Shrub Border!

I should have taken a picture of this before I cleaned it up! It was a tangled mess of small saplings, rose brambles, barberry and just a general thicket of invasives and undesirables. There is probably a handsome case of "contact dermatitis" awaiting me, as I'm sure some of the vines I ripped out are slowly awakening poison ivy! Oh well...
I've been planning on creating a new shrub area for some time. Bob and I have collected a number of lilac suckers from several friends and we (spontaneously) purchased a shrub or two thinking of the future. Bob also had a few small flowering trees from my sister Beatrice having enrolled him in the Arbor Day Foundation. Those were healed into the vegetable garden and have grown impressively, making for a harder transplantation than we originally anticipated. The crab apple especially seems to have liked where it was residing and put up a fight at being moved.

Doesn't look that big but it resisted being dug up! There were a couple of dogwoods, too. One I planted out near a variegated dogwood we purchased last year. The digging in that area was so hard and it got to be late in the afternoon, so I put the other dogwood in the new shrub border. Sometimes, the path of least resistance is awfully appealing!

So it make look just like my shadow on a spot of earth, but there's a hole there waiting for a new resident. I dug and ripped and raked and dug some more- I spent the entire day outside, installing this new section of the garden. It's going to be nice, once we get the fence moved and put a new gate up at the end of a sort of natural path that leads through this former wilderness. Hey: we have friends who are down sizing and getting all happy about not having lawns to mow or gardens to weed. I just keep developing new gardens...
But look what the competition is!

We made a trip to the New York Botanic Garden last week, to deliver Bob's metal work that they sell in the shop there. (One of the horticulturalists said to Bob, "You're famous! Everyone wants your metal work!" That was cool.) But wandering around their 250 acres of trees, shrubs, perennials, bulbs and millions of specimens makes me so envious. Look at those flowering cherries above! And literally a zillion daffodils! Yikes. It was awe inspiring, but I hate to think of how many gardeners they employ. Back here at home, we only have me and Bob and Robin.