SRH gardening volume 1

Here's what my daughters call "my inspo"

This what I'd LOVE for the front of the house on either side of the new driveway. Of course I'll never stick to such a considered-looking palette, but I love the rocks and flowers.

These four images are from a rock garden in MA.

Crappy image, but I like the grasses along the steps.
(I'm NOT a native grasses girl)
I also like the railroad tie stairs.

So here's my "gessoed canvas"...the google image is what it looked like before we got all the scrubby plants off of the rocks.

People keep telling me I need to do "before and after" images of the transformation of the property. I dropped the ball on the "before" ones. Tim will probably have some, but I don't want to ask him because he's spent the past 4 days drilling 3 foot holes into the ledge and then pouring in some sort of bentonite mixture that's supposed to magically expand and crack the ledge open without blasting or drilling. He's been doing this on top of the usual cooking, ballerina schlepping, and a heavy workload.

The magical ledge splitting has yet to happen. He's grumpy.

I've spent hours stressing about plants arriving before I have a place to put them. This is definitely going to happen. The site work/utilities are now slated to be done by the end of August. I have 800 plants arriving sometime around June 5. I'll figure something out. The Sea Street gardens are important. They will be the most public portion of the project. We hope that if we create an awe-inspiring geologic/horticultural oasis, we will dismantle the wrath of the neighbors. Also, the woman directly across from this huge bed is my age. Her husband died suddenly in his car in the Market Basket parking lot last year before the ambulance could come and help him. He died thinking that our project was going to exacerbate the flooding in their home. We hope that the gardens and French drains below them will  improve the swampy basement situation. In addition, I hope that the pepperbush, roses, little kim lilacs and lavender will make the street smell good from spring through September, which won't help the fact that she no longer has her husband, and her boys don't have their dad, but good smells improve things no matter how shitty they are.

I put the Amsonia that arrived 3 months too early down there because I had no choice, but I think it might add something aesthetically to the beds, so I'm happy about it. (if it survives)

Below are images of the plants I've put in.

Look how fluffy and yellow the Amsonia gets in the fall!!!

(I took this picture last summer to show my sister in law my mom's wild irises. On a Friday in January, it occurred to me that the guys were going to dig them all up on Monday. Weirdly, for January in New England, that weekend was mild. Susie must've made that happen from the beyond. I ripped up what irises I could locate and dumped them in a pile on the ramp mom built for her partner. I hope they weather that poor treatment and thrive on Sea Street.

I ordered plants from 3 places. One place has started shipping, so I had weird plants that needed homes. I leave for Philly on Thursday, so I needed them in the ground. I left one dogwood in a pot and put the other in the bed above the Sea Street bed. (It was slated to go in the "rain garden" which will not be happening anytime soon.)

The "dogwood, sweet william, thyme bed" is above the street, so if all of those attempts die, no one will see my fail. (The images below are just to remind me where I stuck two Hellebore that arrived too soon for the rain garden. I also planted an anemone under mom's old lilac which I'll probably forget about)

Mom's irises did GREAT!

Update: most of the perennials I planted on Sea Street are doing OK, but I wanted things to look good this summer while they are establishing, so I threw in some canna bulbs and sunflower, cosmos, zinnia, and marigold seeds....so glad I did!

I even made a little garden for our neighbor. (She hired a lawyer to try and take this portion of our land right after my mom died, which was crappy of her, but I'm trying to rise above it botanically)

I get a lot of positive feedback while I'm gardening which is nice...people send me pics like this:

My brother's family came to visit while the construction was in full swing. My niece did these drawings:

"No more 'over the fence' chats or communal potlucks!"

"Proven to aggravate the victim complex"

"Drive them to lunacy with minimal effort and GREAT expense!"

We're not TRYING to bother people. We are trying to build and garden. It has taken so much more time than we thought and created so much more noise and dust than we'd expected. We are sorry.

This is the back of the NIMBY float that was in the 4th of July parade. There's a faction of people in Manchester who want zero development. They call themselves "Manchester Matters," which seems to compare density issues in a 5300-person, wealthy seaside town to getting bludgeoned to death during a routine traffic stop. I find that to be in poor taste, at best. The float was about rejecting the Massachusetts state mandate to provide more housing density near our train station. The side panel said "We're Manchester-by-the-Sea, not Manchester-by-the-transit."