Renovate B&A
By: Garden Gate staff
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Overgrown woes
We’ve all been there. You don’t give enough love to one part of the garden, and suddenly, it’s overgrown. That’s exactly what happened in this corner of our test garden. But with some rethinking and a plan of action, it made a quick comeback!
There was just way too much fine texture in this spot — all the plants seemed to run together. The ground cover sedum’s foliage is nice-looking, and it’s great at keeping weeds down, but it spread too aggressively in our good soil. So it had to go.
Since they’re hard to keep pruned back and in-check, the large forsythia and weigela shrubs on the left needed to come out, too.
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Add impact
With the overgrown plants out of the way, we could think about adding more color! We started with the smooth hydrangea in the corner but didn’t stop there.
The tall sedum and hosta were crammed together so we brought the hosta forward, which helped its big, broad leaves make a bolder statement.
The three barberries in the corner were almost right — we just moved one so it would give better definition to the corner of the bed. See how these last two changes look in the next slide.
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Bring in color!
The original garden had some blooming plants, but they finished at the same time. To fix this, we chose long-blooming and reblooming annuals and perennials and arranged them until we found their growing spots.
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Fabulous height
Finally, we added a panicle hydrangea to a container in the middle of the bed. It breaks up all those vertical lines on the privacy fence behind it and adds height until the smooth hydrangea in the corner reaches full size.
Definition, lots of color and every plant in the right spot — this once-overgrown bed has it all!
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