It Ain't Easy Being Green

I got the plants in! I chose Saturday to work on it, which was kinda stupid, since rain was forecast. So I'm thinking, Hey, gardening in the rain is cool! It'll soften up the earth and make digging so much easier! What didn't occur to me until it was too late was that gardening in the rain means getting seventy different kinds of muddy. Even that was fun until I realized that I'm the loser who has to clean it up with someone (read: me, loser) tracks mud into the house. Oh well. I waited until it dried a little to take photos:





Here's the rose glow barberry, cordyline red star, and Huntington carpet rosemary:



Also, mounds of dirt above the slope where I still need to ritually sacrifice the roses (I pulled one out on Saturday!) and get some nicer plants in.





Here's the "razzleberri" chinese fringe flower:



It should get to be about 3' x 3', so hopefully it'll fill it quite a bit and provide an exclamation point at the end of the yard.

I also went out and bought a bunch of tricolor sedum and another firepower nandina to fill in around the rocks. Ground cover's one of my highest priorities, seeing as how without it to soften the rocks, my front yard will resemble a quarry or low-rent beach renewal project you'd see in some trashy Delawere beach town.

Rock Me Amadeus!

The rock slope project is completed! It only took me a week (although it was PMS week, so LAY OFF, OKAY! *sob*), but the slope's done and I just bought a metric shedload of plants.







There are a few disappointments. This batch of basalt seems smaller, on average, than the last batch. Which is good for my back, actually, but it does look a little mismatched to me. The new side is also much less steep as the other as a result of putting in more planting niches. I also still haven't gotten around to preparing the planting area above the slope. I don't like the roses—scratch that, I HATE the roses—but it feels wasteful and ungrateful to just get rid of them. Does any one want any unkempt roses that are probably mostly suckers by now?

Among the new (hopefully not moribund) plants I bought: tons of creeping rosemary (I'm hoping it'll do something like this:



to soften the rocks a little), a "razzleberri" chinese fringe flower:



(yes, I know the name is awful and self-consciously cutesy in that Vaseline-toothed Miss Texas way, but I like the foliage, damnit), several cordylines that look like this one:



as well some ajuga for groundcover and a few other things that slip my mind at the moment. I think I got another nandina, actually, but only one beacuse it's the end of the season and Christ are there ever some pitiful-looking plants haunting the nursery section of Home Depot. It's almost as depressing as the aisle of grungy used toys at the ghetto Goodwill.

I'm aiming to get the plants in the ground this weekend, and I'll try to take some photos. In the meantime, I'll wrestle with my inner laundry-scoop saver and figure out what to do with the damn roses.