I have achieved so much in my garden. I live in New England, so it's a four season garden, as pretty in the winter as it is in summer. I've planted more than a hundred evergreens and dozens of trees and bushes with beautiful bark. I begin my mornings watching what I call Bird TV, for I sit at the window and watch the woodpeckers (hairy, downy, and red-bellied), crows, chickadees, blue jays, nuthatches, titmice, mourning doves, and sparrows feed. The hummingbirds and finches are gone for the winter, but when they return, there will be dozens of them feeding at a time. There are also gray and red squirrels and chipmunks.
One day I'll post a photo, but a garden needs years to reveal its glory. My big surprise was my delphiniums. I was able to provoke their blooming from early summer until now. Yeah, they're still blooming in mid-November in New England. Amazing. And some of them bloom in blue, which is the rarest color and thus the most treasured.
I pulled my petunias yesterday. I have seven wave petunia beds and anyone who's grown them knows they grow and grow and grow. I'll install flower boxes next spring. I also created two mounded beds and built five, raised, hemlock beds for veggies, berries, and herbs. The biggest challenge in building raised, wooden beds is filling them. They're four feet high, so they take tons and tons and tons of soil. I managed to fill three this fall and will do the final two next spring. My centerpiece is a 60-foot flagstone path, lined by boxwoods.
I've done 99.5% of the work myself, unlike the rich women in the neighborhood who hire people to design and build "their" gardens. The only thing I can't do is place the boulders, which require excavators and tractors.
