Front Patio Plantings Update

Last summer, after Cute W made our fabulous new front patio, I added a whole bunch of new native plantings, which I finally caught you all up on later that fall in this post. Now that things have come up in the spring, I thought I’d give you a bit of a before-and-after update.

I planted several Tiarella or Foam Flower, which looked like this when we first put them in:

These have all grown well, and they had a bunch of flowers, too. Right now I’ve got some little burlap borders around them because it’s not entirely obvious, yet, that I don’t want people to walk on them. So that’s a little unsightly, but I’m psyched at how well they’re growing. These send out runners, so the idea is that eventually they’ll “join up” and create a little boarder along the side of the patio.

Here’s a Columbine plant from shortly after it arrived at our house.

These haven’t shown tons of growth, but they have gifted us with some lovely flowers.

Here are the three Meadow Rue babies that I planted last summer:

And here’s a shot that includes two of them now, plus a close-up of a couple of their flowers.

Here are a couple of the meadow rues as of mid-June:

The third one is not quite as pretty; I think an animal has made a nest in its roots, and I don’t want to disturb it . . . them? . . . whatever.

Here’s a baby phlox planted last summer

And here are a couple of pictures from May, as well as the pretty flowers they’re showing.

Here are a couple of baby Sedum plants.

And this shows you how much bigger they’ve gotten, plus the lovely little white flowers they’ve got they’re a little hard to see, but if you open the image in a new tab, it’s easier.

And finally, the two Redtwig Dogwoods are going great. Here’s one of them, with the picture on the left from last summer, and how it’s looking so far on the right.

A lot of plants are growing well. A few plants have disappeared entirely. There’s still way more empty dirt than we’d like, so it’s definitely a work in progress. We also have some old stuff that we’d still like to get rid of and replace, so that’s on the to do list.

Meanwhile, remember how my strip of native wildflowers turned out to be not-so-native? This year, I finally have some intentionally-planted native flowers coming in: a few blanket flowers coming in, plus lots of coreopsis

We’ll see what the summer brings!