And this is now...

When we sold our old house, we needed a little more space: a bigger yard, a guest room, or maybe another full bathroom if we were lucky.

We ended up in a house with a lot more space and a lot more yard.  Instead of the sunny quarter acre lot, we have a mostly wooded acre.  Instead of a friendly beach community where our neighbors did their own lawn work and gardening, we're in a quiet bedroom community where our neighbors hire crews to do their landscaping.

Not gardening...landscaping.

This is a big change, which honestly feels daunting at times.  In my house, I could buy anything that caught my fancy and put it in the front yard without thinking twice about it.  Now, when I look at plant catalogues, I find myself wondering what our quiet neighbors would think if I decided to put in a bed of rudbekia maxima in the front yard.

Approximately five to six feet tall!

The original owners of our new house were gardeners and created a really beautiful woodland garden in the backyard.  It's almost uncanny that some of things they did, probably twenty years ago, are things that are quite trendy now.  They minimized the lawn and used a nice combination of trees, shrubs, and perennials in the understory.  They chose a lot of native plants.  There is a hidden bench in the woods that you can reach with a winding garden path. 

The backyard was the main reason I agreed to put an offer on this house.

However, the people we bought the house from were not the original owners and were not gardeners.  They were lovely people who took great care of the home, maintained the lawn, and kept the trees well limbed...but they were not gardeners.

The garden path is overgrown.  Trees have been removed and replaced with plants or beds that are not appropriate for their space.  Leaves and sticks have been dumped for about five years in a few different spots in the woods.  Meanwhile, the beds that still exist are covered with dry gray mulch.  When we moved in last July and I made a solemn vow to not. plant. anything. for one year.  I needed to figure out the type of garden that would fit into our new neighborhood and I wanted to see what came up in the spring.

I'm glad I waited.  In a section of grass that appeared to be lawn last summer, there is a cluster of hostas coming up right now.  I don't know if the deer ate them last year (a distinct possibility) or if the previous owners mowed them over while preparing to sell the house, but I found them and now I need to figure out how best to take care of them.  In the woods, I found eight hellebores.  I had seen the leaves last year and thought there might be one or two of them, but I could not imagine there were eight.  Sometimes when I walk in the woods and find a new plant (like the fringed bleeding heart I saw this morning growing out of a two foot pile of leaves), I feel like I've won the lottery.

But just like someone who has won the jackpot, I can't jump in with both feet and start transplanting things and building new beds and buying new plants. 

I need to make a plan.