create a secret garden in my backyard

We have removed the very leggy and poorly placed rosebushes from the Secret Garden. We will try roses in another area – this space doesn’t work for them.

Today, I spent some time getting rid of the Spring weeds, raking and turning the mulch and thinking about what I want to do. First thing for this year is going to be to get some stepping stones to keep a clear path from the upper deck to the pond deck. I have not made any planting decisions yet. I will probably start small.

I need to make a decision about the Beautyberry that has volunteered pondside. It is growing at an amazing rate and I fear it will be too large for the space. I am tempted to leave the Redbud which has also volunteered nearby. Redbuds are so graceful and lovely in the Spring.

I guess the number 1 goal for this year is to keep the weeds under control. That would be a good start.

In the autumn, my garden looked delightful – that end of season, ready-for-renewal look – empty but full of potential. Today, it just looks desolate and disregarded. I hope to be able to spend some time out there over the coming weeks and make some decisions about what I want to accomplish this year.

I took the afternoon off, thinking I would be doing a hospice visit but they asked me to come tomorrow instead, soooooo…it was a beautiful day here – a bit of a chill but nothing to keep me indoors – I went into the garage, got my gloves, my rake, my hoe and my garden debris popup bag and headed into the Secret Garden to get rid of all of the remaining grass and weeds. I spent about an hour and a half out there and accomplished quite a bit. I need to cut back the rose bushes soon, they are quite leggy and not terribly attractive at the moment. And I have my “MidAtlantic Gardener’s Guide” by Andre and Mark Viette ready to see if I can divine the secrets my garden will reveal to me next year!

I spent a couple of hours in the Secret Garden today, pulling weeds and imagining flowers. It is a beautiful, bright blue October day, temperature in the 60s. The soil is still moist from the recent rain so the weeds didn’t put up much resistance. I quite rudely disturbed the bullfrog with my fierce attention to cleaning things. I apologized.

Because my poor little Secret Garden has been on its own for weeks now. I haven’t even gone out to chat with the fish in the pond. But all that will change this weekend when I get out there and tenderly pull the weeds from the ground and spread a warm winter coat of mulch. And consider once again that secrets that my garden holds and wonder what it will reveal to me in the coming months.

We have been inundated with rain (a little storm called Ernesto, among others) and now my little secret garden is a bit weedy again. But, wonder of wonders, I also have a Morning Glory vine growing on the lattice fence. And every morning, I look outside and, even on gloomy days like today, those perfect violet blue flowers give me hope and cheer!

Right now, my “secret garden” is just mulch and weeds. Well, there is the pond and the waterfall but they are surrounded by a lot of mulch and not so many weeds as in the past and 5 “leggy” rose bushes. This is an improvement over the past three years when the space has been filled from fence to deck with weeds and not much else. I feel like I am at a starting point. My husband and I go back and forth as to whether we want to do a Japanese garden of stone, water and wood, or if we want to do more with plants. Right now, I am leaning toward the Japanese garden concept.