Our Latest Garden Bed

In October 2017 Rob and I started developing our latest garden bed⁠—a large curving area under the giant pecan tree in the backyard. For years this new bed looked rather awkward and scrawny, with lots of bare spots and weedy spots, but recently it’s had a glow up. The summer rains have made it so lush that I think I can finally share some pictures without getting too embarrassed.

The first step I took when creating the bed was to build a little stone patio to serve as the centerpiece. Usually my homemade patios are extremely bumpy and slanty, but this one actually looks pretty good. I’m not quite sure why. I think it may be due to the nice flat large stones I was able to procure at Native Nurseries (my favorite nursery in Tallahassee).

Once the patio was in place, Rob and I used garden hoses to help us come up with the shape of the surrounding bed. We traced the outline with blue marking chalk, then went over it with our edger so it would be a little more permanent. We put down heavy-duty brown paper from the hardware store to kill the grass and weeds, and then we covered the paper with pine bark mulch, which we bought by the bag at Roses. When leaves fell on the bed in fall, we let them lie. We even supplemented them with loads of extra leaves that we found on our neighbors’ trash piles.

Because the bed is rather big, mulching it took a while. But filling it with plants took longer; it took years. I like my shade beds to look really natural, like little forests, with an herb layer, a shrub layer, an understory layer, and a canopy layer. In this particular bed, the herb layer is made up of lady ferns, southern wood ferns, Christmas ferns, chain ferns, yellowroot, golden ragwort, and wild violets. The shrub layer consists of coonties, mapleleaf viburnum, camellias, needle palms, hearts-a-bustin’, and wild azaleas. In the understory you’ll find red buckeyes, an Ashe magnolia, and two young cedars, while the canopy is formed by the grand old pecan tree, a beech tree, and a southern magnolia.

In March of this year, I added a tidy edge around the whole bed using bricks arranged in a sawtooth pattern. The brick edging gave the bed a more finished look, and I started feeling pretty pleased with it.

“The new bed isn’t looking so bad anymore,” I said to Rob one day in April.

The animals that live in our yard seem to like it too. I often see box turtles sheltering under the fern fronds, and white squirrels (we have a population of white squirrels in Quincy) scurrying up the trunk of the pecan tree.

Even though I say I’m satisfied with the bed now, I know I’ll keep adding plants and decorations. And the plants will get bigger and more beautiful every year. One of the great things about a garden is that it just keeps getting better over time. It becomes lusher and more detailed; it grows in character. To see it changing and improving is a wonderful reason to get up every morning.