Finishing the Maple Garden | New Plants, Stone Paths & Our Garden Swing

Hello everyone, welcome to Gardening TLC. My name is Michelle and I live in northern Illinois zone 5. We are at the back maple garden today and yes, the swing is going up. I'm so excited. But before we can put the swing up, I want to do some things right up here in the maple garden. I've got some planting to do, I've got some rock work to finish, some edging to get in, and a pathway leading up to the swing. So if you guys are ready, we are going to jump in and really add some more things to this garden to kind of finish it up for the year. All right, you ready? Come on! I love this tree. It is so beautiful. It is a crimson king maple and it has really big leaves and it provides a lot of shade. But they're really hard to plant underneath because the roots are above the surface. Now down below that, right here, I have a red maple. Last year we started the planting of these two beds and then we added some things coming up the embankment earlier in the season this year. And one of the things that I said that we needed to do was we needed to figure out how to transition this big blank area right here back up onto the sidewalk from these rock steps that we put in last year. So we'll be doing that transition. I've also got some plants that I want to add. Now all of this stuff is very, very new. It's very, very young. Things need time to grow. There are a few annuals in here that were like placeholders while I was deciding what it is that I wanted to do. So one of the things that I absolutely love, and I tested it to see if I loved it, and I do, and that is this geranium maccharism right here. We started these as little plugs last year and they have filled in so beautifully. I absolutely love them and I started some more plugs and we're going to be adding them to the garden. Another plant that I want to add in here are some epimediums. So I've got some epimediums that a viewer, Kim, sent me from Iowa and I've been holding on to them this whole time and we're going to get those in the ground today as well. So those are going to be kind of going up into this area. I also have my two kokedamas that we put the hostas in. We enjoyed these for a lot of the summer. These are just little mini hostas and we're going to be adding those. And then I have a hosta here that I picked up as a little plug at Ballseed. Not a clue what kind it is, but we're going to put it in the garden. So we'll be planting that. We'll be deconstructing these two, which we said we were going to do all along, and we're going to add those to the garden as well. Now I want to take you around the corner into this new bed. Now we're not working over here this today, but I do want to show you these Fall in Love Sweetly Anemones. Now these are in their first year and they will get bigger and grow, but oh my goodness, aren't those the sweetest things? I love those and I think I'm going to be adding some more next year of these anemones to the bed. I absolutely love them. We've got some more down on the other end, but one of the things that I want to add today in this area, and we're just working over here, is I do want to add some more anemones and I think I'm going to add a white one called Elfin Swan. It's so dark in this area and even though I love my little Sedona Bowls here that are filled with Impatiens and I loved dotting those in, I think I want some white in the Fall to brighten this up, so we're going to be adding those as well. Let's talk about these absolutely gorgeous plants that we're going to put in. So the first one, I have kind of put this all over my garden now and I'm really liking it. I do know that next year I'm going to be introducing quite a bit more ground cover in different places because if I have my way, I'm going to have ground cover in a lot of different areas of my shade so that that way I don't have to mulch because when you have to clean up these great big leaves from all of these maple trees, they fall on the ground and then when you kind of blow them out, even if you're like, you know, doing zoop zoop zoop like that, you like my sound effects, but even if I'm doing that and I'm blowing the leaves out into the lawn, I still inevitably end up losing a lot of my mulch and if I can get this to totally fill in and not have to worry about having mulch up here, oh my gosh, that would be awesome because I don't want to have to mulch every single bed every single year. So if I can get it to where underneath all of the trees, it's ground cover along with what I'm growing, that would be a huge money saver and time saver. All right, so the first one I'm going to be putting in and I have 12 of these. I started these as little bitty plugs that I bought from my grower. This is a big root geranium or a geranium macarysum. It's called Bevan's Variety. So this guy can be semi-evergreen in warmer climates here. I don't know if it's going to be or not. We had a pretty mild winter last year and they did kind of sort of die back to the ground, but they were little baby plugs when we put them in. These are actually a lot bigger. Now the root system isn't as big as this one gallon container. I just transplanted them into these containers from their little plugs maybe three weeks ago, so they're probably not fully established through this whole thing. So they're still going to be really easy to plant in the ground around all the maple roots, which can be a challenge doing that in itself. All right, so these guys will grow in sun to part shade, but they will grow in full shade. They're going to get 12 inches high. You should space them 18 inches apart. They get little beautiful pink flowers all over them in the spring and this was absolutely gorgeous in the spring when it was full of the flowers. I absolutely loved it. Now I have yet to see the like red edges that it's supposed to get and the color it's supposed to get in the fall. I don't think it's been cold enough to trigger that yet and if it is semi-evergreen, I hope that it holds on and looks good through the winter, but we'll find out together and I'm not going to cut it back and we'll see what it does. All right, so that's what the green canopy looks like and they've been fantastic underneath the maples. Oh my gosh, I'm so pleased and so happy with the performance and even if I planted nothing else, these are definitely well worth planting. So I want some more anemones, but I don't want really big ones and I've been told that these aren't as aggressive as say some of the white ones that you can get in your garden. I mean we'll find out if they are aggressive or not. They do have some little buds on them, so I'm pretty excited about that. I just like the way this plant looks too. It's full and it's lush and I really like the leaf structure on here and how that looks. I like the color of the green on this. So this is an Elfin Swan Anemone and this guy is also known as a Japanese Windflower. It is going to grow in sun to part shade. Now we're hoping that it's going to do okay down here. It's probably going to get maybe more shade than it probably wants, but we're going to test it. I only have six. We're going to put them in the garden and hopefully they do really well. Now they're going to get only 12 to 14 inches high, so that's not very tall at all. 12 to 18 inches apart, zone four through nine and it says here that you want to keep them consistently watered. So my one thing with this anemone is because I'm putting it underneath a maple, which is a big fat hog, right? They want all the water, all the nutrients and that's why sometimes it's so hard to plant underneath them. I plan on using these going up the embankment in between the trees, not at the bases of the trees. I think if I put it too close to the base of the tree or where the bigger roots are and where a lot of the feeder roots are, I think this would really struggle because it needs more consistent water and so I don't want to make where I'm watering, watering, watering all the time just to have this plant. Now if they don't work out there, I'll dig them up and I'll move them over into the other garden where it's not in competition with anything, but I'm pretty excited to add these to the garden. Last but not least, I'm going to add these three epimediums. Kim from Iowa sent them to me when I talked about how I was adding them to my garden. She had some in her garden, dug them up, and sent them to me and I'm so grateful that you sent these and I'm so happy that I didn't kill them, but I have all three of them right here. This one's looking a little crispier than the others, but the root system on it looks really good and so we're going to be adding these to the garden as well. Now I did have three in the garden that I absolutely loved that I put in earlier in the spring. Fortunately, I totally fried them and I have transplanted them here and here and then I have done absolutely nothing since I put them in the ground, but I have done and seen this before where a plant does this and then you leave it in the ground, you keep watering it, and the next thing you know in the spring it comes back up. So we're going to leave them there and we're not going to give up on them until next year. Here's the other one right there. So we're going to see, maybe they come back, I don't know. All right, so the first thing we're going to do is I am going to clear the annuals out of here even though there's a little more time that I could have these in here. I really want to get the geranium macrorhizomes and everything else planted instead so that they have time to settle in and get a few roots on them. Next, I want to go ahead and add one more little step area right here and I'm going to transition this around into the path right here that's going to go up to the swing. That was actually a suggestion from somebody earlier in the season and I was like, oh, they're absolutely right. I need to do that and connect the two paths so I think I'm going to do that today and then we've got some really nice concrete man-made stepping stones that look like flagstone that we're going to use to have a path that goes up to the swing. And yes, we are getting the swing up and I know we might only enjoy that swing for a month but once I actually get it out of the box and put it together then it's not such a big deal to hang it up next year. So we're going to get that done as well. So that's what's on the docket today. Well, it's not quite as full without all those annuals in there. It looks a little naked. So we're going to be planting the geranium maccharisms up here. I grew them for this area because I totally want this packed out with those. Now, I do have some hostas on the edge here that are looking a little weak but we'll see if those hold on and come back next year. I actually dug those out of a friend's house and brought them over here and put them on the edge. We're hoping that they take and if they do, great. And if they don't, well, we'll just try something else. All I'm also going to draw out the lines of how I'm going to transition this around and basically what I want to do is I want to take the boulders and continue it over here to the sidewalk. I'm going to put some fabric down and then I'm going to put more of the river rock up here. The other thing is I'll do the transition down at the bottom as well and mark that out so that I know where that's going as well. Hopefully you guys can see everything. It's really hard to film sometimes in dappled light but we are going to be outlining this area with some more of the little boulders. I'll lay some fabric down and put some of the A-stone down and then that will lead us into our path. Now, I'm not putting boulders on either side of this path because what I want is just the flagstone to go in here and then I want the plants to kind of spill over onto the flagstone to kind of soften that up. So, I did put three of the anemones over here. I have one right here and I put two more right back here and I think that those are going to be a nice addition in here. A nice pretty soft white and they're not going to be crazy tall so they're going to look really good. All right, as we go up the embankment this is where I put the other three anemones and the three epimediums. So, as we come up the stairs you can see that I've got one right there, another one here, and a third one behind that little rock right there. We're going to put one of the epimediums here in front of our weeping hemlock. I have another one here in between our two little blue mouse ear hostas. Here's this one a little bit closer. I think that that looks so sweet right there behind the rock. It's going to soften that up a little bit and then as we swing up I do have one epimedium right here. This is the rubrum. I put this one in, I don't know, sometime this summer but it's the only one that looks actually halfway decent right now. But then as we come up the hill you can see that I did add the third epimedium from Kim right there. I have dotted in all of the macrorhizomes right through here. Look at it from a different angle right here. You can see this is hopefully going to be enough to fill this whole area in and I'm not going to plant anything in between. I just want the geraniums to totally fill this area in. And then as we pull a little bit further away from the tree then we start with the hostas, the epimediums and on down the hill we go. All right the last thing I want to do is take apart my kokedama. So this was a video I did. I linked it down below if you want to go check that out. I actually thought these were so fun and all I'm going to do is I'm just going to cut the string off and then I'm just going to peel the string off, peel the sheet moss back because I want to be able to use that sheet moss again. And all I have to do is get it wet and it'll be all nice and pliable all over again. So basically what I'm doing is I'm just pulling off all of the string that was on here. Okay so now I've got all the twine off of it and I let these completely dry out. I thought maybe it wouldn't be as messy to do it that way. Oh there's still one more string right here I didn't get. All right there it is. All right so I think I can just peel this right off and hopefully it's not going to be as messy. Oh yeah this is going to be easy. So I'm just going to peel it right off from around. I've got a little root ball in here. Oh look it met a little baby on that one. It kind of came up through. There it is. Okay so I'm just going to, there it is. Here's my little guy with my little root ball and if I want to reuse this again I can just soak this in water and it'll be repliable to use for something else. Let's find a place to put our little mini hostas. So we have the little blue mouse ears that run down the embankment along the edge of the boulders and I think that this would be perfect right here to put our two little variegated ones. So I have an epimedium right there and I think this little guy he would be really pretty right there and then I think the other one we could tuck him in right there because even if he grows a little bit over the rocks it'll soften the rocks and look pretty. I think those are perfect there. I'm going to take you through and I'm going to show you how to plant one of the geranium macrorhizomes. You do not need to see me plant every one of these plants but I want to show you how to do at least one. Planting underneath a maple tree can be a little bit of a challenge right because there's roots everywhere and a lot of times if we're hacking away at a lot of roots underneath our maple tree we do damage to the maple tree. The other thing you can't do is you can't pile a bunch of stuff on top of the roots because then you smother the roots and your tree can't breathe and you can do damage that way as well. So what I do when I'm planting underneath the maple is I try to find the youngest plants that I can and there is a little bit of risk in that because sometimes you have a little bit of loss when you do this but at least I'm not out serious money because I'm using smaller plants. Now these started as little bitty plugs and I have up potted them into a bigger pot. Now if I dump these upside down I can take a lot of this soil off and take this down to where I have a root base. See look at all that extra that's in there and when it's right down to the very end I have hardly anything at all to plant and I'm only going to dig a shallow little hole and then I'm going to backfill around this with everything that was in that pot. If I need compost I will backfill around the top of it with compost and then I'm going to mulch this area with two inches of mulch and that will be another layer on top. But I'm not going any higher than two or three inches on top of the maple roots but this is how I'm going to get this in the ground without hacking up all the roots on the maple tree. So the smaller the plant the better. Now the other thing you've got to take into consideration is not everything is going to grow underneath a maple tree. You've got to find plants and I have had good luck with hostas with this geranium macarysum. I've had pretty good luck with a juga if it's further away but you've got to find oh and uh lungwort's another one I've good luck with or pulmonium. You've got to find plants that will actually be able to grow underneath the maple and handle the competition because a maple is a big fat pig. It wants everything all the light all the nutrients all the water and all the roots are at the surface so it's a competition. So this has proven over the last year and a half to be absolutely fabulous underneath the maple and that's why I'm planting more. So let me get this one planted in the ground and I actually dumped all that dirt in the wrong spot but what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna I you can either use a shovel I like my little hoe uh cultivator tool and I'm just gonna do a little shallow hole right here. Now last year we dumped compost on top of this so I shouldn't have to add a whole bunch more. The mulch that we put on is kind of broken down over the season and I will be adding more so now I've got this little plant right here I did break a couple leaves but that's no big deal and I'm just gonna settle it down in this hole right here and then I'm gonna take all of this soil that was in the pot and I'm gonna use it to anchor around and that's as deep as I needed to make that hole. Now when I mulch all of this it will also protect underneath here a little bit more going into winter. I just got back from the garden center we went over and I got 25 granite boulders most of them are this size or a little bit bigger. I did find some flat ones like this so that I can put them along the edge in the front here and it's going to separate the lawn from where the rock starts and I want these to not stick up so much I want them to be a little bit flatter so I hope I found enough flat ones. So I cored it out. I also am going to put the landscape fabric down. I couldn't find any landscape staples so I'm going to just go ahead and put it down and use the rocks to hold it in place. So we're going to get this knocked out. You ready? Let's do this. I don't know about you guys but there's something about a fresh coat of mulch that just makes your landscape pop. Wow does that green really stand out. Now it's going to take about three years for this geranium maccharism to completely spread and fill in and I'm going to have to really restrain myself for the next couple years not planting things in here unless it's an annual or it's an annual bowl. I need to give this stuff time to grow up. I think my favorite part though is right here this transition area where this isn't going to be like a big muddy mess now and now you step up instead of into mud you step onto the rock and then you go right to the sidewalk. Oh my goodness I love that. As we come down oh this looks so good. I love the anemones. Even though they're not blooming yet I can picture that that green against the blue that really shows up and then that white will look so good. The only thing I could think that maybe I might add would be two more yews coming down the embankment. So I've got the one here the one here and here and I'm thinking of doing two more like there and then another one around the corner. I just think that that would finish this back edge off and it would look really good. All right so outside of planting any annuals I cannot plant anything else in here. I've got to give it time to grow up. All right so we've got a transition right here and we're going to be putting a stepping stone right here against the edge of the rock and then we're going to be taking those stepping stones all the way to where the swing will be. I'm going to go inside now and start getting the swing assembled and then we'll get these stepping stones in place and we'll call it. This area will be ready and the only thing that I'm going to have to do for winter is pull the Sedona bowls with the impatiens in it and I usually just dump those right out into the compost pile and any hostas I will cut back otherwise everything else in here I'm just going to leave it up and leave it alone. All right here's another view of it coming up so you can kind of see the transition. Oh my goodness you guys this is great I love this and now my big muddy mess is gone and I do like the way that looks. Oh my goodness oh I love it yay. When I started this yesterday I didn't realize how excited this was going to make me to kind of have this completion to this area even though I probably over the years will still plant some things. I love the transition here that I'm not stepping down into mud that it takes me naturally down this path. I mean oh my goodness I am ecstatic over this and those stepping stones oh my gosh they were perfect. So this is a company called High Format that makes these stepping stones we sell them at the store and I just think that this is the perfect finish in here up to my swing. Now I know the swing is a different color but I couldn't find a brown that matched so I thought a contrast would be better so oh my goodness I love this. These are perfectly proportioned so that when I step on them it's a natural stride. Oh I am not going back to work I am in my swing can you believe it this is so awesome I love it and I love the new plants that we put in. I like the addition of the rock at the top and the bottom of the you know rock step area oh my goodness you guys I couldn't be more pleased with how this turned out and I even put two right down there at my feet. I love this oh I wish you guys could come here and sit with me and check this out and just have a drink oh I love it. I am over the moon you guys I am so happy with my garden area back here and we started this about a year ago and it started with our no-till bed on this side and then planting that up this spring then coming over to the other side adding the compost planting up the basics of it last year in the fall coming in with a couple different plantings through the growing season this year and then ending it off with our swing our pathway adding to the top and the bottom of the embankment steps oh my gosh you guys I am so happy oh my gosh I am gonna never leave this swing I'm not going back to work I'm not going inside Glenn you're gonna have to make your own dinner I'm staying right here.