They Turned Their Garden Into An Oasis! 🌳🌿🤩So Many Trees, I Couldn't Believe My Eyes!

Hello everyone! Welcome to Gardening TLC. My name is Michelle and I live in Northern Illinois Zone 5. Welcome to my garden! We are going to be doing our August garden tour. We're going to walk through the gardens, take a look at how they're doing. We have some floppage going on in a few places. It's been a pretty rainy season and so things that normally are standing up might not look so great, but we've got some things that look pretty awesome too. So we're going to go around, take a look at the garden. I can't believe it's almost Labor Day weekend. Can you? Oh my gosh! All right, come on, let's go! Let's start with an overall look at the driveway bed. I'm pretty pleased with this bed. It's come a long ways and I really like all the additions that I added to it this year to add some more of the foliage color in here. I love the blue junipers that I added right here in the front. We have one and then we added another one over here, back a little ways right there, and then another one more towards the front. I love those in there. I love the blue. I also am loving the sedums, the low Sedona bowls with the calibrachoas in it, the begonias. These are the surefire cherry cordial and the alliums. You know those are my favorites. These have been just covered with pollinators. Right now there's little bees. Look at them, they're sleeping. There's one there. There's another one right there. It's just kind of cool because during the day these are loaded with pollinators. I also like that I didn't cut back the liatris right there and I just left it up. I think that was a nice vertical accent in the bed and I think maybe next year I won't cut it back. Usually I do, but I actually like it in there. I'm also loving that this wajilla is re-blooming and isn't that gorgeous? Now it's not blooming as thickly as it did in the spring. Well actually it's more like early summer, but when it put on the new growth it pushed out all these new flowers and I just love the variegated foliage along with those beautiful fuchsia pink flowers. The other thing that I'm pretty happy with are these little lime punch. These are great and for a shrub that really is supposed to be getting eight plus hours of sun, these guys are performing so well and they're only getting like six to seven hours of sun. So pretty pleased with those and I'll take you around to the other side and we'll take a peek at all five of them in their full glory. And as we progress further into fall, those flowers will just continue to get darker and darker and darker. Oh I can't wait. I am also loving all the sedum in this bed. I like that it rings this magnolia right around the outside edge and that when you pull into the driveway that's one of the first things you see and when it starts to bloom it's absolutely fabulous. We have another patch here that is just starting to crack open just a little bit so there's a little bit of pink going on. I also like that I left one patch of black-eyed susans here. This whole edge used to be black-eyed susans but when I decided to put in the junipers so I could have some blue color, I pulled one of the patches out and I'm really glad I did. Here's another Sedona bowl with the white calibrachoa in it and you can see this year I did not cut back my day lilies. They don't look as bad as they normally do. I think part of it's because we've had so much rain. I also like that we tucked these little Sedona bowls in here. Here's another one with calibrachoas and the hostas well hostas have been rough this year. We've had wind damage, hail damage, bug damage because you can't bait because we've had so much rain. All in all they don't look horrible but I've had them look better. Swing around the backside here and take a look at these beautiful fruit punch hydrangeas. Aren't those absolutely gorgeous? I love these. I think that they are so pretty. I am so glad I put them in this bed. I really didn't know if they were going to perform without getting enough sun but I am so pleasantly pleased with how these are performing. Absolutely fabulous. I am also liking my autumn frost hostas. Now I'm not in love with the flowers on there but I do like this hosta. It always is the one that looks the best the longest and as we swing around into another Sedona bowl that we created I think this is my favorite one so far this year. So in it we have one coleus from the Color Blaze series. This is the Wicked Witch and I haven't grown this one. I've always wanted to and then I just always pick a different one so I'm loving that frilly edge on there with that lime green and I love the wedding train coleus that's trailing along the ground and then we did the Cherry Cordial Surefire Begonias. I will repeat this pot. I absolutely love it. Let's take a look at one of my favorite beds. We created all of this color with very little plants. We have the staples that are in our beds like the boxwoods, the oak leaf hydrangeas. We have one incredible in here. As we go a little bit further down you'll see some coral bells. There's a few grasses and a few hostas but this bed really is made spectacular from the annuals that I put in here. Every year I pick a different coleus to use as my centerpiece in my pots because you can take one four inch coleus and a four pack of impatience and create that. That is really inexpensive to get this big bold beautiful pot. I mean isn't that fabulous? I absolutely love it and then I love to use the Sedona Bowls and I've got one here, one there, one there and that is just a six pack of impatience in there and you feed them every week. You water them and then you get this spectacular color palette and every year you can change it out. Last year we did salmon and coral. The year before that we did pink. The year before that which I don't think is on film I did orange and white so you can change out the look by just changing out the color of your pots. I love this. Now we ended up using a impatience that was called a portland mix and it had two different color pinks and a white in it and then we also ended up using the dipped in wine color blaze series coleus from Proven Winners. Now some of the coleus that you grow they'll grow in little round mounds but this one kind of grows up like in individual little bracts that come up so I kind of like that layered look in there as well. I think it looks really cool. I also love this incredible hydrangea and even though he's not getting near enough light he still produces really well for me and I love that he kind of he weeps a little bit. Now I do use a trellis in here as you can see right there to kind of hold him up but I love the look of that hydrangea in there. As we swing around we've got another oak leaf hydrangea. I absolutely love these hydrangeas. Aren't those great? I just love them and then we've got our boxwoods down below and then we just keep repeating these pots as we walk down the sidewalk. Now this side of the bed is a little bit longer so we do have some coral bells down here. We've got a mix of a palace purple with a citronella. I love the two of those together and then we did do some surefire begonias behind it. These didn't perform as well as the ones down on the other end. I think part of it is water even though they can go without water. They're pretty much underneath the eave so they aren't getting a lot of water but let's take a look at it looking down the other way. When I have my coffee in the morning at my bistro table isn't that a nice nice looking bed? Just love it. Let's give you a container update. This was the hodgepodge stuff that I grabbed from the greenhouse where no one had bought it. It was like the end of June or maybe the middle of June. Some of the tags had fallen off and I just brought it home and I was going to put it together in a pot and I didn't even really know that it matched that well but all in all I really like this pot. I like the coleus. It's got again some of that lime green modeling through it. We've got two different kinds of caladiums in here. I don't know which ones these are. They are the heart to heart series from Proven Winners but I don't know which ones they are. I really like this one so I'll make sure I take a picture of it and kind of match that up next year so I get that one again. We do have a little blackie potato vine in there. Our little wire vine is right down there and then if we look around the back here we do have a really pretty little Boston fern in there. All right so we have two of these that flank the steps going up to the deck is the second one right here and I am liking this pot a lot. I think it turned out really good. All right as we come up a little bit higher you can see that we did put the wedding train coleus and our cone baskets and yeah they really filled out and again they look like just big masses of foliage. I don't know if I like it or not. I don't know if I'm going to keep doing hanging baskets here. I can't find one that I really like. This one is okay but to me it looks like a big glob so I don't know. We'll try something else maybe next year or maybe I'll eliminate this little shepherd's hook and not do it again. Let's walk down the outside edge of the bed. Look I don't have a still be shame. They still look really good. All right let's walk around the back edge here into the garden and you can see that we've got our beautiful crossa regal hostas in here. Look at that jacana cloa grass. Isn't that great? Now this guy actually perked up a little bit so I was pretty excited about that but I still think I want to go get some either caramel or the pumpkin spice and put them in there. That's what I'm thinking. All right kind of give you an overall here of this bed. It's doing very well. I love the rock and round sedums, our arbovitas, the Mr. Bowling Balls recovered very nicely, the knockout roses put on another flush and let's just kind of walk down the path a little bit here and see what's going on. So as we come in here our betty corning clematis that we planted on our trellis is doing really well and I love this verbena in here and I hope that it spreads its love everywhere. I want more and so I'm very excited to have this in the garden. This is one of the shrubs that has a little floppage going on. This is our bobo and as you can see it looks like it's splayed out. So one of the things that I will do to help a shrub along if it's doing this is I will prune it maybe a little bit shorter and I will prune out all the skinny spindly branches next year before it breaks dormancy to try to strengthen up the bottom of the whole base of this shrub so that hopefully maybe this isn't happening because it should be strong enough to stand up on its own but as you can see all that rain has kind of made it flop open. We're going to swing over here real fast and look at the dahlias you guys. Here is that beautiful yellow flower. Now I love the dark foliage of this but I wish I had more flowers. It's like I get one, one, one. I want more so for me I love the dark foliage but I'm not in love with the flowers not being heavy enough on the plant itself so I don't know if I will do that again. I do still love my heliopsis. This stuff has been blooming even though it's looking like it's on the end right now. From a distance it doesn't look too bad but I bet you this has been blooming since the end of June so super long time. Then we swing around and oh look here's some more alliums looking fabulous. Swinging over here we've got our wine and roses wajilla along with our over dam grasses. Absolutely love that and I love this shrub in here. Now this one did not repeat bloom but it's only in its second year so we're going to let this continue to grow. Absolutely love it though. Our hosta bed yes some of the hostas look better than others but what's really exciting this is the most exciting thing ever. Look at my ground cover. Oh my gosh it's filling in and it's going to do what I want it to do. Now I just need it to survive. Now you can see this is what happens when you don't get out into the garden beds in your allotted 10 minutes. Weeds come really super fast so we've got some weeding to do in this bed but loving this. Now another suggestion that was made that I think I'm going to add into this garden I actually think I'm going to add some variegated Solomon's seal into here next year so that I've got some arching branches that come up through the foliage of the hostas and this big root geranium. So I can't remember who made the suggestion but I think I'm definitely going to try and add that to the garden. All right let's get you a backed up look this way. As you can see I fell a little behind cutting flowers out of hostas. I just wanted to show this little vignette right here with this Patriot hosta this big Catlins giant ajuga and the three boxwoods. I think that is so sweet. I just love the way that looks. I'm loving this as well and I actually think if these coral bells right here survive I'm getting some more and I'm going to put a row of them in front of this lady's mantle. I also think I want to add in a few more things in this bed that are a different color. Now the lady's mantle right now looks a little bit dark green but it usually is like a lighter green. It's just the play of the sun on it right now and we do have the slow mounds right here that bloom white flowers and we do have bleeding hearts in this bed all over the place in the spring. But I look at it right now and I'm like hmm I've got those two hydrangeas in there but I feel like yeah I feel like I need some more color so we'll work on that next year. Don't you love that about gardening? It's never done. Check out our atlas rose. Isn't that the most beautiful color? I love this. I actually think I might add a couple more of these to my landscape as well and I do love that it's giving me all these blooms. It's in its first year. I planted it back I don't know June or July but I love that that black lace elderberry is behind it so as that grows and gets bigger that's going to look so good and then we have a summer sweet right next to it and when that bloomed oh my gosh it smelled so delicious. It was awesome. All right here is the passageway bed. Let's take a look. So I'm going to kind of get down and low. Loving that and look there's no straight line there. You can't see all them boulders. That was the goal. Now the one thing I did this year. Check out those caster beans. All right so I planted caster beans right and I went on a garden tour in Madison and the guy's house that I was at during the tour had these caster beans and I thought they were so cool so I bought some seeds and I started them. I got four that actually took and I thought okay we'll put these in the ground. His were not this big. They were a lot smaller and I did not anticipate them getting this big. I think these are so cool but they definitely do not go here. They need to go someplace else but I think these are the coolest little plant and I'm pretty sure that these little pods in here right there I'm pretty sure those are the seeds so I will be collecting those so that I don't have to buy the seeds again. I can just grow my own. Now the one thing to know about a caster bean is all parts of it are poisonous but I just thought this was the coolest thing but they just keep growing and growing and so I love them but next year they have to find a different place but check out the coleus in there. Aren't those great? That is the pineapple brandy and our little clematis bloomed even though it's a baby and we just put it in. Look at that. Isn't that awesome? I love it and I love all the different colors that we put in this bed from the white alyssum to the pink bitum that I didn't even know I was going to love that I love and oh my gosh I will plant this again too. I love this silver sage. So Erin at the Impatient Gardener is the one that turned me on to this one. She also kind of turned me on to the bidens too because she had white bidens in her garden and I just thought that they were so cool looking so I planted some in my garden and now I'm hooked. I love them. Look also these are the little blue star junipers that we transplanted earlier in the year and every one of them looks like they're living. Now the true test will be going through the winter but I think they're all going to make it. All right let's just kind of take a look at the bed here on the bottom. I am going to come through tomorrow and probably clip off some of these bottom leaves so that it's off the top of some of my plants in here but I am loving this. Right now this is my favorite place to walk through because it's so colorful and so pretty. We've got a nice patch of joe pie weed right here. We've got our fox glove next to that along with some of our heaven sent Jacob's Ladder and I am on my third try with a butterfly bush and look it lived. There it is. I love it. That's the Miss Molly. So we hope that that guy is still there next year. This silver sage is definitely the biggest one. It's also the first one that I put in the ground so I did need to get them all in the ground a lot sooner than I did. Some of them they went in the ground and they really didn't have a lot of time to do anything before the heat just revved up and some of them it took them out but I'm loving everything in this bed. It is so nice and yeah you see a lot of the same plants over and over and over again but that's okay. All right we are going to be tackling this corner right here in the next couple weeks. This has been a holding bed of stuff in here and we are going to be digging it out and putting what is going to be permanently here very soon. I have turned around so that you can see my beautiful zinnia patch that is out of control. Totally gorgeous. I love it but but yeah man are those big. I think next year I'm going to plant all short ones and I think I'm going to be doing these double zahara down here. Check these out. Those little cuties right there. I think I'm going to do those and do all short ones next year but I am loving these. This is the Oklahoma pink. This was part of the seed packet that we sold last year in the collection and the zahara double pink was another one. Aren't those so sweet. I love those and then check out the benari carmine in the back. Some of these are absolutely huge. I mean look at this. Oh my goodness. Come here. Oh that is gorgeous. I just love that. Who needs a dahlia when you can have big zinnias like that. I mean come on those are awesome. I know I know. Dahlias are awesome too. All right and then look at that alyssum. That is the violet night and we have that planted in between our midnight wine shine wajilla. Isn't that cool looking. I love it and look at our fountain grass. That definitely filled out the whole pot and you can barely see the little fan flowers in there. The other thing that we planted and I only planted three of them but boy did they get big were the cleomes right here and this is the seniorita rosalita. This is actually going to be proven winners annual of the year next year and look at that. I've been planting it for years. Totally love it. Here's some more verbena right here. Loving it and this is our service berry. Now what I'm hoping is that some of this will drop like down inside the service berry so it kind of grows up through the service berry. That will look really cool and let's just drop down for a look right here at this corner. Isn't that nice. I love it. All right let's go into the garden. All right we are going to assess the vine first. Here we are. Here's our arch and you can see our annual vine that we chose the thunbergia which is also called a black eyed susan vine is going to fill this whole thing in but I'm so disappointed in the amount of flowers that I'm getting. So check off the box fills the whole arch by the end of the season. Yes but the flowers there's not that many flowers so I'm a little bummed because this is what the flowers look like and I was hoping this whole thing was going to just be covered with flowers and it's not. Maybe that happens later but I kind of want this to happen through the season as it's growing too. So I don't know this isn't one that I would say love it and I'm going to do it again. I'm going to try something different next year. We have a nice totem pole right here that's got some floppage going on because of all the rain. Oh the mosquitoes are coming out. Oh okay so he has flopped a little bit. I'll have to come in here and maybe trim up. I'm not going to tie him up. I think I'll end up trimming them and I'll just use the plumes in an arrangement or something. All right as we come in here our black eyed susans look really good. That is the American gold rush. We've got a little more verbena in here and then let me show you what happened to my dogwoods. So I didn't catch it in time but they are decimated. Just look at that. I got sawflies. So I got a dogwood sawfly and what that is is it's a wasp and it's a wasp that doesn't sting but what they do is they come to your dogwoods and they lay eggs and then those eggs hatch and little caterpillars come out. Let's see if I can find one. I did spray with bt but I've had to do it a couple times. There they are right there. There it is right there. That little caterpillar has been eating all of my dogwoods. Now it probably won't kill my dogwoods but they don't look really great and you can see I'm trying to salvage this end down here that still looks healthy but I think they're moving that way and then what will happen is these guys will go into some kind of pupil state on the debris and the leaves and whatnot and then the cycle will start over again next year. So I have to one I'm going to be cutting all of these back to the ground this year so that they're gone and we'll use the red twig dogwoods and Christmas things and then we'll make sure we clear all of the debris and maybe that will help like our problem because man they were everywhere and I wasn't out here so I didn't catch it. Swinging over to this side let's take a look at how everything is doing. Again we still have some alyssum along the edge. Our time is coming in really nice. We have some of the silver stage over here. The coneflowers definitely need to be deadheaded. I might just leave them up though for the birds. It's not like you know it's the end of the world if they look like that so I'm good with it but as we swing along this way I'm telling you the plant that I put in here that I really am liking are these mango gilardias. I love these. I think these are gorgeous. I'm going to put some more of these in my garden as well. They have been blooming their heads off and then here is our white hibiscus right here and then if we swing around our caryopteris is getting ready to bloom so I'd say in another two weeks this thing will be totally full of these beautiful purple blue blossoms. Swinging around this way take a look at this hibiscus. He is gorgeous. Look at that deep red flower against that dark foliage and I'm so sorry I do not remember the name of this one but isn't that absolutely fabulous? Love it. Swing around this way and see you can't even see what's back here because this agostachy is in the way and we will be cutting that back and moving it to a new home later. This will kind of give you a view of how bad the dogwoods look. Oh isn't that horrible? The good news is it's not going to kill them so it's just a bug and we can take care of it. All right coming back this way. I love the edge here. Isn't that nice how we soften that so I can't wait till these little plugs that we put in down the way start to fill in next year as well. Oh yeah. Now I have another plant in here that I probably would not do again and that is this detour right here. This thing is a beast. Oh my gosh it's big and see the big white tulip not tulip I guess I call them trumpet flowers on here. So it got way bigger than I thought it would. It is kind of cool but it is definitely way too big for this spot and I guess I was judging how big it was going to get on how big the ones that grow in the greenhouse underneath the tables get. They don't get this big but again they're not outside. So I don't know that I would plant this one again either. You gotta love experimenting though. Look at those castor beans. They're so so big. All right taking a look at this bed here you can see oh something is missing. Yes we did pull out the two arbovitas that were back there. They just kept getting more brown. They weren't getting better. I pulled them out and I thought about trying them in another place to see if I could get them to go. I ended up just tossing them. They were so brown and brittle on the inside when we dug them up. I mean the needles were just falling off. So I've decided that I want blue and I'm either going to do blue rockets or tailors. I want skinny blue junipers there and I think that's going to look absolutely fabulous. So that's what we're going to add. All right so all in all that bed's looking pretty good. Let's look at the last bed. Yeah the last bed. Let's look at the front bed. This bed really has become one of my favorite beds. Once I fix the end of the bed and I get my permanent things in here it's going to look so much better because there's actually too much yellow down there on the end and when everything's in bloom it's like yellow, yellow, yellow, yellow and so we're going to be breaking that up. I also want to kind of have a little bit of a screen right here to break up the view so you kind of have to walk down there to see what's there. I am loving the angelonia in here. We did cut back the veronica and so the veronica it's it's starting to shoot up a few shoots here and there. We did take the Sedona bull out. I had that Seneco in there and it just was not doing well and so I ended up pulling the whole pot and then we'll do a fall pot there instead. But what I am loving oh my gosh I love this plane in the blue selvia. Isn't that fabulous? I definitely will plant that again. Now this year I'm telling you my petunias have been a disappointment this year especially the dark purple just not performing to the way they normally do. So it's not that I won't do petunias again but I think I'm gonna maybe steer away from the dark purple and try a different color. I am loving the euphorbia's in here. We're hoping there's enough of a little microclimate in here that these will make it through the winter and we added some more of those rockin round pure joy sedums in here and I really like that sedum. Got a nice patch of sedum down here and I love the little nine bark that's peeking out from back there and again I love my limelight hydrangea and my weeping Norway spruce. Let's go look on the outside edge and see what it looks like. Another new favorite in the garden is this calamint and this is the montrose white. I think it's calaminta. I love this. It is absolutely gorgeous. I like the little white dainty flowers. Again it's one that is absolutely covered with pollinators. The plant itself looked really good while it was filling in and then I love that it's a later season bloomer. All right our fizzy mizzies those are you know I don't know the jury's still out on those but I am liking the nine bark in here. As we swing around this way you can see that we have some more cleomes with the salvia in here and even my limelight has a little floppage going on and this is the first year I've ever had that happen with this shrub. That's how much rain we've been getting and some of the rain has been like a deluge of rain because look at my black-eyed susans in here. They are flattened. Now I think part of this is an animal coming through here. I don't think that's all rain so I think I'm going to have to relocate those because this is not the first time that they've looked like that and I don't want this garden to have that so I think we're going to move those into a new area but again the cleomes look fabulous and as we back all the way out we've got our little quick fires with our little piglet grass and then the last big floppage we got yep right here is our baptisia uh-huh look at how that flopped open but I've been using the foliage so I'm not I'm very hesitant to cut it back because I'm loving that and being able to use that. All right as we come up the last thing we're going to look at is our container right up here loving this container. I love the zinnias that we put in here. I like the sedum. I like the little star. Oh my goodness uh mini vista petunias. I like the the blue my mind evolius even though they're closed right now but I just love the contrast of everything in this pot. It has been very very pleasing to look at all year long. I just love it and then let's just peek through here one of my favorite views oh yeah isn't that nice check out my grass one it's green but two look at the hay fields in here it is growing so fast that is happening and we are cutting it every seven days oh my goodness so I'm going to have to get out here with a bagger on my next cut to kind of pick that up the next thing that we'll be working on well there's a few things that we'll be working on so stay tuned one is going to be this area out here we are going to finish getting this ready for next year's planting here's my pavers for my little platform that I'm going to be making out there but we aren't going to plant anything this year we're getting everything ready for next year and we really are going to try to make an ecosystem out here where flowers and vegetables really form a marriage to solve problems in the garden and make it pesticide free and we are using nature to take care of nature so that is a series that will be happening next year stay tuned for that and it is starting to get dark out but we will be working down here underneath the maple tree you guys and so we're going to create this garden bed down here we've got a swing we're making the little secret nook I'm very excited about this because I know a lot of you struggle with planting underneath a maple tree and so we're going to tackle this together also Tracy's secret garden is coming up so oh yeah lots of great videos lots of great landscaping still to go one last look at this one oh I love this garden that's all I've got for today you guys I hope you enjoyed the tour seeing the garden probably at the fullest it's gonna look because the weather is cooling down we are actually in a 10-day run right now where we're in the 70s like the lower 70s we actually have a couple days where it's like 68 and oh my gosh it's glorious and it's great for planting and everything but I hope we get maybe a little bit of a warm-up just to get some roots going with all the planting that I want to finish up so it's a mad race to the finish because I usually finish planting any kind of perennials I want to kind of be done by the end of September and I've got three kind of semi-big projects I want to get done so stay tuned for those it's be a lot of fun don't forget Garden Gab is this coming up Saturday the deadline for viewer submission pictures is midnight Wednesday the 27th so if you don't get them in by then I won't be able to use them because I got to go into production at some point and start putting that video together for those of you that are new I'm glad you made it to the end of the video please subscribe if you like our videos if you want to be entertained you want to be educated and you want to be inspired because that's what our channel is all about and welcome so I'm Michelle I hope you enjoyed the tour we'll see you next time in the next video I hope you get your hands in the dirt today bye everyone