The Chaos Garden

The garden at the front of our house is nicely organized and designed for those passing by.  The Redbud blooms have faded and the Daffodils blooms are gone, so it's in a green phase just now until the Clematis flower.  But the back yard is the 'chaos garden' where Mrs. F.G. can experiment and combine and stuff in her growing collection of plants.  It's hard to know how to describe this, so I'm going to start with two areas that are quite different.

 

This part of the back garden is in front of the living room window.  It's dominated by hostas, with a large pink Bleeding Heart in the middle and a group of day lilies in the background.  There are ferns out of sight below my feet.

Here's one of the large hostas on the left, Christmas Fern  to the centre-right, and an errant Rhubarb plant in the back corner.

I love the look of this fern, with its ladder-like leaves.  There are several more ferns close to the wall of the house.

On the opposite side of the house, outside the den window, is another group of hostas like this one, a smaller two-tone colour.

And behind that a large Solomon's Seal.  There are more plants here, but they're united in enjoying the shady situation, and all have been directly transplanted from out old house.

The other big patch is the area between our patio and the shed.  It's almost all new plants brought in by Mrs. F.G., some grown from seed, after we had the patio installed.  That was the exciting year!  It has plants that will grow a little taller.

At the moment this is dominated by five large peonies, which will all bloom in the near future.

It's also got some interesting colour patterns too, and these are 'evergreen' in that I can see them even over winter, unless they're actually buried in snow.  These are a Coral Bells and Lambs Ears.

Here the rich green leaves of the Bear's Breeches contrast with a reddish Coral Bells and a few darker purple leaves of our Japanese Maple.  This entire area has now been growing 4 years, and it's filling in really well.