I mentioned yesterday that I should probably do a post on how things have changed here over the years at Casa y Jardín IVG, and several of you expressed interest in seeing such a post, so here's a quick attempt. Actually I'm rather "photo poor" this week, because I've used up most of the stuff I had in the recent archives, and it's been so dangerously hot and humid this week that we've hardly been outside more than we have to and have been neglecting the weeding as well as the photo shoots. And even though it's going to be a brutally hot weekend, we're going to have to get some serious weeding done, even if it's done in small doses ... just as we almost had most of the weeds under control, the weather had to slip back into its hot and rainy pattern for a while. Now it's just plain insufferable!Anyway, I digress from the purpose of this post, which is the evolution of our garden. This first shot (which came from the County Assessor's website) was taken in February, 1996 (according to the EXIF data). We moved in on September 10, 1998, so this pre-dates us. We closed on the sale of the house on July 22, 2000 (a day I well remember) after renting for two years I'm sure you'll notice how barren it looked at the time. If there were any plants there at that time, it would probably have been the small stand of Iris that are now slowly dying out. There may have been a few other things planted, such as the Lamium we ex-ter-min-ated, the Italian oregano that's worthless for culinary purposes and maybe a couple of hostas. Only the Iris remain, and we plan to dig them up in fall and move them to a sunnier spot than they currently occupy, and augment them a bit with some new ones ....
Flash forward to July 1, 2003, not long after we (and friends) built the front boulder bed. I'm sure readers will recognize several of the plants here (I apologize for the quality of the photo) ... there's the original stand of Prairie Mallow, a bunch of the now-being-ex-ter-min-ated Heliopsis, and of course the Monarda, Clearly, the most established plants here are toward the back, which was where the original garden started. So, we took out more and more of the grass and moved forward planting. As you can see now, that horrible to mow slope (a lot of yards here have impossible slopes, and ours really wasn't bad compared to some I've seen around town) has now disappeared and been replaced with a whole lot of dirt. I can't remember how many trips we made to buy dirt, get dirt from others, but on one excursion I recall the pickup we had at the time (the dearly departed Ranger whose demise has been recounted a while back and its replacement here), groaned and was really telling us what a load we were carrying, which thus led to more frequent trips for less dirt.In 2003 we planted mostly annuals in the front border due to the time of the year, so we had tons of moss rose, coleus, celosias and such ... We also put in some perennials as well, but I've forgotten which at this point, but if I go to the way back machine of my now defunct gardening website, I can find a lot more from the early days. (I got these first two photos from my archived files). I'll let you readers make the then and now comparison....
Flash forward again to July 4, 2008 for further comparison. I hardly need to call out the plants here, as most of of them have been featured as the subjects of their own posts recently, but I just want to give some updated perspective, so I include these last two shots. I should note, however, that these were taken before the big weeding extravaganza we did on the 4th, and though it's getting bad again (thanks, rain, hehe), it's much improved than before this shot. The Prairie Mallow has lots of seeds I need to collect and I need to chop them back to see if we'll get a later, second show this year. I would have done that sooner during an ordinary year, but this hasn't been an ordinary year...
I had to include this section of the garden, because it's much changed over the course of the month, and most notable is that all that Heliopsis you see to the right has now been ex-ter-min-ated! I keep finding more of it, and as I do, it gets dug or pulled ... I know we won't win the war this year, but if we can get it out of the front beds, we'll be happy.... And you've already seen just how much the Coneflowers have progressed since the beginning of the month ... One of my favorite rocks can be seen in this shot ... the one of our (then neighbor Eric) friends dubbed "butt rock" because it provides a good place to sit down. Hard disagreeing with that moniker, so it joins "finger rock" as the two named rocks in the front boulder bed.So that's the short version. Now you know why the motto of this blog is "transforming one urban corner, one season at a time...."
UPDATE:
A few of you were wondering in the comments what Finger Rock looks like, so here's a post from earlier this year that should answer your questions. If you look closely in a lot of shots across the site you should be able to spot it in that general area toward the corner.
