Mother Earth’s Garden

Resurrecting a Dead Space

by Rebecca on October 4th, 2007

My parents both like to garden, but unfortunately they can’t always find the time. They inherited a rather “over done” garden from the people who lived in the house before them, and over the years it’s slowly declined into this:

My parents have tried planting new flowers and plants in this space, though mostly things die off fairly quickly. They’ve also tried with out success to tame a rather ambitious holly bush planted by the previous owners:

I decided, as a sort of gift, to resurrect these dead spaces for them. When re-doing any gardening space, either for yourself or some one else, there are a few things you need to think about first.

1. How much time are you able to devote to tending it? In my parents case, they would love a garden, but can’t tend it every day. So lots of low maintenance plants and shrubs that only require some weeding and occasional pruning and mulch.
2. Formal or Informal? Any extreme of either requires different types of plants and more care. Formal gardens will need to be weeded and mulched more regularly to achieve the proper look, and informal gardens can get out of control if not tended properly. I went with an in-between sort of style for my parents garden. Basically, pull up what you don’t want to grow.
3. Decide what you are going to plant before you move one clod of dirt. It’s much easier to plan your space around the plants then it is to find plants that fit in your space.
4. Mix it up. Don’t just plant your favorites. Some amount of variety is always important. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen beautiful spaces ruined because some one had an unhealthy love for the color yellow.

The first thing that needed to be done, was get rid of unwanted plants. The holly bush had to go. The amount of pruning that would have been needed would have only made it look worse than it already did. Plus, it led to the discovery of a rather healthy conifer tree. This tree will need some time to recover from little sunlight and crowding, but it looked very green and healthy on the crown and opposite side.

I also thinned out the plethora of iris bulbs out front. I threw out half of the bulbs, and spread out the rest.

The next thing to do was replenish the soil. Due to over planting and little care, the soil in these beds had a hard time growing anything but weeds. The nutrients needed to be replaced. This is something that should be done at the beginning or end of every season, especially if you don’t live in a wooded area that is provided with natural mulch. Cow manure and compost is the best mulch you could ever use, but since I didn’t want to haul that down to my parents in the car, I bought several bags of mulch made of this same miracle mix! It’s cheaper than wood chip mulch and does a better job.

After mulching, I planted a variety of bulbs, both spring and summer blooming, some box woods, a red bud tree, and some mums. Some of the plants that were there were kept, but most were moved to better locations. I also added definite borders to make it easier to mulch and weed. Here are some before and after pics:

Over all a much better use of space, and easier to care for. Many of the empty spaces will be full of blooms next season. It can be daunting we you inherit a space that has already been gardened. You don’t know what has been planted, or where it will grow. The best solution to this is to pull everything up, start from scratch. Don’t wait for it to get shabby, and don’t be worried about “ruining” the previous gardeners work. It’s your space now, plant what you want, get rid of what you don’t want. You’ll be much happier with it.

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POSTED IN: How to Grow Stuff