For the past two summers I have been doing gardening and landscaping work for a family at their weekend farm. It’s an absolutely gorgeous property, but the gardens were in very rough shape. With three young and very active children, the gardens were at the bottom of their list of priorities. As a result, they were badly overgrown and full of weeds. A mutual acquaintance, who had done some contracting work for this family, recommended me for the job of cleaning up the gardens. One trip to the farm to meet the owners and view the property was all it took to convince me to take on the project.
I decided to take pictures as a way of measuring the progress made. These are the before shots:
The photo below shows the left front bed after weeding was completed. Some perennials had been purchased and were being positioned.
The rest of these photos show the gardens around the house, on the back lawn and by the pool in their pre-clean up conditions.
The areas at the back of the house and around the sunroom were a tangled mess of branches from shrubs that had grown out of control. They all needed severe cutting back.
The area on the right side of the house and the bed to the right of the front door were completely filled with weeds and forget-me-nots.
A garden in the grove of cedars at the back of the house had been overrun by some type of wild growth. One side of that garden was filled to the brim with lily of the valley and the other side was a mass of orange tiger lilies. The wild growth knew no boundaries and sprouted up wherever it wanted.
There was lovely hardscaping in the pool area - large rocks built up and overlapping each other creating a wonderful focal point, but there were no plantings around it. In another hardscaped area near the pool there were some plantings, however, the bed needed to be filled out and it required definition on the back edge.
The potential of these sad looking gardens was limitless and my visions were grand. Before I could get too carried away dreaming about what they could be, however, I had to deal with what they were - a big mess.
Please feel free to follow along as I relate how these gardens were tackled, torn apart, transformed and rebuilt.
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