This is still a work in progress... but I love the textures and colors here. They are a welcome respite from the boring garage, which my boyfriend likes to describe as "indiscriminate beige, with darker indiscriminate beige trim." I'm testing alternate trim colors to further remedy that, as you can see on the near window. The fence behind the garage was also beige before I painted it this spring, and I think that I'll be incorporating the fence color into the trim somehow...
... but as usual, I digress. Back to the plants. This part of my backyard is very narrow, and it's a pain to have to turn the mower around in such a tight space, so the grass in the foreground will soon be sacrificed for a path that leads back to the Japanese rock garden. You can kind of see on the left where I have started to lay the flagstones. They're in the dirt, with some thymes already planted around them. On the left of them (out of the frame) is an espaliered apple tree underplanted with borage and flanked with two blueberry bushes.
The rest is a hodgepodge of culinary herbs like sage, lemon verbena, and lemon balm (planted safely, I hope, in a chimney tile)... edibles like cabbage, swiss chard, carrots and red onions... perennials like hollyhocks, false indigo, asclepias tuberosa, salvia, dianthus and Russian sage... and even a couple of ornamental grasses and a "Sky Pencil" holly.The hollyhocks are only there because my winter sowing was a little more successful than I had expected, and the cabbage were a coworker's extras that I brought home. All were plopped as filler while the baptisia is still small. There are a bunch of other transient plants in the list above, too, so this won't look the same next year at all... and as much as I am enjoying it now, I'm looking forward to its next incarnation, too.
6 comments:
A garden fanatic you are. Keep it up, my 1st time over here after catching you on my site a few times.
btw, we just had the run in with the same culprit on out tomato plants!
Have you considered painting the garage black! I did mine and it's receded into the background - it's quite a leap of faith to think such a strong colour will act this way but it did. It's also a great background for foliage colour.
it looks cool to me, nice range of textures and colours.It sounds quite edible your garage garden.
What colour are your hollyhocks?I have two seedlings growing on in the kitchen windowsill.
That's a nice spot.
Wow... thanks for the compliments, Karen and all! I'm always hesitant to post full-garden pictures since I've only lived here for a little more than a year and it's still very much a work in progress.
Rick, sorry to hear about your run-in with the hornworms. Do you need me to send you a few cocoons?! :)
John I hadn't considered painting the siding black. I was just thinking about painting all the trim and the garage doors... hmm. The fence is painted in Behr paint's "Black Bean," the darkest shade of warm grey that I could find, because I wanted it to recede. (It looks lighter in the picture because I had to use satin finish paint to cover the old satin.)
Snappy, they are 'The Watchman' black hollyhocks--you're growing black hollyhocks, too, aren't you? I winter sowed these so I probably will get flowers next year.
I like the edible border, very pretty. I had a fence I didn't like the look of in California and I painted it a sage green, it really tied in nicely with the garden.
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