Garden Siren Call

This garden includes two Valentine's Day roses, a blooming red heuchera and the red begonia kept over the winter and planted this spring, at left front. Several years ago I was in a local grocery store around Valentine's Day. A petite sweetheart rose bush was on sale, and I bought it for about $5. My grandmother Cox raised championship roses, and I love the flower but I find growing it to be intimidating. Championship roses might be in my genes, but these days? It seemed like too much of a challenge to plant a rose garden. This cute little plant was marketed especially for Valentine's Day ... It would be a lot easier. It was a live flower centerpiece during February that year. I then decided to keep it alive to plant it out in the yard. I was working full-time in those days, and kept it watered and in a sunny spot of the house. Come springtime, I placed it in one of the gardens in the backyard. This space is small but receives hours of sunshine each summer day....

That project finally complete! Squared up with the new soil mixture Clay soil starts to dry a bit. This is how the low spot looked in the first place. It was 1992 and we were looking for a home lot on a lake. As a native of Minnesota, I yearned for a lake view, and we finally found the right place in northern Scott County. It is a corner lot with a spacious yard, but in 1992 it was covered in weeds. Our first foray into the space was with our 2-year-old toddler daughter and an 18-inch lawn mower. It took hours to mow down the weeds. After the house was finished in February 1993, I came up with main garden plans. A space out front would be the start, but I was in for a shock. The nice black soil we enjoyed in our Davenport gardens was not available at the new place. Instead we faced working in hard clay soil. As reported several times by Alma Gaul of the Quad-City Times, homebuilders routinely remove the black soil during the building process and sell it e...