Labor Day

We've lived here for nearly a year. There's been time enough to play in new gardens, while watching the old, established ones. I've catalogued different participants, and spent some random moments of this summer scheming about dividing, transplanting and replanting as the seasons rolled around toward fall.

Today, finally, the time for planning was through, and I began working on the front bed in front of the house. It's an L shaped bed, edged by woods and overgrown with wisteria, but also home to a great drift of Shasta daisies, blue spiderwort, yellow daylilies, pink cranesbill and irises, all crowded in too close around an assortment of roses who might flower better with more space.

In part one of the project, I tackled the driveway side of the bed.
 

STEP ONE: Pruning the long ramblers of wisteria that have been weaving through the bed, choking the other plants and trying to strangle adjacent trees. There were, by now, several plants of the stuff...the newer ones were easily dug up, and their long trailers pruned and piled. The main plant remains for some future day's toil, but it's been pruned back hard, as well.
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STEP TWO: Digging seperating and transplanting some overgrown Shasta Daisies, working to spread their joy along the back of both sides of the bed. Here, a surplus waits here in the wheelbarrow, soon to be taken to their new homes in an assortment of other locations around the yard.
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STEP THREE: Crowded in the center of a trio of different roses, a thick cluster of non-blooming German bearded iris needed to be dug out. They came out easily enough, and I laid them out to be cut back and trimmed before replanting in the driveway side of the garden.
 

STEP FOUR: Around one of two of the rose bushes is a thick clump of yellow daylilies and spiderwort, which I've begun to dig out and divide, to be returned to the bed a safe distance from the roses. An assortment found homes around other sides of the house, and throughout the back garden beds, as well. I also dug out several large clumps of perennial geranium, AKA cranesbill, which I planted in the foreground of the bed. I also dug in an assortment of hyacinths and other bulbs still living in pots from the spring.

As you can see in the background of this pic, there are still plenty of daisies and daylilies to be divided and replanted when part two of this project resumes.