Shoots in the front bed. From top to bottom: early-blooming yellow daylilies, garlic chives, and late-blooming orange daylilies.

Assessing the yard this spring, I’m relatively pleased with what I have to work with. A thick leaf mulch still covers the beds, although I’ve raked the leaves away from the plants I’m trying to encourage: the crowns of the peonies, the bluebells, the poppies. I have big plans for the whole year, and I’m raring to go; it’s hard to believe that this is more than two weeks sooner than my first garden-related post last year. Granted, it’s been a mild winter, and the warm weather has caused everything to pop up a bit earlier than usual, which contributes to the feeling that every moment is one with valuable potential for yard work. Nonetheless, I’m proud of myself for the progress I’m already making.

My nemesis in our overgrown garden is liriope. For reasons that remain unfathomable to me, folks around here love their liriope. I see it all around the DC area: taking water from trees in city boxes, smothering flowering bulbs in residential border gardens, and running wild from any bed where it’s been planted and left untended. This last is the case with our yard: we had liriope crowding trees in the back yard, smothering bulbs in the front yard, and popping up all through the backyard in competition with the grass that my partner is so keen to preserve. Never have I been so keen to kill something, and I relish every chance to get to dig those suckers out by their runner roots.

The bed to the right of the front steps, after the first day of weeding. Behind the daffodils, in the rear left corner, are the crocuses rescued from the left bed. The remaining liriope is still visible in the lower right corner; in that area was another clump of tenacious crocuses.

Given my animosity for the plant, the first thing I did in the garden this year was dig some up. I cleared it completely from the small bed to the left of the front steps, unearthing a sizable cluster of crocus shoots when I did. I made it about halfway through the bed on the right side of the steps before hitting my three-hours-in-a-row wall for laboring in the garden. The right bed required a bit more care, as it contained the daffodils that I am working hard to preserve. After only two flowers last year, I’ve been granted ten buds this year, and the last thing I wanted to do was stress the plants so much that they wouldn’t open. Three hours got me one and a half liriope-free beds, and a gigantic bag of lawn trash. I was reasonably satisfied, and vowed to return to dig another day.

The new bed, with spindly daffodils from the backyard and a variety of crocuses from the front beds. I don’t expect they’ll bloom this year, but I look forward to seeing what they’ll produce next spring.

That other day was today. Having discovered daffodils along the south fence of the backyard and even more clumps of crocus in front of the house on the left, I was eager to create a more permanent spot for them. I created a little bed around the front light post (sorry, grass), into which I moved all the daffodils from the backyard. That took about an hour, after which I broke for lunch. After lunch, I spent another hour moving all the crocus sprouts that weren’t blooming, with their resident earthworms, to the new bed. Finally, I tackled the remaining liriope to the right of the front steps. I successfully cleared the rest of the liriope from the small bed itself, after which I moved the crocuses to the new bed and the freed daffodils to the vacant corner made by the steps and the porch. I expect that the daffodils are tall enough to get light over the steps and smaller plants can be set between the daffodils and the lawn. Another day. After covering the new bed with a light leaf mulch and clearing up the weeds, which generated another big lawn bag of refuse, I called it a day.

When I think of the work I’m doing in the garden, I am put in mind of a quote I read somewhere—maybe a blog, maybe one of the garden books I’ve been consulting lately, they tend to blur together—that said, the difference between a landscaper and a gardener is maintenance. I find that I move between these two roles, and a third one of ‘plant rescuer’: killing and uprooting the invasives; tending the successful beds I’ve been able to eke out of the overgrowth; and moving or nurturing the plants that we continue to find under all the mess. Maybe one day my ‘gardening’ will consist of a snip here and some weeding there, but today is definitely not yet that day.

After weeks of anticipation, the first of the daylilies are blooming in our front bed. We have yet to see any flower stems in the row of the larger orange variety, but the smaller yellow ones are off to the races. I’ve heard that daylilies are edible, but I haven’t tried them yet. I’m pleased that the bed has filled in so nicely, compared to when we planted it last spring. It was, at first, a bit scraggly. The aster in particular should be really nice this fall, as it’s already quite tall and lush.

This year, pre-blooming:

Last year, freshly planted:

This morning delivered the first peony bloom of the summer. The bloom is on the plant that came with the house, and there are a dozen or so more buds to look forward to. While the transplanted peonies seem to have survived, they are unlikely to bloom this year. My grandmother claims that peonies are hard to kill, which is heartening. I’m willing to wait a couple of years for them to start blooming; I’m hopeful that they’ll fill out into a nice drift against the fence.

In other garden news, weeding continues apace. Every single week I am newly amazed by how long it takes to clear each small patch of ground. This weekend a friend came over and helped us clear some stumps and liriope out from under the large holly tree. Once I get the remaining roots up, I’ll boost the soil and then transplant the lilies of the valley from around the yard into that area. That whole process should only take, oh, about 15 or so person hours of labor. After which we’ll start on the beds along the other fence. Each week, we are reminded of how hard the town public works staff labors, as they take away huge piles of roots and weeds and vines and branches each time we put in an hour of work on our yard. I really need to take them over some tasty baked goods one of these days.

Since it’s been raining, I put some indoor time toward creating an index of the plants currently in the yard, as part of my effort to track the progress on our house. Unfortunately my camera was out for repair when the spring flowers were blooming, so photos of those will have to wait until next year.