Marilyn’s Garden

This page is just dedicated to what Marilyn is doing in the garden. There’ll be some videos and pictures and other stuff.

Below are pictures from the garden click on the first one to launch a slide show viewer with bigger images to enjoy. Close the viewer to return here.

For those who are “challenged” with getting flowers to grow, sow zinnia seeds!!”
We have nearly 40 butterfly bushes, but this year we have had very few butterflies –this week I was thrilled to see these two.
Passion flowers grow on vines that come up in July “wherever they want”:
(The picture below is from last year). It is a perennial “Mountain Mint”: nicknamed “Butterfly Crack” as pollinators LOVE it!! (The color is my favorite and it has a delicious minty fragrance !):
When we bought our home in 2011 it had almost no landscaping. In the back, under the deck, the rock hard clay “gave way” 6 inches beyond the deck posts to a 45+degree incline into a deep ravine. The steep incline was covered with brambles, weeds, and scrap trees; it was difficult to even try to walk on it. The picture below was taken after we’d lived here for 6 years and had been weed-eating and clearing brambles and scrub trees. Remember, the incline started 6 aches from the deck posts so we could not even walk outside the deck posts!!
I spent the first year and a half digging up wheel barrows full of the imported disgusting clay from under the deck and dumping it just beyond the deck posts. I replaced that with good soil and began bringing my shade perennials from my garden in Greensboro. The morning sun would greet me and I found coolness and comfort there:
Although I did what I could with plantings in the front of the house, as I sat on my porch, the house next door (shown in the picture below) loomed large and “loud.” By 2015 I was desperate to get some trees planted.
Two of my brothers came for my birthday in June, 2015 and blessed me with trees that were planted that fall.
Eastern redbuds in the front and back, a cherry, 3 skip laurels, a Japanese maple, 4 spring grove arborvitae (it took two years and five nurseries for me to finally identify the evergreen that would get 30′ tall but only 10′ wide) joined the seedlings of our crepe myrtles that I had brought with me from Greensboro.
Below is our view from our side back window on April 3, 2020. In the foreground is “Jane”: a deciduous magnolia. Behind her is our second eastern redbud — backed up by the neighbor’s cherry. Isn’t it GLORIOUS!?!
This morning – 7/26/20 – I took these pictures of our front yard. The house next door is still there, but I hardly notice it. Again, I learn so many lessons from God through the gardens.
Back to the back: in 2017 Ric spread out the discarded clay (that I had moved from under the deck to the top of the ravine incline) and covered it with topsoil and grass seed. He then built a retaining wall:
This is how the walkway looks today:
A few weeks after Ric made the wall, (and after a week of rain that softened the hard clay), the LORD inspired and strengthened me to cut paths in the ravine and “make a way where there was no way” for us to enjoy our back yard.
April Update
Not long after the paths were cut, a friend contacted me that a master gardener in Charlottesville had dug up hundreds of perennials and they were in the back of her large lot: free for the taking! Jehovah Jirah (God our provider) was providing for me once again. I took two trips and filled my Subaru station wagon both times:
Above: upper path. Below: lower path
However, since the hill got steeper below my paths I still could not access the deep woods behind our house. When a neighbor took down five trees this spring, it was like a red cape to a bull: this was my chance! The mulch provided the covering that would turn the red clay into a walkable path. Cardboard (found by the road on trash day) provided a barrier beneath the mulch that would prevent the weeds from growing. So, much to my family’s consternation, I spent hours, days, and weeks, [like my immigrant great grandparents] clearing and “taming” the land.
I went out early one morning after it had been raining for days and this was what I saw “in our own back yard:
“To God be the GLORY!!