In My Dream Garden...

...I'll have wisteria trained up the wall of my house. There will be a shady, green oasis with hosta, a fountain with stepping stones, and a stone bench. An enormous vegetable garden will be off to the side and it will be enough to feed the family. The veggies will be in raised beds, (built by my husband). The fruit will be the vegetable garden boarder: trellised blackberries and raspberries, cherry, pear, fig, and apple trees.

All around the house there will be flowers, in a cottage garden style. Enormous hydrangea bushes will run across one side of the house. On that same side, climbing hydrangea will be trained up the wall. There will be an espalier on every sunny side of the house: pear and cherry trees. A clematis will climb up the mailbox and honeysuckle will climb up the fence.

In the spring, pots of tulips and daffodils will welcome guests at the front door. The pathway up to the house will be flanked by flowers. There will be lilies interspersed throughout the garden- fragrant, show-stopping lilies. Ground cover will be all over, like moss, creeping thyme, creeping jenny, and other low-crawlers.

I'll have window boxes full of seasonal flowers. There will be lavender bushes all around, to harvest and fill our house. Blueberry bushes will be along one side of the perimeter of the garden and there will be a magnificent magnolia tree with flowers the size of basketballs.

So it's obvious I love plants that climb! I have a lot to learn about gardens, so to some more seasoned gardeners this might sound ludicrous, or even wrong (is it possible to fill a flowering garden with ground cover?). Somehow, though, it feels very good to document it and get it off my chest, even if it may need some revising along the way.