On the fifth of July we spent a day grooming mom’s garden for her second garden open day.
From the parking area on the east side of the house, you might not have guessed that a big bright sunny garden awaited.
By her car port, a blue geranium rambled through a cutleaf elderberry.
Almost all of the lilies now bloomed in the sunny south garden.
In her patch of woods, we had hung an old window for decoration.
Looking west from the lilies above, we could see Mike and Mark’s house: good neighbours.
The lawn edging had held up well from tour number one and would not have to be redone for the smaller tour two days from now.
All the containers we’d brought up to enhance the garden for tour day were still in fine fettle.
The plants on the fairy chair had started to blend together. (All purchased at The Basket Case.)
Above, looking from the west to the east down one of the small paths. In front of the house, two long concrete strips running east-west (for a single wide trailer, originally) had inspired a design of nine geometric garden beds divided by grassy paths.
One of the short north-south paths of the nine flower beds gave this view of the big flower beds that sweep in a curve around the south side of the garden.
Originally we had kept a doorway pruned through the escallonia hedge, but we had let it close in to keep the deer out.
Just a reminder of what the escallonia hedge had looked like nine years before (yes, it is there, behind the tulips):
The cosmos were starting to bloom over in that southwest border….
along with a magnificent tall stand of lilies.
When I first learned of the existence of Oriental and Asiatic lilies in the late 1980s, I could not believe they would actually grow in my garden. They seemed far too delicate and tropical. I got a book called “Let’s Grow Lilies”, illustrated with clip-art style cartoons, that said they would not grow well in thickly planted beds but must instead be planted among “little lacy lovelies”. Yet here they were coming back strongly year after year in my mom’s overgrown garden. The main trick was keeping the slugs off.
It looks like the lily book from the North American Lily Society has changed its look!
But I digress. Here we looked back from the south border toward the house, and we walked from the patch of open lawn that divided the geometric beds from the big swooping border and reentered the grid of grass paths.
An old photo, below, shows the same side of mom’s house in 1999; it is a good thing she bought the second lot to the south or she would never have had enough room for her garden. (You can just see the edge of the concrete parking strips that inspired the geometry of the nine garden beds.)
Above, in 2009, the birdbath sits just inside of the edge of those concrete strips.
The garden is finessed and again weed and dead-head free and ready for the Vancouver garden club and a few friends to arrive in two days.
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