And now for the maintained garden beds

Yesterday I posted the drop garden meadow from our NYS home.  Today I will finish up this nostalgic love story with pictures of the more formal beds.  

The vegetable garden

I wish this was a better picture

This takes in a few garden beds, and 
looks back to the vegetable garden

the front of the house

my favorite photo of "the land"

July - sheer joy

one of the beds in front of the drop
gardened meadow

The wetlands way out back, with some
drop gardened purple bee balms

Drop gardening in NYS

When you have a ridiculous number of perennial flower beds, each year you have a lot of dividing to do. For many years I gave our extras to friends, neighbors, co-workers. But most people have limited amounts of space.We were lucky in that we had an acre and a half of land. At a certain point, I decided I'd take the divided plants I didn't want in the maintained beds and drop them on either side of the path in the meadow. These areas are referred to on the map of my previous post as areas 24, 26, and 29. 

I'd usually put down a little dirt, and then plopped the plants/roots down. Drop gardening, I named it. I watered them a time or two, and then just let them live or die. Many lived and naturalized. Here are some pictures of that area in all it's glory.

day lilies and red bee balm

From the back of the path looking towards the 
garage and house.

Foxglove, for crying out loud.  It loved to
naturalize and reseed.

From the path looking west towards area 26 and 29
and a little bit of the veggie garden

In this picture you can see the trumpet vine in front of the
garage, and my gorgeous husband.

The path going out to the wetlands. 
Area 24 on the left, area 26 on the right.

From the back of the meadow looking towards 
our little veggie garden.  Purple bee balm.

Day lilies, the wild kind you find in the ditch 
along side the road. We also had
hybrids in the maintained beds - later for that.

Sorry, I don't seem to have pictures of spring when the dames rockets were in bloom, and I don't think I captured the purple cone flower (which never did as well as the other drop flowers).  Oh well.  I know they are there.  

Remembering garden beds

We lived in the Finger Lakes Region of New York State for 39 years, moving to Central Florida in 2014. We didn't buy our first house until 1990. It was an old house on one and a half acres out in the country, adjacent to state land. 

Perennial garden beds were our passion for 24 years, and it seemed like each year we couldn't help but put in another, and then another. By the time we moved it was ridiculous. We left the new owners a hand-drawn map and a detailed summary of what was where.