i thought i'd be done gardening by now

Back when I was first thinking about gardening and what I wanted to do with my flower-beds, I had the brilliant idea of concentrating on perennials.

It made perfect sense. Perennials come back every year. So I'd spend a year (maybe two -- three tops) planting. But then I'd be done. These perennials, by dint of their awesome perennialness, would keep coming back and the garden would soon be taking care of itself.

Well, I've learned a few things since then.

For starters, a garden full of perennials doesn't just take care of itself. I mean, it does, but not in the way that I want. Plants encroach on each other. Weeds work their way in. Boundaries disappear. Even if I don;t have to replant everything each year, there's plenty of work to do. Not that I'm good at doing it. There's plenty of work that my garden needs and isn't getting.

But even if perennials did take care of themselves, there are always new reasons emerging that I can't just kick back and let it do its thing.

Plans change

Blair and I keep coming up with new ideas about what we want to do. "We should keep this area as grass." "No, let's put daylilies there!" "We should put a path here." "Let's reroute the path!" There are always stones being moved as we redraw boundaries between lawn and flowerbed. And unforeseen circumstances change things as well. As an example, a friend stayed here last fall and decided to build a stairway into the front lawn. The part where we're always walking downhill from the front door to the driveway. Well, the stairway needs flowers around it. And so, this spring we've been filling in the area around the stairs with daylilies, hostas, some creeping flox. And we still have to put down a slate walkway from the top of those stairs, along the rerouted border of the flower bed, up to the front walk.

Embrace annuals

Yeah, I know I said that I focus on perennials. But there are some annuals that I like as well. Coleus is tops among those. But calladium and canna are nice too. So, despite my vow to stick to perennials, I find myself working with annuals as well.

All those daylilies

There are over 80,000 varieties of daylilies out there. I don't have all of them. Seriously, though, I keep saying that I'm done buying new daylilies. Then I get to a LIDS meeting and or plant sale, and there are all these great looking varieties. And then, when I buy new ones, I have to find places to put them. And buy markers and labels for them. And, no doubt, some of these markers will get dameged, so some of these daylilies will end up unlabelled, leaving me to replan and replant and...well, you get the picture.

So, yeah...years after I was sure I'd be done gardening, I'm still...gardening.