When I moved to a bigger place, I finally started putting in a couple of perennials. My first were a bunch of mini roses around a birdbath in the middle of the yard.
Finally, I moved to my current house. There was this annoying piece of grass between two sidewalks leading up to the house. My sister and I were living together and the time. She was in charge of mowing and asked if I could just turn that patch into a garden. It was the same day that I was going to ask her if she minded if I did that.
She had to go to work, but I have a persistent OCD personality. I spent that entire day digging it up by hand with a spade. Soon after that, my parents were scheduled to come out for a visit. I always considered my father to be a master gardener of sorts, even though he was really just as amateur as I am. But he taught me a lot to get started.
The week before they were due to come out, I fell and chipped an old break in my ankle. I had a walking cast and was told to just walk as I felt comfortable on it. When my parents came out, my father and I did a lot of shopping. He picked out a lot of perennials for me and gave me advice as to where to place them. Together we worked on that plot, with a little assistance from my mother and my sister and the neighborhood kids across the street. A couple of years later, it had filled in nicely. This is a picture from about May of 2009.
It continues to be my piece de resistance, and also my pain in the you-know-what. But every year I keep plugging away at it. I divide some, I add some, and I work on keeping it cleaned out. This has been the source of a lot of trial and error. But I have now found the fun in playing with perennials.
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