Gardening at Night: Something out of Nothing

So, I guess sitting back and enjoying living here doesn't mean doing nothing. Last weekend, we started to tackle the front yard. I was inspired by a garden design in a book I picked up at the Friends of the National Arboretum tent sale this spring. It's a layout for a small plot, with a gravel square in the center surrounded by lush, cottage-style plantings.



With that image in mind, I got some soil ammender and gravel, tried to keep my inspiration idea, and Mr. MJ and I got to work.



First we pushed all our mulch to the middle, chopped up our hard clay soil as much as possible, and worked the ammender into it. There's still an awful lot of unimproved soil down there, but this was a start. Next, we paused for a break during a rainstorm.



Once the rain had gone about its business, we pushed the mulch back into place, marked out the corners of our gravel square, and spread out the rocks. Of course, I did not buy enough bags of gravel the first time around.



A few hours and a trip back to Home Depot later, we had another four bags (eight total for this space) of gravel spread out in out plot. It's starting to look a bit more like the image in the book, yes?



The second trip to Home Depot let me pick up a couple of lavender plants on clearance, so along with some better organization we've got some nice smells going on too.





Now I've just got to tackle planting around the square....I'm currently thinking of roses, coreopsis, and some oak leaf hydrangeas...