Correcting Landscape Mistakes

 Step #1 is admitting you have a problem:

You know how you spend a whole winter chewing on a gardening issue and not being able to do much about it?  I do way more mental gardening in the winter than I do in season.  Towards the end of this past summer I told my husband that I think I have created a problem for myself.  And the problem is that I set myself up to battle the deer all summer long.  And that takes so much joy out of flower gardening.

I love daylilies.  They are inexpensive and readily available.  You can easily divide them and spread them all over.   They come in many colors and even some variation on leaf texture.   If you plant them in a row, the deer will treat them as a flower bud buffet....

The worst problem is our front fence line.  Of course, this one was my husband's idea...  but I've duplicated it in at least two different planting areas.  We are planning to remove these "ditch lilies" in the spring and plant them back in the ditch where they came from.  It's going to be a big job, but it will save me so much gardening time between spraying them each night, to deadheading, to cutting them down in late summer.

When day lilies are well maintained and in full bloom, they are beautiful.  The problem is that I have months of work to enjoy three weeks of blooms.  And when they are done, they are best cut down completely and allowed to grow back, which leaves you with a big bare spot in the middle of summer.  I have illustrated the Daylily Paradigm below.

The pink triangle highlights the moment of peak blooming. 

That brief moment of peak blooming is glorious.  At least it can be if you start protecting your blooms as soon as they peek up over the foliage.  I even commemorated it in a post last year.

"Daylily Day" 2023

Below is a photo of what became my second biggest deer battle.  A row of lilies, nose height, along the driveway, where everyone, including the deer, walked daily.

It wasn't always like this.  It started out with just a few lilies.  And this fall, when I was doing garden maintenance, I pulled most of them out leaving only one plant on each end which has my favorite color bloom.  And I really like how it opened the bed back up so that it looked like you might even want to go in there and sit on the bench.  I was initially going to plant another row of something else.  But I think I've changed my mind.  I like the wide open space better than I liked the row of frustration.

Original plan

Another area that I am over and done with is the strip along the back lawn where the Linden trees are planted.   It has become quite shady and since I would love a shade garden, I started putting Hosta divisions in there.  Then I realized that I am not interested in walking out there to spray them.  And again, this is near a preexisting deer highway.

It wasn't always a shady spot.  It used to be more open an sunny and full of....

Day Lilies.

That Linden row is far enough away from our living space that I no longer feel like I need to decorate it.  Come spring I am removing what is left of both the Hosta and the remaining Daylilies.

I can't even see what is planted there from this vantage point.

Gardeners are always having to correct gardening mistakes.  Sometimes they are little ones like the right plant in the wrong growing space and you just need to swap things around.  But sometimes they are big ugly mistakes that require some serious reworking.  Our best example of that is the area shown below.  It was initially landscaped after the neighbors removed some large oak trees and put in city water.  It looked nice and neat, but the mulch was a nightmare.  

The mulch would be soaked with water and become ankle deep mud.  This rendered the French drain inoperable.   It had to be refreshed every few years which was a lot of hard work, not to mention expensive. So we completely reworked the area into a dry creek bed. 

How wet could it get?

Really wet.

Well, the dry creek bed landscape solved the wetness problem beautifully.  And again, I felt compelled to plant it up.  With Daylilies.  It looks lovely for the few weeks they are in bloom, and when they are not blooming you get just an appropriate grassy texture.  But after eight seasons with these lilies, I have come to realize that this dry creek bed is not the optimum spot for a flower garden.  Its an out of the way place which is more trouble to maintain than the enjoyment I get from it. So I have been removing lilies as the spruce trees crowd them out.  I pulled three from the far end which had become completely engulfed by spruce branches and I'm not replacing them.  There are a few gorgeous deep red lilies that I would like to relocate somewhere that I could enjoy them more.  I will be replacing those with ornamental grasses which the deer don't bother at all.

I am looking forward to next season, but instead of plotting and planning how I am going to protect rows of daylilies, I am prioritizing which lilies I really enjoy and I am scattering them around the other flower beds where the deer will have to spend more effort looking for them.  There are areas that are less travelled, and maintaining a netting over a few lilies here and there will be much easier than netting entire flower beds.