Eight years of growth and change... ~ handmade home

I was going through some boxes of old photos a couple days ago, when I came across many from the year 2003. I remember that season well, as our oldest son and his wife were married in our gardens that June. It's always amazing to me how fast things change in the gardens... after all, this was only a few months short of eight years ago. If there ever was a year when I wish I could have frozen plant growth to a certain size, this could well have been that time. Several areas of the garden were at a perfect balance for my taste, but alas much has changed... most for the betterment of the design and some perhaps not...

These before photos are during my pre-digital days and they were scanned as well so the quality and color isn't all that good...

This is the conifer bed that has several Moerheim blue spruce

Annuals include Inca II marigolds and Fantasy
petunias as well as Pretoria canna

These conifers have grown exponentially in the past eight years and I really miss the space for planting annuals. Following is a photo of the area this past summer... if you follow my posts, you will be familiar with this area, but my goal today is to show comparisons and thereby indicate how quickly many plants grow. It is hard for me to take in how quickly these changes occur despite being involved with plants for 2/3rds of my life. There are landscaping companies that work off the principle that a new landscape is good for seven years and I suspect if initially planted to look good from the 'get-go' this could well be the case.... unless perhaps the designer takes advantage of the wide range of dwarfer growing plants available these days.

2010... for perspective, compare the Princton Sentry ginko behind the column
to its youth right of center /back in the two previous photos from 2003

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Looking from the birch walk towards the house...
the Tina flowering crab has been removed

The Acer negundo Kelly's Gold has also been removed and
the planting beds about the birches are now grass

Fagus sylvatica 'Asplenifolia' is in the very center of this photo,
pictured prior to leafing out in the spring

In the three previous photos, this part of the garden still had a fair amount of sunlight... as things grew, several plants have been removed and others have grown considerably... many shade tolerant perennials, most notably hellebores, have been introduced as well.

The fern leaf European beech in fall color

The Purple Fountains European Beech is behind the Fern Leaf variety

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Back to 2003... there were several lilacs in this particular garden and all have now been removed except for two... the garden was simply looking overgrown and lacked enough textural variety.

All visible lilacs on the right side of this photo have been removed...
the Ludwig Spaethe to the rear is a favorite and another to it's right was cut
back to the ground and allowed to regrow

The magnolia in the center was retained, but broke over in a storm this past summer

These two lilacs were beautiful plants but did a huge amount of suckering, especially the President Grevy blue to the back. In bloom its scent was heavenly, but it was acting like a thug

The result, after eight years, is a portion of the bed having a wide variety of dwarf conifers. I'm also using the area between the conifers for a nice assortment of lilies which eventually will be moved as the conifers fill in a bit. This is also my mum area and I expect to find some low and interesting groundcovers and grasses to combine with the conifers.

Many of the conifers are small so look closely!

There remains one lilac barely seen on the left... previously this entire area was filled with lilacs

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My all time favorite flowering crab apple and the sad story of its demise still bothers me. As a young gardener I was crazy about a beautiful pink budded and white flowered crab called 'White Candle'. It was very rare in this area and with its amazingly large blooms was very special. I seached for the tree for a long time to no avail... then while visiting a nursery that was going out of business, I found five large specimens. I purchased them all and was thrilled... two were passed on to a gardening friend and three went into my gardens. Here are photos of them in 2003... as you can see they had a very upright vase form and the original plant owned by a friend maintained this shape as it grew to 25' or more... it was glorious! I've included several photos of my three White Candles and the comparable areas this past season.

The weeping white pine pictured on the left is the same one eight years later in the next photo. I liked the fact that you could actually see all three white candles when you stood in the right spot

As you can see, the weeping white pine has filled out nicely over these eight years...
a Butterflies magnolia was installed just to the right

The third White Candle

The Montgomery spruce pictured just to the left of white candle in the previous photo is the spruce to the far right in this shot

So where did my White Candles go? While not known for disease resistance, they actually did very well until I brought in a semi load of wood mulch one year after a very major storm had taken thousands of trees down in a city near here. Unfortunately I got more than what I bargained for, as Fire Blight was a part of the transfer. I lost all of my fruit trees and many flowering crabs to the disease. It took several years to end the plague through proper pruning when the disease would show up on some of my more resistant crabs, and was one of the most frustrating and disappointing experiences in all my gardening years. For that reason I only use purchased mulch, the source of which I know.

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I will return to some more comparisons between 2003 and 2010 in a later post. For now I'll share a few more photos of white blooming plants in my gardens as promised last post.

One final thought... I apparently caused some bad feelings by not responding to the comments left on my site. I guess I didn't realize this was the proper etiquette, I do apologize, and will attempt to do better in the future... take care, Larry