Today Joe is sharing his former garden with us.
This was the garden I made over a decade ago at the first house I ever owned, in central Michigan.
This is how it started—not much there, and the house needed a lot of work too. It was fun starting with a blank slate, but so much work.
A year later, the house was looking better, but I still a lot to do with the gardening.
A big mass of Campanula carpatica (Zones 4–9) looked amazing and bloomed nearly nonstop. But these turned out to be very short-lived perennials, and faded away.
I love bulbs, so lots of tulips and daffodils added color to the front garden in the spring.
In a shaded part of the garden, windflowers (Anemone blanda, Zones 4–8) carried on the spring-bulb flower scheme.
I planted a lot in these front beds in early summer. Dense planting means less space for weeds to grow!
A combination I loved was silvery leaves of cardoon (Cynara cardunculus, Zones 5–9), dark fine foliage of bronze fennel (Foeniculum vulgare, Zones 4–9), and ornamental onions (Allium christophii, Zones 5–8).
This wasn’t planned. A bed in the back where I put plants I wasn’t sure what to do with sometimes looked better than my intentional gardens!
Old-fashioned petunias line the front walk. I like their looser growth habit that fills in and lets the different colors mix together.
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