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Garden journal entry |
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| May 23, 2020. I'm so predictable! Last weekend, I decided to pay a semi-annual visit to one of the more interesting nurseries around here, where I always find new things to grow. Their price tags aren't "discount", that's why I only venture out a couple times a year! So of course I returned with a good number of new green friends. And, as tends to happen, my eyes are bigger than my garden space, so I didn't necessarily have room for all those newcomers. That's not a problem for most small to medium-sized perennials, for which I can always claim some space from unruly or slightly bare parts of the borders. But when the newcomer is a small tree, things get trickier. This time, the problematic purchase was a hardy tapioca tree, which wants to eventually grow to 15 ft tall (and equally wide), even though it is just 5 ft at the moment. After surveying the garden and finding no obvious places in existing borders where it would fit in the long run, I did what I've done many times before: I decided a new border area needed to be created to provide a home for Ms. Tapioca. The selected spot is at the back left corner of our house, where a couple of downspouts converge on a narrow border where I tend to stick plants that like a bit more shade. The tapioca doesn't want shade, but that's not a problem – it needed to be planted much farther away from the house than the border's previous width, where the house's shade won't reach most of the day. That meant extracting a sizable extra lobe from the lawn. Those operations always mean a good number of hours of hard digging work (you might not think so, looking at the photo, but trust me, I put in plenty of sweat equity), but by this afternoon, the border extension was complete, and Ms. Tapioca is its first inhabitant. Hmm, a lot of empty space around that tree – should I make another nursery visit? |
Last modified:
September 09, 2009
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