<p>Gourmetmom–It HAS been a very raining & cool spring (until this week). We still have all our planting to do. Your grotto sounds beautiful, a wonderful spot to have your morning coffee (at least that is what I would do!). The hard scaping sounds great too: a change in level, a large rock, stairs, a statue. Sounds wonderful.</p>
<p>Love the grotto idea. It sounds beautiful. We have an old stone foundation that used to be a barn. it is filled with debris and weeds, etc. When we moved in twenty years ago, we planned on a garden similar to your grotto. And yet, here we still are! My H has not turned out to be a great yard guy :(</p>
<p>Here are a couple of the issues I am having in my yard. Maybe some of you wonderful gardeners might have ideas.</p>
<p>I have a landscaped area in the front of my yard with shrubs and perennials. At the rear of this area are two holly trees. I hate them. They are scraggly and weirdly shaped (probably because we are terrible at pruning). One is really short and can’t be seen from the front and the other one can be seen but looks terrible. Any ideas?</p>
<p>Years ago, I planted chives and they are everywhere now! Any tips on getting rid of those?</p>
<p>Anyone know any good shade plants besides hosta a astlbe?</p>
<p>Many heucheras and, especially, heucherellas are great shade plants - I plant them between hostas under a tree. Cape fuschia and various other fuschias (I like the hardy varieties) are really good shade plants. Flowering currant is also a beautiful shade plant (though, left to its devices, will grow tall.)</p>
<p>Re holly.
We removed an english holly & privet hedge in our backyard.
The holly was a must do as I like to go barefoot & the privet was a pain so I decided to do the whole thing over ( now it is red twig dogwood & where my garden shed will be)We also removed an english laurel- quite satisfying.</p>
<p>I have sword ferns ( once it gets established it can do well in dry summers) planted underneath some trees along with hosta ( which the slugs haven’t found yet) & dicentra.
Foxglove also does well in the shade.
(I also have Polystichum setiferum, which is a nice light fern along with maidenhair & licorice ferns oh & deer ferns as well as chilean hard fern & autumn fern)
do you want perennials or groundcover/shrubs?
I also have lots of plants that are native to my area. Salal is evergreen and is a shrub in the shade- ground cover in the sun.
violets are nice ground covers also as is kinnickinick.
Flowering chives you can just dig up- maybe repot some of them & give them as gifts? ;)</p>
<p>^^^^
Ah! Too late!!! I already yanked most of them out and disposed of them. Thanks for the suggestions. I’m off to the nursery today. I will try (again) to talk H into pulling out the holly. I hate them.</p>
<p>If you want flowering shrubs I recommend almost all varieties of hydrangeas. Most of them will get large if planted, but I keep some confined in big pots and they are gorgeous under trees. I have a lacecap with pink, blue and purple blooms that remains smallish in the ground. They aren’t evergreen (it freezes here) but their summer beauty is worth it.</p>
<p>For shade, I tend to like white plants, either variegated foliage or white flowers. Solomon seals are nice, (either the real kind or the false.) Tiarellas are great too. While bleeding hearts, epimediums. Corydalis comes in blue flowering varieties or yellow. The yellow are very hardy and bloom a long time. Very pretty foliage as well. I also love hakone grass (Hakonechloa macra ‘Aureola’). Hakone grass has a great flowing look in the garden.</p>
<p>Good luck with the holly travails. I have gotten cold hearted in my old age…if I don’t like a plant for 1-2 seasons, it is g-o-n-e!</p>
<p>Cayuga,
They are G-O-N-E!!! I thought it would be a tough sell because while I have hated them for a while my H has resisted. But I wore him down. OMG! It looks so much cleaner and lovelier than it did with them. Now to choose something to fill the spot. I want compact with a bit of height. Partial shade. Come on Gardeners!</p>
<p>I will say, as bad as the weather has been and as neglected as my garden has been (work full time, grad school and death of my dad this spring) my azaleas have never been as gorgeous as they are right now. They are heavy with blooms and the colors are brilliant and lush. All that rain paid off.</p>
<p>Holly can be quite nice in the right spot, however, if they are very overgrown it becomes difficult to prune them into an acceptable shape. I just removed a few that had become quite contorted (growing towards the sun). It just wasn’t worth trying to rehabilitate them. </p>
<p>Lots of good suggestions for shade lovers - another great plant is hellebore which comes in many varieties and is very distinctive. I like bleeding hearts, although they are all finished by the end of June and something else needs to be underplanted. Does the area get any sun? There are lots of other options for plants that are part sun/shade. Do you have a problem with deer?</p>
<p>If you want to get rid of chives or any bulb that likes to propagate - I have a problem with grape hyacinth - pull them out and then dig deep to turn over the soil. A topping of mulch or peat moss should keep them from coming back.</p>
<p>Trying to sell house (still) so not spending much on the gardening. Years of work mean great perennials, flowering trees and shrubs, many being later than average bloomers- avoiding major changes. Cold, wet spring- even frost warnings this week. Garden- lucky tomato plants- all 3 of them- that are my only vegetable garden did fine with the low 30’s temps. Nothing like temps 10-20 degrees below normal to lessen enthusiasm…</p>
<p>You mean it’s time to garden already? Still feels like early spring…</p>
<p>Thanks for reviving the thread topic, even if I’m being a Scrooge about it.</p>
<p>EPTR—Congrats!!! Feels good doesn’t it? Hopefully H will see the wisdom! So you want to fill in the spot with something compact but with a bit of height, and something that can take shade. How much shade? And how big do you want it to be? Are you talking shrub or perennial?</p>
<p>On another note, last fall we pulled out 3 azaleas to make way for a small addition. We managed to replant 2 of them, but the 3rd got left out all winter above ground, listing on its side. It is blooming its head off this spring! I took pity on it and it is in a pot now until I figure out where to put it. The flowers and leaves are slowly righting themselves.</p>
<p>^^^
I’m not sure if I want a shrub or a perennial. The area gets quite a bit of sun (my shade question was for another spot). The plants that are already there and doing well are hydrangea (although it is a sporadic bloomer), rhodadendron, azalea, salvia, daylily, candytuft and few others that I can’t remember the names of.</p>
<p>Okay, I bought a Summer Wine Ninebark ( Physocarpus Op) to put were the Holly was. The dark wine colored leaves look beautiful against my gray house. Yeah!</p>
<p>EPTR–I just googled the summer wine ninebark (I’d never heard of it) and it does look very pretty. I like the idea of the wine colored foliage for contrast. Th site I looked at said it would grow to 6 feet–a little bit of height in an otherwise fairly low bed. Sounds good. Good luck with it!</p>
<p>It’s in and it is so pretty. What a nice change for 29.99!</p>
<p>Something is eating all the leaves off my columbines…grrrrr</p>
<p>I just planed some columbine:( I haven’t seen any bugs yet but I have trouble with something every year.</p>
<p>I am suspecting an adolescent ground hog. Time to find some repellents.
In other news, a friend’s daughter is graduating from hs this year and I have offered to bring vases of flowers for all the tables for her grad party. I am surveying the garden and have enough in bloom I think.</p>