Garden Log 5/6/21

I’ve been a little under the weather, and it’s been grey and rainy, which I usually love, but the combination has made it a little tough to do much gardening. I do try to get out and do something every day, though — it’s good for my sanity. So I trimmed the remaining dried flowerheads off the hydrangeas, and even deadheaded some of the Thalia daffodils.

I have enough tulips and daffodils that I usually don’t bother deadheading them, esp. since deadheading those doesn’t lead to repeat flowering, but if I’m just puttering in the front garden anyway, sometimes I tidy things up a bit. Overall, my garden is definitely more on the wild than the neat side, but a little trimming here and there can be pleasant. 🙂

I also ended up moving some wood hyacinths — I don’t know why I planted them in a row along the front, because I almost never do rows of everything.

The problem with rows, I’ve found, is that if something goes wrong (say, your row of boxwood has a dog pee on it, and two of them go half-dead), it’s super-evident. Whereas if you have a more complex and wandering structure to your garden, then if something is struggling, it’s not nearly as visible — the eye is mostly going to be drawn to the pretty flowers that are doing well. That’s also useful for disguising withering daffodil / tulip foliage, bleeding heart foliage, etc.

So anyway, I dug up a few clumps of the wood hyacinths (plant as bulbs, and over a few years, they’ll multiply into thicker clumps of tiny bulbs), and then I divided those clumps and planted them in several other spots on the yard. No more row in front (which wasn’t that neat a row anyway), and more flowers filling up bare spots, which should lead to less need for weeding / mulching. Wins all around.

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