Moving my 30 Projects to the Burbs?

Of course I have a lot to do at home, but my parents needed help, too. They bought new shrubs for 2 beds that they had to overhaul and were eager to get them in the ground. One, we lost a beloved beech tree. Its memory lives on thanks to Google Street View.

It was super great for climbing.

Since these Street View images were taken, we had made some effort to fill in the useless lawn between the tree and the walkway and mask those steps that awkwardly jut above grade. Then my parents were working on pulling up most of the pachysandra. They were left with some odd shape patches that needed to be tamed and some disjointed remnants of the previous attempt to turn this into a shade garden.

My mom bought 2 more fothergilla to (hopefully) match the one you can see left of the lamp post. I made the pachysandra bed bigger around them by yanking out that weird patch to the left in solid sheets and laying it down like sod. There’s still a bit more pachysandra to come out, and after that this bed will look like half of a pear. They have a few other ideas for the other end of it once they decide what to do with the yews. Back when the tree was alive we had 2 yews die on us, and I thought they were supposed to be invincible!

Then, the at the opposite end of their property there was some kind of a big evergreen shrub/tree thing. It kept getting bigger and more weirdly shaped over time (this picture is 5 years old, from back when it kind of looked good) and my parents wanted it out except for the privacy they’d lose.

They picked up 3 new clethra, a deciduous shrub that is supposed to grow to 6 feet high, and we relocated 3 existing lower shrubs just beyond those. The bed now runs along the street as far as ever but will be a few feet narrower along the hose line.

Then the next door neighbors were working on their property and said, “We have too many anemones and they scrape against our car. Do you want some?”

Um, yes! (That would be the pink flowers that are staked up.)

And for reference, here’s the back yard. It’s pretty private but is laid out with a straight line clear through it, so this bed we just redid is supposed to block that line. I wish we had before pictures and/or the design plans I drew up for this space when I was in high school. A lot of the plantings have changed around (for the better) after the original plans, but the layout worked well. My mom said that she wanted this small back yard to be a “Charleston courtyard,” so I laid it out this end of it as well as I could on a formal axis, broken into spaces each roughly the size of a typical city garden, or 3 times the size of a South Philly back yard.

But without those things the blog may not return here, so I’ll also remind you of the urn fountain I built back here after college.

And where am I with #30ProjectsIn30Days? These 2 beds would be Projects 12 and 13 now. I have 4 more done and possibly a few more along with them later this week. If I help myself to Sunday, maybe I can pull off #30ProjectsIn31Days. Maybe.