Northeast Indiana might give gardeners a challenge with its hilly terrain, but Tamara is meeting that challenge with beautiful blooms. Let's take a look as she shares her gardens with us.
it all started with 32 tons of field stone and a strong young back. Oh, and a wheel barrow and shovel. We would order one truckload of stone at a time and have it dumped at the top of the hill, since we live on a pretty good slope. The house is more or less a walkout basement home.
In 1984 the steps and walk and a small retaining wall went in.
A lot of my flowers are pretty basic; I've added more and more varieties over the past 3 years.
I have a lot of standard perennials, Liatris, geranium, hosta, blackberry, lily, sedum, monarda, rudbeckia, lamium, agastache, larkspur, hollyhock, and clematis. This is the east side.
This row of peonies is about 20 feet along the drive; lavendar phlox is growing beneath the peonies.
We have a very small raised vegetable garden; we didn't get much sun there until we cut a wild cherry tree down on the west side.
And now you see what a hill we have. This is the west side garden using ladders as trellises; fun fun! We have purple cones along the garage followed by
Henry Eiler rudbeckia, shasta daisy, mums, and old fashioned garden phlox
The cherry tree stump, covered in clematis.
Another shot of the house and raised veggie garden in early spring.
I have a commode garden too. I fill it full of wave petunias; it was a new bed last year. I have daffs and agastashe, liatris, dianthus and sparaxis,
now all I need is the tub; been looking for one!
This is part of the west side lower garden; it is a project in the works. We are going to build a 14x16 deck off the screened porch. I've been working on reworking the rock wall; I'm almost done with that. Next we will be moving more boulders to the outside edge of the flat area. I'm thinking we will be planting below the boulders, so we don't have to mow it. The area is a bit steep to mow comfortably.
The new deck will jet out over the hill just a little. I'm not too sure how I'm going to tie into the mulched area in front of the porch; that is a shady and very dry area. It has a little creeping jenny and hostas trying to survive. I don't water that area; also it's way too steep to even think about mowing, so mulch it is. I'm looking for drought tolerant plants that like shade.
This is where a lot of our focus is right now, down to the west side of the woods and wetlands. We had a major amount of dead wood down, and we have dead ash and some black walnut trees we are going to log out and sell. We are working on opening it up to have access to the field north of us, as our whole property is pretty much hill.
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And how beautiful you've made those hills! It looks like a peaceful kingdom sitting among the rocks and trees. Thank you so much, Tamara, for a lovely tour.
Join us again soon as Trish and I take you on another Garden Tour.
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