Front Garden Design: Dry Garden - April 10 2022
It's been a while since I've wrote an update on the garden, but neither me nor the garden have been sitting still. We got new fencing in part of the back garden, and I planted up a new border around it. Mainly however, a lot of progress has been made in the front garden, which - in my humble opinion - is now no longer the shame of the neighborhood (I dream big).
At this point we definetely were the shame of the neighborhood.
In a previous post I discussed how I took out the bricks/tiles out of the front garden and improved the soil. After that I essentially spent a year on controlling the perennial weeds in the front garden, mainly bindweed. I sowed grass and clovers in the front garden to drown out other weeds and as green fertilizer. The bindweed is not gone, it still creeps up every now and again along walls or under paving where I can't get at the roots. However, it seems to be steadily becoming weaker each year. While doing that, I made plans for the planting of the garden, which are presented below.
Planting plans, one sketch with an impression of the view from our window, one rough planting plan.
I didn't follow the plans to the letter, I couldn't get orystachis plants for example, but the idea is close.
The plants I chose are pretty much all plants that love full sun and draught/good drainage, which suits my sandy south facing front garden. I focused on plants with soft textures and various shades of foliage, with lots of blues, light greens, and silvers. I paid attention to pick plants that stay green in winter or have good winter silhouets.
Hence, I put in a lot of grasses, festuca glauca's in different shades ("Elijah Blue" and "Amigold"), and two variaties of stipa (pennata, and tenuissima "Ponytails"). The tenuissima are also in my backyard, and I grew all these from seeds a year earlier. I simply dug them up from the back garden and transplanted them in the front. The Festuca's "Elijah Blue" are also in the backyard and I cut up some of those plants into three and reused them in the front garden. My favorite grass in the front garden, however, is the Schizachyrium Scoparium. I have varieties "Prairy Blues", with purply-blue leaves, and 'Honka Tonka', which have a small layer of white fur. They have a gorgeous coppery winter silhouet. I hope they will grow a bit wider and taller still. I haven't taken a good picture of them yet, so you will have to believe me (or google them).
In the back left stipa tenuissima, next to those stipa pennata. The blue grass in the middle is festuca 'Elijah Blue', and the smaller light green ones 'Amigold'.
Other structural plants I put in are shrubs, santolina rosmarinafolia (green, Dutch: Olijfkruid, Heiligenkruid), santolina chamaecyparissus (silver, Dutch: Heiligenbloem), and leucophyta brownii (Dutch: Zilverstruikje). The leucophyta has intense white/silver foliage and braches and has fairylike blooms, but it isn't fully hardy in our winters here. In the end I took it out because I'm too lazy to properly protect it, and I found the color contrast too harsh during winter/fall. Other plants I put in were two aloes (one died because of being water logged in winter, the other is doing fine), cotula hispida (Dutch: Vedermos), lavendula angustifolia ("Blue Mountain White" and "Imperial Gem"), sedum "Cape Blanco" and genista lydia (Dutch: Heidebrem). The majority of these plants' blooms are bright yellow.
Santolina bushes followed by sedum "Cape Blanco".
As show stoppers I put in eryngium "Big Blue" and "Violetta", which are essentially bright blue/purple thistle plants. They are stunning. I also put in purple tiny irises, and white and yellow eremurus (naald van cleopatra). I find the flower spires of the eremurus so dramatic and beautiful that I somehow expected them to just not grow in my garden. Like, why would these exotic-looking flower queens show their face in my unexotic Dutch garden? However, on paper my garden's conditions should suit them very well, and (spoilers) grow and bloom they did indeed. Most even have already come up again this year!
Eryngium "Big Blue", white eremurus, and everything blooming together in the first spring of the front garden.
Finally, I planted a tree. Discussing the tree will have to wait however, because I'm so proud of having planted it myself that I want to dedidicate a separate post to it.
In the fall of 2020 I took out all the grass and clovers. Then I started to realize the planting plan. Here is the transformation:
Next, I covered the soil with olivine gravel. I wanted to put in gravel because a) I think it looks great with dry garden styles, and b) I hoped it would discourage cats from coming in and pooping in my front garden. I'll try not to say too much about the latter, but: I've had to remove bags full of poop from the front garden. The gravel worked, but only so much that only one cat still poops there and this cat now aims its poop to land precisely on my preciously planted new grasses. I literally had to pick a little catpoop out of each of the lower grasses this spring. It would be funny except that it is gross and that it somehow killed a bunch of my festuca grasses that I really liked.
Anyway, olivine is actually really cool, because this gravel actually binds co2 from the air. A kilogram of olivine binds on average about 1 kilogram of co2. So this gravel may actually be used to counter the climate change crisis we're having. In the Netherlands some studies have started on the upsides and downsides of its usage, and you can read about it more from rijkswaterstaat here (Dutch). You can order olivine gravel online here for example (I'm not sponsored by/affiliated with this store in any way). The gravel looks good/like any gravel, and is not that expensive.
Now far away from being the shame of the neighborhood.
I did make one big mistake in the front garden design however, which is that I left a strip of the old paving around the house. It just didn't look good, as you can see in the pictures above. It was partly covered by a very tough to weed grass, which was very annoying (and that cat pooped on it also ;_;). So I decided a few weeks ago to just take it all out, and put in olivine all the way through. It looks SO much better, and matches our big siting rock (something nice the previous owners of the house left). I also hired someone to remove the hedera (Dutch:klimop) from our facade, as well as a small tree/shrub that was too close to the wall. Here is the result of my latest efforts:
Overall, I'm very pleased. I do need to do some more editing this year, replacing some of the plants that haven't done well (because of CAT). I also want taller grasses near the fence, so I'm putting in stipa extremaorientalis and replacing some of the current stipa with stipa ichu. I'm looking forward to see how it matures.