That is the question…

10 years ago we bought our home on the seacoast and utilizing the ideas from my “dream home” folder became a reality.

My first step was to plant the wildflower garden of my dreams.  In my mind, the garden looked like the backyard of an English countryside cottage.  Random plantings of beautiful flowers of all colors, shapes and sizes strewn together to create a poetic backdrop to our lovely home.

It can be so disappointing to visualize something in minute detail and then not have it come out at all.

10 years later, 1/2 of my beautiful flowers have been pulled out of the ground, by me, because I could no longer tell the difference between actual plants and weeds.

I’m not sure how you get that English cottage artistic garden look.  Unless you surrender to the fact that much of your garden will be overcome by weeds.  Or unless you have all the time in the world to constantly be pulling out the weeds to hopefully let the flowers take over?

Either way, this is the spring where I put down the landscape cloth, cut a hole to let my remaining plants out and mulched the heck out of my garden.

Not exactly the look I was going for, but I’d rather see a neat garden than one that looks as though it’s been forgotten for a century.

And I know now that it was overkill for me to lay down the landscape cloth.  A 3-inch layer of mulch around your perennials or annuals will suffice as a natural weed killer.  Who knew?!