The kitchen courtyard has a nice background to it finally, with the coyote fence, the Kintzley's Ghost and redtwig dogwood and the red rose in the corner. Even the butterfly bush, now pruned to be shrubbier. The woody plants do well in this tough spot.
But not the clumpy perennials in the foreground. It doesn't need more drifts of little plants to bulk up, it needs less. The geums came out, they are too ethereal to add anything and are declining.
I need visual weight, not so many flowery plants. So the stump stays but now has the fairy sculpture there rather than trying to keep a small container bowl of petunias on it.
The blue fescue grass was put in an empty spot and seems okay.
A Radio Red salvia is planted in front, making a trio of upright woody red flowered shrublots. Where the geums were, I planted a Pawnee Buttes sandcherry.
I had it out in the field where it was doing nothing in the weeds, not even visible and not growing well. Basically unwatered.
Here in front of the garden and irrigated, I hope it will spread to its advertised three or four feet wide, out toward the walk, covering the artful (?) rock pile and filling the empty spot. The question is whether it will be a low 18 inch tall groundcover as some say, or a bushy 3 foot tall shrub.
Highly variable and this is a small space.
I left a couple of the healthier looking geums for now -- they are just green basal clumps -- but will remove them when (if) the sandcherry spreads enough. The idea is to edit them out, maybe the veronicas too eventually. This won't really be a flower garden.
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| This is the idea sort of. |
I need to be ruthless in this garden. I have to grow what likes it here, not what I want, and woody salvias and shrubs might be the answer.
But if the sandcherry spreads around and over the rocks and as the flowery things are taken out, it will simplify things. I hope.
The red circle shows where I want the transplanted sandcherry to spread but you can't see it yet -- it's twiggy and stressed and the leaves are tiny. I need it to extend out over the rocks and I'll remove the clump of geum still there.
I was totally ruthless in transplanting Pawnee Buttes. I did not dig it up, I tore it out with the claw, there was no real dirt to bring with the rootball to its new site.
When I dug the hole for it in the kitchen courtyard I had, as always, a tough mat of roots to chop through.
That's why more delicate perennials struggle here even with lots of water (when I dug up the geums they were dry despite emitters and deep hose watering.)
It must be the cottonwood's roots, extending all this way thickly under the coyote fence and into this area. What else could be creating so many deep dense roots?
It all still looks undeveloped, with little clumps, but eventually the sandcherry will have structural woody stems and greenery to blend with the white rocks and fill space.
I need it to fill up this garden in a way the multiples of small plants can't do. And the twiggy serviceberry tree will add . . something, eventually. It is a pretty little thing right now.
The kitchen courtyard wants to be a quiet shrub garden (and when the serviceberry grows, it will be. It once looked good when the multiples of geums and veronicas formed more mass, but it was temporary and after blooming there was no structure or form. And now they are barely growing.
I'm still confused whether Pawnee Buttes grows upright to three feet, or spreads out like a ground cover.
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| Is Pawnee Buttes upright or prostrate? |
But it should get large enough either way in this spot.