Garden: Update--Late Summer 2018

Hey everybody!  Long time no see.  I feel as though gardening has lost its allure (helped along, maybe, by the reminder of the plumbing fiasco that destroyed parts of the garden nearly two years ago).  And I have a pretty short attention span, to be honest; it is hard to sustain the slowly-accruing rewards of gardening.  

So, anyway, last Fall I dug up and redesigned the front garden bed, ditching the New Perennials-style planting and creating something more traditionally Pacific Northwest.  The new planting is lower maintenance and offers more continuity throughout the year than did the previous scheme.

The new garden features swathes of Hakonechloa (Japanese Forest Grass) interrupted with sword ferns.  Both are good four-season plants, here.  The Hakonechloa dies over the Winter, but maintains a full,  mounded shape and attractive, warm buff color.  The ferns remain upright and green until I cut them back to make room for fresh Spring growth, so they contribute year-round to an attractive planting scheme.  Last Winter, the garden looked a bit sketchy because the plants were so immature, but I think the combination will be a winner as it becomes fuller with maturity.  

The new scheme also introduced a few new plants.  I'm almost embarrassed to admit that there are a peony and a rose as well as the clematis, hydrangea, and Foxglove that survived the purge.  What???!!?  Those flowers sound way, way too "English Garden" for me!  We'll see.  They are interspersed throughout the Hakoneckloa in what I hope looks like a "natural" manner.  The rose is just a tiny thing that I got through mail-order from Heirloom Roses (so it won't show up in these photos at all) and the peony is an Itoh hybrid with single/semi-double butter yellow flowers.  I hope it gives good Fall color, but I'm not positive that it will.

Here is the view into the corner of the front garden bed.  Most of the plants are still small, so there is quite a bit more ground showing than I would like.  The hydrangea remains from the previous garden scheme, but everything else is new--either newly purchased or simply dug and divided from elsewhere in the garden.  

Another view of the same.  There is a swath of Astilbe chinensis "Purple Candles" at the back (six plants in total, grouped around the foot of the hydrangea), the pale trunks of a multi-stemmed vine maple in the foreground, and the new Itoh peony in the left-hand corner.

I've added some purple Ajuga "Mahogany" to continue the purple foliage from the other side of the entry path.  The Ajuga is doing a good job of holding its own amidst the encroaching Sweet Woodruff. 

Existing plantings on the other side of the entry path.  I simplified this planting last Fall to keep it in character with the changes to the other side of the garden.  There is a lot of Hakonechloa in this portion of the garden--it shows up all over our property as does the Japanese Anemone--I guess you could call them "signature plants".

And that's the current state of the garden.  I hope it will look OK next Spring, but I think the plants will need an additional year to mature and to fill-in before the reality matches the vision.  

While I wait for that to happen, I will be spending time on different artistic pursuits including Art (I'm trying to improve to the point of being able to make real "Art" with a capital "A") and I am setting myself up to dabble in oil paints.