Springtime work has started.

Well, I decided to start small. After some cleanup of some scrub trees in the far back of the property, I got to my first plantings of the year. This small bed is on the upper patio and I filled it with some shad perennials including some hostas, yellow and purple coralbells, and some variegated ferns.

The next step was to continue on with some upper patio work. After many hours of cleaning out several different kinds of groundcover I finally had another planting bed to plant. After cleaning up the bed, I found out that the upper patio was about 2 feet wider than I originally thought. As you can see in the lower corner of the pic, I removed 3 large pieces of bluestone to keep the planting bed the size I thought it was and had planned for. This area of the patio, where we have our dining table and grill and is closest to the property line, so I went with a more "formal" hedge look. In the back I went with endless summer hydrangeas, then a boxwood hedge in front of that, and finished that off dark purple coralbells in the front. I am very excited to see how this fills in to create a "wall" around the dining area. This area was the one area I knew exactly what I wanted to do from day one.