roots of decapitated Virginia Creeper. Ah, the Side Garden!
So it was weedy, and wild. The previous owners had pulled down a cedar hedge on this corner plot (quite the safety hazard, everyone in the neighborhood agreed), and put up a shiny new fence. Great! But then, they never got around to landscaping in front of it.
By the time we moved in, it was a weedy overgrown mass. The grass had been mowed, but it was hardly the lush green carpet of your dreams; no, it was clover and dandelions, knotweed and toad flax, crabgrass and such.
But it got great sun. Oh, this corner had such great sun! Unlike the main front garden, which is shaded by a large Ash tree, the side garden got full sun day to night. So of course I wanted to put a garden there! So I dug up the weeds. Oh my goodness those weeds! The soil was dense and matted with the roots of the many weeds. The dandelions roared at me until I mowed them into submission. Then they just bared their fangs at me and hissed.
So that was all very exciting.
Plus, the bugs attacked me. I had to wear a hat, the really stinky bug repellent, and steal the mesh bug hat net away from my son.
But when gardening fever sets in, nothing can stop it. So in the summer of 2017, I dug, and hauled away sod and dirt (and put it in the green bin; I later learned you aren't supposed to put soil in the green bin - oops - hee hee). I found some fascinating remnants of previous life: many plastic annual plant tags - petunias and impatiens, mostly. Where had they been planted? Along the fence? In pots? I found rocks of all kinds and sizes, potato chip bags, broken bottle pieces, and shards of wood. I found the foundations of the fence - I inadvertently tried to dig them up but couldn't; then I realised what they were and stopped hacking at them. I put in sheep manure - why not? And dug and dug.
Finally I had a bed, if a two by seven strip of soil can be dignified as such. I put in mammoth sunflower seeds, even though all the neighbours warned me not to (squirrels!), purple lobelia, orange marigolds and portulaca. This is what it all looked like about a month later:
Recognize this photo? Yes - it is from my Sunflowers post a few years ago! Hey, why reinvent the wheel?
The sunflowers grew! The other plants lived, sat quietly there and smiled! The portulaca didn't thrive the way I thought it would (in the garden I had growing up, they usually grew luxuriously), but it may have been because it was quite a wet and cool summer. I also dug up another strip of land, in front of the gate. This was to be my iris bed. That autumn, I bought three (very expensive) iris rhizomes from Breck's), planted a pink clematis, some white mullein, lots of "early blooming" spring bulbs, and hoped for the best.
But I had even bigger plans for the side garden!
As mentioned, the summer of 2017 is when I started the side garden, described above. The summer of 2018 was when I really started to go to town! All through the winter of 2017-18 I thought about that side garden. Why did it look so scruffy? So messy, so unimportant? I studied other people's gardens, online, in magazines, and in the neighborhood. One online article provided a clue - it advised that a flower bed had to be at least three feet wide. So I had to increase the size of the side garden. But what to put there?
I waited impatiently all winter for the snow to melt, so I could start digging. Of course, being Ottawa, it went from freezing snow to broiling sun. So in the heat I was digging away. I was also creating a number of other new beds in the backyard, and planting the zillions of plants I couldn't seem to stop buying. So it was frenetic activity all the way. It was only about mid-July, after strenuous digging in yet another heat wave, that I was satisfied with the size of the side garden. It looked abundant. It had presence. It even had straight lines. It just needed some flowers.
I put in irises, graciously given to me by members of a Facebook gardening group. The previous year I had put in perennials - hot pink sweet william, cheeful gaillardia blanket flower, yellow coreopsis and pink phlox. Those all did well, and were slowly growing. I planted zinnia seeds and got some annuals - purple globe amaranth and white African daisies, and called it a day. But the garden had other plans! Seeds, relaxing in the ground from last year, started to sprout! I couldn't bear to throw them out, so I let them stay. Cosmos, which I hadn't wanted to grow as it got too huge the previous year, threw up its feathery fronds. Calendula, which I found sprawling and too untidy last year, bloomed yellow and cheerful. Tiny little succulent leaves appeared...yes, portulaca! Even though it hadn't grown well the previous year, it apparently liked this spot and several volunteer plants appeared. I moved some around and they thrived.
This is the side garden in early June:
By early July, it still didn't look like much of a much:
But by early August the garden looked like this:
Wow! Just Wow!
Zinnias, baby. Last year it was all about the zinnias!
I have never been too fond of zinnias. The name is kind of ugly, and the leaves are rough to the touch. But now I am won over; that colour! The various shapes and sizes! They were such a nice complement to the calendula, as well. Love!
The red bee balm (monarda) got a little too happy - it grew to a gigantic six feet! Next year I will pinch off the tips when it is around a foot. It put out lots of flowers - spiky red blooms that smelt of some wild meadow sweet potpourri. In my mind I call it "Ragged Robin". Here, it is next to "Little Duck" pink clematis, which is doing quite nicely.
Lots of hot sunny weather in July and August killed off the grass; I spent two hours each day watering - but that garden was taking off!
The white portulaca flowed like a rivulet between the globe amaranth and the African daisies. You would think I planned it that way, but I didn't...it was all just a gift from nature!
That side garden made me so happy!
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