It's probably no secret that I don't particularly like our front garden. It's never worked well for me. The problem is that the previous owner tried to put in a cottage garden (we think) — or, at least, something more naturalized than not. And I like cottage gardens, and wild gardens, but they're impossible to maintain unless you know how to identify weeds. Which I ... didn't. And don't. And so, inevitably, at some point (usually some time in July), it would all fall to crap and I would feel horrible — especially when I would compare our neighbours' well-maintained, rigidly structed hosta garden to our ill-kept, anything-goes-but-mostly-weeds one.
And the plants I could identify, I wasn't terribly fond of. I like the roses. I love the pink weigela. But those are in the back. In the front, there's ... spirea? Sedum? Forsythia? The random giant shrub I can't identify and can't quite get close enough to prune? Uhm, great.
So this year, we've put aside some money and we're going to just go for it: redo it all. Put in plants that I like (and can identify!). Mulch around everything, and weed anything that survives. I can garden if I know which plants are where and what I'm supposed to be doing with them. We are keeping the tree (city by-laws) and the lavender (it would probably come back anyway, even if we didn't), but otherwise, we are starting over. I gave it two years; I tried my best. We were obviously not meant to be.
So now I am working it up: doing research, figuring out plants. I even busted out the graph paper. That's how you know I mean business.
