Harmony Hills Home and Garden: Stairway Garden Clean Up

Hi there! Today I'm really happy to be able to share with you another before-and-after in the garden. This one makes me so happy because this area has been a vegetative eyesore since the first day we moved in almost a year ago. Actually - it was an eyesore when we toured the house the first time, the second time, and for the home inspection too. So yeah, this one feels good to take care of!

The problem? Take a look at the mess of green madness in the retaining wall next to the stairs in the back yard!

I mean, what a mess!!!

In this garden area, I just know there are beautiful, full hostas hiding in there somewhere. But they're totally consumed by a jungle of native Virginia Spiderwort, wild day lilies, volunteer sweet pea vines, and wild weedy grasses.

The spiderwort is a pretty plant - it's a native wildflower that now is in cultivation and many gardeners use it because of its unique form - very upright stalks with lance-shaped opposing leaves coming out of the main stem. I do like the spiderwort - I even purchased a gallon of a different variety of it for the azalea border garden in the front yard this spring (before I knew I had many, many clumps of it in the back yard!) So I'll be moving it out of here to other places around our yard. But in this particular spot, the spiderwort has gone crazy tall, and then flopped over and now is a tangled mess. Now that its main flowering season is over, it's time to move it, buster!

This area of the yard has served as a kind of waste area, or a nursery bed, or storage, or what not. In the photo below there are several pots of things that are in the middle of being moved from one place to another. It's time to get this cleaned up!

So yesterday, on an incredibly humid, soggy morning, I tackled the area with a shovel and got to work. The results were exactly what I hoped for!

Now when we arrive in the driveway and walk up the stairs, there's no more wild messy jungle greeting us! Only a lush row of incredibly full hostas, lined up neatly along the stone wall.

There's room for something else to be planted here, too. Will have to think on that and come up with a plan.

So clean and neat!

I left two butterfly bushes flanking the old back porch, and also left one white azalea that is there by the grill.

In front of the azalea is where I had to squeeze in some herbs earlier this spring... not the best arrangement but it was the only empty area I had at the time. Now I might just make this entire area an herb garden!

Let's talk about the old back porch for a minute. It sticks out here, off of the back wall of the house, but currently serves no practical purpose. In years past, it was the back entrance to the house. The door from the porch leads into the kitchen. If the old blueprints are correct, the door used to be where the window is, and used to go into a butler's pantry that has since been turned into the laundry and half-bath. Somewhere along the line, either the house was remodeled to move the door into the kitchen, or the blueprints were not followed 100%. Anyway, in the 1950's - 1980's or so, this door was used - and that means there must have been stairs coming down of the porch into the back yard.

But somewhere along the line, the stairs were removed, leaving this porch stranded and unusable.

When we had the new brick pavers installed last fall, we had to make a choice - totally abandon the porch and make the bricks just go to the stairway, or leave a landing spot for stairs later to be added back onto the porch, making the brick path wider in this area. You can see we chose the latter. Maybe some day we'll remodel this porch and make it useful again.

It's hard to imagine what it might look like with the porch remodeled, railings updated to modern code, and a stairway coming down off of it onto this landing area. It would really change the look and feel of this entry garden, wouldn't it?

For now, I'm just enjoying the cleaned-up gardens, and I'm not going to worry about what to do in this garden. It's neat and tidy now, and that's a good thing!

I left a little bit of vinca in the garden, to see if it would take off and thrive now that it has no competition. If it does, I might just let that be the solution for this space. I think it would look nice with a nice ground cover of vinca.

I'm pretty sure I'll be moving the two butterfly bushes. They just don't get enough sun here to thrive, and instead they look spindly and weedy. Not sure the fate of the white azalea... maybe I'll keep it here for another season or two and see what other ideas develop.

Another benefit to having this cleaned up? Now the vegetable garden that is across the diagonal corner from the hostas looks even prettier than before.

Amazing how having a wild mess near by made the vegetable garden look wild too. Now they both look tidy and pretty! It makes a really nice "Welcome Home" view when you come up the stairs from the driveway. (In fact, maybe I'll put a "welcome home" sign here. Hmm, a craft project!)

What did I do with all of the plants that I removed from this area? Well, to store them temporarily, I stuck them all into pots that I had stacked up in the garage from this spring's planting frenzy.

I ended up with 14 big pots full of root clumps - some pots have a double-decker stack of roots because I ran out of pots!

I had a couple pots of hosta and daylily that I saved too, plus I had a honeysuckle vine that I brought with me last summer from our old house that I haven't planted yet. Most of these spiderwort clumps will be planted in our south side hill, which is nearly 100% shade. They should do well there. Some of the clumps will be shared with friends - some in exchange for other things, some just as gifts. I love to share plants - do you?

Here's a "truth in advertising" moment - to the right of the stairway, it's still jungle mess. This kind of mess runs 100' down the length of the driveway along the new fence line. It's a big project to think about cleaning that one up. It's not going to happen in on morning like the left side did. So I'm leaving it for another day to worry about.