Back garden eyesore - Part II

Two issues to address: how ugly is ugly and how creative does one have to be to fix it.

Ugly is in the eye of the beholder just as beauty is. And, of course, it's relative. It's ugly to me because so far it has confounded my imagination and my limited experience. It's ugly because I had no recipe for revamping it. It's ugly because the plastic shed can't be painted to match the cottage-y one that's in my brain. It's ugly because all the garden magazines show pictures of plastic nursery pots in neat organization, adorned cleverly to more resemble haute couture than gardening implements, and I'd love to steal their clever ideas. It's ugly because it seemed to have no chance of being beautiful. So let's deal with the problems.

• Neutral to alkaline soil:

I have had azaleas there and a gardenia. The gardenia died, and two 'Mrs. G. G. Gerbing' azaleas were rescued in the nick of time and relocated. The native soil under my oaks trees in the back is very dry powdery sand, whitish gray in color and in places resembles chalk. The pH is in the low 7's, very inhospitable to the typical shade loving plants with which I'm familiar. In my heavily amended shade bed the 'Endless Summer' hydrangea blooms very pink. I throw soil sulfur around in that bed regularly because I do have four azaleas there (two or three others died). One good thing it that it is now irrigated so the unwettable soil seems to be conquered. My standby, no-fail evergreen has become 'Evergreen Giant' Liriope which seems not to mind my pH because it prospers everywhere I put it, but I can't fill every nook with liriope even though I love it, gracefully waving in the breeze. Hydrangeas don't care about pH, but I care about no foliage all winter.

•  Fairly deep shade until late afternoon

Since the spot in question is rather dark, blooming plant choices are limited.

• Height

I think the place needs something tall-er.

On Tuesday I circumnavigated the garden center at Lowe's three times, looking for some bit of inspiration, some plant I hadn't thought of and rejected. I found it. It's a thick and heavy concrete fleur-de-lis birdbath. Not the dainty kind but a hefty one. I liked it and the price was decent - $65. I would put the birdbath in the center and plant Flax lily around it. Or maybe something else, but the birdbath was a go when I went to bed Tuesday night.

Last night wasn't very productive due to over-tiredness, but I managed to hit upon a 5-gallon hydrangea, 'IncrediBall', on Ebay for $39.95 plus $19 shipping. Yikes! Am I that desperate? Today I called every nursery in town. One has 4-gallon 'Penny Mac' hydrangeas for $19.99. Granted it doesn't have basketball sized flowers and it's not white, but it reblooms and 30 minutes after I left work it was mine. Companion plants will have to include some that conceal 'Penny Mac's winter nakedness. I see a problem there.

OK, where does that leave the birdbath in a 6-ft diameter area with a 5x5 bush in it? My heart wanted that birdbath...how about on the gravel where I now have the potted plants? Hmm, that could work.

I also bought some variegated Liriope to plant in front of the stockade fence that will hide the pots storage. (I also bought a huge Fuscia plant that won't survive below 28 degrees so I have to "plant" it "pot and all" so it can be brought inside during cold spells. Impractical? I guess, but it's a very pretty plant for another spot.)

So after dinner I went to Lowe's to get the birdbath and fence boards for building the fence. Didn't get the birdbath. I decided to get further along before I commit to dealing with this glob of cement (two globs, really) that weighs a ton. (Secretly, I'm having doubts about it.) However, I did buy two sections of cypress fence (why build when one is already built?). One is for the other side of the shed. I almost bought some impatiens, but the colors just didn't click with me.

Well, that's basically it - a hydrangea and a fence. I hope "the plan" isn't too anti-climactic. Do solutions have to be complicated? Simple is good. I also hope I love the 'Penny Mac'. At least it was a local plant. (#1 - better survival chances, and #2 - our economy needs the money.) I do love hydrangeas, and this spot will get more sun than the other bed does, and I love the light pink I've seen in photos of it. The plant is pretty large and was a good price.

OK, ugly wasn't really all that ugly, and I think a toad has enough creativity to have figured this one out. Now how strong does one have to be to put up a fence? Maybe boards would have been better.

Ding dong, the ditch is dug. Er, I mean rose bed.

Bottom line is, it was a witch of a ditch! I have a whopping 102 inches between the driveway and the property line. I had killed the grass last September (sorry, neighbors), meaning to work on it in a timely manner, but this was as timely as I could manage. The bed is only about 12 feet long. No sense in digging out shaded ground unless you're name is Hercules, and mine is definitely not even though my 85-year-old neighbor across the street thinks otherwise. I must admit to feeling pretty good about myself when I quit working last Sunday although I will also admit I hobbled to a very hot shower and was in bed by 6 o'clock. I figured I'd be barely moving on Monday morning, but au contraire, I felt fine and even felt better about being 60. This digging may well have put to bed my feeling of having one foot in the grave!

Back when it was still hot weather, I did some digging and pick-axing in this bed. Oh, what an agony. The ground was dry and rock hard and bearing abundant chunks of limestone, i.e., rocks! I have been spoiled by soft and penetrable Florida sand. Hitting a rock causes a sort of cartoon effect in me like Roadrunner hitting a wall. Very aggravating. I managed to remove one shovel depth in that attempt.

This time I knew it would be a double dig project. Dig out a shovel deep and heave it in the pickup. When that level's done, go back and repeat. I think I got about six running feet done when I figured the truck needed to be emptied. Driving around to the field behind my house, I was a tad concerned about what DH would think with the front end of the truck so far up in the air. Then each and every shovelful that went into the truck had to come out of the truck. Did I say double-dig? Quadruple-dig seems more accurate. (Just a note: I don't just dump it but neatly fill in low spots back there.) Then back to the driveway and digging another couple of rows, but the suspense was killing me. I had to see what was below the surface of the next layer which is my M.O. My particular brand of attention deficit disorder only allows me to continue doing the same behavior for so long at which point I must deviate and do something different.

So as I said, my intention was to dig and flip and break up. Hmm, I hear you asking, what breaking up is needed for sand? That is a great question. The answer is none. This ground, however, was not normal sand. It was more like mortar mix. Awful stuff! Dead stuff. No bugs, no worms, no roots. Yuck! Doing the flip-and-break-up revealed more thick layers of white clay and something that I think is called marl, a hodgepodge of compressed strata of mostly black 'something' mixed with little chunks of white and orange clay. I just couldn't leave all those chunks of clay in the ground, broken up or not, so I had basketball practice with the chunks and the truck. I stink at basketball. Again I was concerned about what DH would think if he heard all those dings on the truck, but I was getting tired and those chunks were heavy. One of them was as big as a football. I walked that one to the truck. From that 7'x8' area I filled up the truck again, and drove my super cool truck with its nose in the air back into the field. Miraculously, I got it empty again. Monday I moved another truckload of the next three linear feet, and today I finished the digging, but the truck sits full in the driveway, nose high in the air, waiting for me to return tomorrow. Whoa, there definitely should have been more fanfare with that statement.

**I finished the digging.**

This is where I must advise you not to do as I do but to find the right way to do it. As I was looking at all this yucky high-pH clay, my brain decided to apply a lot of powdered sulfur to the bottom of the bed, figuring that any roots that went that deep would find some acidity, so that's what I did. And even though they say earthworms will just appear in a garden bed that's been organically prepared (and I've seen it happen), I knew no right thinking earthworm was ever going to put his tootsies in this stuff, so I also decided to apply a whole lot of Milorganite to the bottom along with ground pine bark (soil conditioner) in hopes of this nutritious layer migrating down even deeper, as everything else does in Florida soil. Afterwards I googled 'calcareous clay', and sadly, I read that it neutralizes sulfur, so today I threw on more sulfur. Like I said, you probably shouldn't do this, but it made sense to me.

The next step toward 'White Maman Cochet' and 'Mrs B R Cant' having a permanent and cozy home is for DH to go get some composted horse manure from the sweet lady with a broodmare farm who loads it into our truck and doesn't charge a nickel for it. Yes, sir, she's the sweetest.

P.S. Here's a couple of pics of the new bed. I measured the bed when I was done. It's actually 14 feet long and narrows to 5 feet at the curb. I'm thinking I'll put White MC toward the street end and Mrs B R on the inside. I had trouble finding the surveyor's stake which is sunk several inches below the surface which is why the edge bulges on the right side. I've got five Evergreen Giant Liriopes to arrange on the street edge as I did on the other side of the driveway in the main circular garden. The area behind this bed and alongside the house will be covered with weedcloth and pine bark mulch. I have to cut off those oak suckers and heavily cover and mulch that area around the tree trunk, desperately hoping to limit the continued emergence of them. If anyone has any ideas, I'd love to hear them. I may add a picket fence on the property line for a future climber - but maybe not.

Garden work

As usual, I didn't get done what I thought I wanted to do, but I did get stuff done. I put out the epsom salts in the back and side gardens and some of the front before I ran out. I will have to run out tomorrow and get some more. I have found that Walgreens has the best price. I paid $2.99 on sale for a 6 lb bag of very fine crystals that are easier to apply than the kind from the garden stores. I also put out sulfur on my lime-y back garden. I went to Seminole Feed to get it today and there decided to buy the wettable sulfur (very fine powder) in a 25 lb bag for $20.99 (cheaper than 4 lb of large granules for $8.99) since I've read that the finer it is the faster it lowers the pH. Just be careful not to breathe it. I did the front garden a few weeks ago with the large granule soil sulfur, so we'll see if I can see any difference. Oh, I also got a 50 lb bag of alfalfa pellets. Good stuff!!

I also moved 'Madame Scipion Cochet' out of her pot and into the ground. I should have taken a photo of this Hybrid Perpetual rose bush. She is leafless (well, there was one yellow one which I removed), but she has lots of swollen budeyes. I'm very curious about how this rose is going to grow. Her canes go out and around, or that's the way it seems so far. I also moved 'Martha Gonzales' from a 3-gallon nursery pot into a nice heavy ceramic pot that's taller and wider. This means I have only one rose in a pot that needs to be in the ground...er, at least until next weekend. That's when three new roses are coming home with me. 'Lilian Austin', 'Cl Clotilde Soupert' and 'Souv de St Anne's'. Hopefully, I'll get them in the ground the same day but maybe not.

While I was out today, I went to a nursery to get some Evergreen Giant Liriope, but instead I did a risky thing. I bought an azalea for the spot - a $9.99 azalea to be exact. Thankfully, azaleas have shallow root systems, and hopefully, the roots of this bush won't go much farther than the 16" or so that I dug down, removing the powdery fine, light gray sand that I know is bad for azaleas. The spot is right at the base of an oak tree, so I had to dig around the roots with my glove-covered fingers to get out as much bad stuff as I could. Then I sprinkled some sulfur around, added peat moss (unfortunately already pH adjusted up) and composted manure to the bottom, then filled the rest with newly amended, old amended soil that I had removed from the hole and, of course, put the azalea in the middle. This azalea is a 'Duc de Rohan'. A few weeks back I had scribbled its name on a stickie note by my computer after reading good things about it. It's a salmon pink flower, and the tag says it blooms from November to February in Florida. Maybe that's why I wanted it. I can't remember now. It's a long bloom time for an azalea. The plant I bought had spent blooms on it as well as open flowers and buds, so maybe I can believe the tag.

This area of the garden needed an evergreen bush, because there are four hydrangeas in this bed which are bare for an awfully long time. I will say though that I am starting to admire their silvery grayish branches that practically glisten when the light is right, especially the 'Limelight' hydrangea paniculata.

Oh, and I replaced the leaky hose that ran from the hose bib to the timer with 1/2" poly and two hose-end adapters. So now that section of the garden can be watered automatically again instead of using the hose and 10x more water! Of course, how much easier it would have been to have done it this way to begin with, but, alas, I didn't know what hose-end adapters were for. What can I say?