It’s the third house I’ve owned (or been half-owner of), so it’s the third flower garden I’ve put in, and it isn’t going well. Both previous houses were manicured to within an inch of their lives when I moved in, which means I just dug holes, popped in flowers, and Bob’s your uncle.
This place is a jungle. Not only is it a completely different climate–PacNW, zone 8a, instead of the Midwestern zone 5a I was used to–but the previous owners let the whole place run to hell for years before they sold it.
My husband dug up a border for me in the springtime, and I happily planted some things, but the weed seeds took over and now I have to save what I can and tarp the whole thing for a year, to have any hope of an orderly border.
The one place that isn’t overrun with weeds is overrun with hypericum groundcover. Dear God, I HATE that groundcover. I hate yellow flowers. I hate its glossy yellow-green leaves. I hate that when I tried to pull some up this spring, I got my first bee sting in a quarter of a century. They couldn’t have planted bunchberry, could they? Or sweet woodruff? Something dark green with starry flowers and/or berries that would glisten in the perpetual overcast?
No. Fucking yellow hypericum. Fuck.
This stuff’s roots are so dense that you can’t dig it up and not have it come back, so I have been slowly but steadily, in small doses to appease the environmental gods, poisoning it. I have a swath about five feet wide at the top of the bed’s retaining wall --completely-- dead and brown. And tops of retaining walls are for one thing and one thing only: iris!
I ordered eight purple-and-white beauties from Schreiner’s in July, and yesterday they arrived (with a ninth “free gift”, hooray). I just spent an hour pulling up handfuls of hypericum roots and stealing potting soil from my begonias, and my iris are in the ground.
Double fingers crossed that they like it here. There aren’t many flowers I love so much I HAVE to have them, but purple and white iris are one. The winters here are awfully wet, but also awfully mild, and … retaining wall!
If they take, I’ll tuck bits of cerastium at the edges, to cascade down the wall, and look all silvery and numinous. My favorite combination.