Gris's Journal

Gilding the lilies

Last fall, a couple of my friends undertook a *major* fall planting, settting 300 lilies and daffodils into a new bed in their front lawn. Dreamy fool that I am, I started eyeing that stubborn bare patch next to the driveway last fall, and thinking how nice it would be to have a little color out front. Not like I'd even have to lift sod to put a small bed in, after all, nothing's growing there now, right? Buy a few bulbs, loosen up the dirt and put a little edging around it, and in the spring I'd have beautiful flowers, just like Jeremy, right?

Heh... heh... heh....

On such dreams do gardening centers make their really big bucks.

You see, grass will grow just about *anywhere.* If there's a nice sunny spot on which grass refuses to grow, there's usually a reason... and silly me, I found out the hard way. I staked out my bed and started digging, and quickly discovered that the "soil" beneath was composed of packed clay and stones. No drainage, no organic matter. It took me not one but *four* afternoons (two of them in mizzling rain) of hard labor with a pickaxe to carve my 6'x4'x8" bed out of the earth. (There were times I thought it very convenient that my muddy little hole was about grave-sized. Just in case, you know.)

The "native soil" was so awful that I didn't so much amend as replace it. Three *large* bags of a rich soil mix, two bags each of manure, vermiculite, and topsoil, a bag of blood meal, and three more bags of black cedar mulch to top everything off. Seven yards of edging to hold everything in place. (Told you the gardening center loved me.) I'm sure the sweat and fresh blood helped the flowers, too.

Other fall planting aside (I went a little nuts with the planting last fall)-- 141 bulbs total went into my brand-new "lily" bed. I designed it to bloom continuously from March to August, starting at the outside edge and blooming inward, culminating in lilies; blue, white, and yellow for spring, and bold colors for summer. 21 "bright mix" Asiatic lilies, 5 paperwhites, 20 mixed fragrant narcissus, 15 Hollandica white iris, 20 J.S. Dyt Iris reticulata, 40 "Magic Carpet" mix grape hyacinth, 10 snowdrops, and 10 winter aconite.

That was my fall-- lots and LOTS of planting. Blisters I could be proud of. I would look around at my little covered-over holes in the ground and actually *giggle* in anticipation of what spring was going to look like the following year.

Winter came, snow covered everything over, all was well... and then the snowplow came, and plowed straight into the new raised bed. We actually *paid* that man for the privilege of having him *miss* the driveway by five feet and tear up half of my brand-new, never-bloomed, blood-sweat-and-tears lily bed. It's not like it's easy to miss, either-- post on one side, trees on the other side. He even had to jump the curb. I was furiously angry, I was in tears, and I was certain all my work, my careful layout, had been destroyed.

Well... I'll save you the angst. it made for a rather depressing winter, gardening-wise, but it wasn't that bad in the end. My mother helped me out with a little gardening surgery, and by spring, the damage had mostly been repaired. The damaged half of the bed bloomed later than the undisturbed half, and the pattern was sort of... squished-in on one side, but everything came up, eventually.

The spring flowering was quite impressive, and I had a broader array of daffs than I'd dreamed of. The irises were a little disappointing, but I later discovered that half of them were late bloomers-- more early summer than spring. But the lilies-- after all, the lilies were what this bed was *about* to begin with. I've been waiting to see my lilies bloom.

And just last week, they started...

Posted by gris at July 11, 2003 01:23 AM