How To Hide the Ugly Parts of Your Garden

I’m trying to do a better job of documenting the garden this season. It’s easy to focus on the areas that are working, but I think it’s more important to document the areas that aren’t working well.

Photographs are the best way to figure out what’s working and what’s not in a garden. Especially looking at photographs throughout the entire growing season. You can see areas that need editing. I’m going to use this post to share some of the areas I want to improve this season.

The new Japanese maple ‘Bloodgood’ we planted last year.

I found this Japanese maple last year at Home Depot. This tree will eventually cover up the corner, but until it does, we need to make some changes. We’ve got a lot going on in this corner. There’s the old and new section of fence and an old telephone pole. The old fence will be replaced in a couple of years, but the telephone pole is here to stay.

I’d like to hide the background in this section of the garden while I wait for the maple to grow. My idea is to train ivy on wires attached to the fence or to install a vertical garden. Either will do a great job of covering the old fence and telephone pole until the maple is big enough to cover it up.

In April, I widened the border in the Mary Garden. I plan to continue adding plants to fill in the border. I watched the Layered Planting lecture by Fergus Garrett at Great Dixter, and it gave me lots of ideas on how to add more layers to this section of the border. Right now, there’s a lot of empty space to fill.

Side garden entrance after the boxwood were moved to Mary garden.

The side entrance garden used to have boxwood lining both sides of the turf path, but I redeployed the boxwood along the left side to the Mary garden.

Now that the boxwood is redeployed, I need to tidy this area up. Eventually, I will replace the boxwood hedge, but that won’t happen this growing season. Instead, I’ll use some of the plants I grew from seed to occupy this space.

Section of the front garden where I am systematically removing the lawn and replacing it with gardens.

Some of my most important garden lessons are accidents. The front garden is a classic example of this. I planted chartreuse barberry plugs and iris into this section of the garden as place holders. I had new plants that needed to be planted before Winter, so I just planted them on the top of the hill.

I’m glad I did. I love these barberry shrubs and want to use them in this section of the garden. The color is amazing and the deer won’t touch them. I’m also amazed at how well the iris grew in this area. Now I have lots of iris that can be divided and put into other areas of the garden. I never planned to have iris in this part of the garden. I just need to do a bit of editing to finish this border.

We plan to install a nice stone path leading to our Mother-in-law’s house and replace this section of turf.

The photograph above shows a section of the garden that needs some serious TLC. I shared our plans to build a path in this area. I also want to replant the border under the Redbud trees. My plan is to clean up the allium and create a woodland border with layers of bulbs and shade-loving perennials.

There you have it. These are the areas in the garden that need the most work. Now that we’ve reached the end of May, the garden season in Michigan will start full speed ahead. Now I just need to keep up. Happy gardening!