I Can See Clearly Now

the garden from far north side looking south--
the trees in the way back are just on the other side of 
the driveway (middle of the property)

The new garden area clean-out was finished today. There are still some oak trees that need to have branches trimmed, but I am not going to do that until after June when oak wilt season is over. All the other trees and shrubs have either been selected to stay or removed. I didn't remove any oaks, but almost all the juniper cedars went as well as many mountain laurels and Texas persimmons. They are all nice plants, but over the past 20 years they have been let to grow wild and reseed wherever. I needed more room for bees, gardens, a pond, paths and other plants so they had to go.

the garden from the center looking north

Tonight I luxuriated in scanning through my entire Native Texas Plants book by Wasowski and Wasowski. It was my favorite gardening book the last time we lived here and still holds many flags in the plant lists. As I went through it I reveled in having the space to put in pretty much anything I want from trees to groundcover.

Tomorrow I plan to walk the garden with a bunch of rope (seagulls are in a flock, owls are in a parliament, crows are in a murder, but I have no idea what rope is gathered into and it is bugging me) that I will lay out where the beds will go so I can get an idea how much area I'm actually looking to plant. Since I decided to go with stone, I'm able to follow a more organic path with the shapes of the beds and contour to the existing topography and plants.

the garden from the center looking south

Not all of the garden will be planted this year--all evidence to the contrary I'm not INSANE--but the beds will all be constructed and filled while I have access to the labor, and trucks to haul soil, manure, and stone.

Timing has been bad with all the travel I have been doing and I'm taking off for a week again in a week so I haven't been able to start plants from seeds. This year I plan to sow seed that can go directly into the garden and doesn't need to be started indoors. I will also buy some plants--especially the trees and ones that are too slow to grow from seed--but that's a more expensive route and I'm not in that much of a hurry for once.

the garden from the north again,
but this time just on the inside of the tree-line

I'm even redesigning the pond and bog pond layout so that the bog pond takes up a bigger area and can be used for extensive natural filtration for the pond. The bog pond I put in in Atlanta was not a good design because when it developed a leak in the liner, it would have been an enormous effort to take all the rock out of it to fix the liner. This one won't be deep. Instead it will be bigger horizontally so the water flows through a lot more plant roots and bacterially-rich river rock before flowing back to the pond. As a special treat, tomorrow afternoon I am going to run by the water garden store as I will be out in that area anyway.