Gardeners, for obvious reasons, love to show off their gardens in the best possible way. Check out any garden blog or magazine and you will see lots of stunning pictures that can make gardening novices despair. How can your average gardener ever compare to creators of these living works of art?
Well, here is the truth: every stunning garden you see on the internet or in glossy magazines have weeds in them and less than picture perfect areas. EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM!
Bonny Lassie, a garden blogger, started a trend of having fellow gardeners show the less than stellar areas of their yards and gardens. She suggested these posts be called “Tell the truth Tuesday”. Without further ado, here is my inaugural Tell the truth Tuesday post.
A couple of tricks gardeners use when taking photos is to select certain point of view or zoom in really close on a flower. This makes the garden look better than it really is. I’ve used this trick below. In the foreground is a bloom on a sunrose, behind it is the fading flowers of a lavender. It’s not a very good picture, but for today’s purpose it will do. Fairly nice looking, right?
Now, let us pull back a bit so you can see the reality.
Not much to look at, is it? The section you are looking at is on the south side of the house and faces the front yard. It’s hot and dry, and because it is out of the way it doesn’t get much attention. I truthfully don’t know what to do with this area. MrsVintage just wants to put landscape fabric down and cover it with mulch. I may end up doing just that, unless I can come up with a more sightly solution.
Now let’s check out a not so awesome section of the garden in the back yard.
This part of the border actually looks fairly good in early summer. But as the days heat up, these yarrows start to look barren and parched. But I have a plan that I think will revitalize this area. Once the temperatures drop, I’m going to dig these yarrows out and move that lavender you saw in the first two pictures into one of the vacated spots. Then I put some purple coneflowers in place of the other yarrow and put a few blanket flowers in front of the whole shebang. I am hoping this will improve this section of the border by, oh say, 92%.
Just for the record, there is a LOT more material in my yarden for doing Tell the truth Tuesdays posts. But I think I’ve exposed enough of my garden flaws for one day.
Anybody else brave enough to share their garden flaws?
