Remember the scene in Ferris Beuller's Day Off where the protagonist's bedroom is filled with flowers and balloons from well-wishers all over Chicago? That's sort of how Andy's garden is beginning to look, with gifts of white flowers. My mother, the Hellebore Queen, gave us a white Bleeding Heart (Dicentra spectabilis "Alba"), and her friend Judy sent some white creeping phlox. (The roses that we incorporated into Andy's garden also came from Judy.) Fellow NC blogger Carla sent a thoughtful card, with a packet of Thunbergia seeds inside.
Elsewhere, work continues on the big center island bed.
I dig up big chunks of sod, cart them over to the back border where I lay them upside down, then cover the whole affair with sheets of wet cardboard...and cover that with grass clippings, mulched leaves, and old wheat straw from where Andy used
to sleep under the deck. It is pretty labor intensive, and it's not the way to create a bed in a hurry, but I tried this on a smaller scale last year and was amazed at what it did for the soil. I don't plan (read "don't have the money to buy") anything for this back border right now, so I can afford to invest the time for nature do the real work.Like I said, there are quicker ways to prepare a flowerbed but as Ferris observed:
"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around, you might miss it."
