Heading day by day into Spring… one day closer… one day closer… we’re ready to see some blooming flowers and spring-y sunny days, how about you? While we wait for those first crocuses to pop out of the ground and make us happy, we’re perusing various magazines and garden catalogs in search of some new garden ideas. You know we (“we” meaning Brigette) can’t stop when it comes to gardening!
We’ve expanded one garden and added two more, and we still have room to grow. Or our plants do anyway.
We’ll be continuing to add plants to our newly established Guest Favorites Garden this year. The garden sits on a slope along the driveway, and the top section is shade, while the bottom section is full sun. We’re filling the Guest Favorites Garden with flowers and shrubs that
our guests love.
So far, the GFG has baby azaleas and a baby quince bush, daffodils, a lovely hydrangea, a barberry bush, a butterfly bush, hostas, coreopsis and
daisies, plus some cool grasses that are going to look like a stream cascading down the center of the top section.
Coreopsis in the Inn on Mill Creek Guest Favorites Garden
Li’l Quince Bush in the Inn on Mill Creek Guest Favorites Garden
This year, we’ll be adding more coreopsis, another butterfly bush, more hostas and some hardscaping to add to our “green stream” and possibly (OK, for sure) more daisies, among other plants. If you have any flowers that you love, let us know and we’ll see about adding them to the GFG.
The former White Garden at the Inn is now in its second year as the new and improved Black and White Garden, containing flowers and shrubs with white/silver or black flowers and foliage. This year, we’ll be crossing our fingers that our black hollyhocks added last year will bloom this year and we’ll also be adding dahlias to that garden and experimenting with annuals and containers to give the garden a different look throughout the year, focusing on summer and fall. We may also relocate the roses in that garden to a spot where they’ll get more sun.
Third on the garden planning list, this year looks to be promising in terms of relocating/replanting our high bush blueberries, which have gotten “shaded out” by the trees nearby that have grown up next to them. To a more sunny spot they will go and more will be added. We’re currently looking at the best location to put our blueberries. And when they are moved, the south lawn beyond the labryinth will be expanded into a more park-like setting, with its mature trees and small stream. We may add some spring flowering trees and shrubs to the mix so that it’s as colorful that time of year as in the fall.
The Labyrinth and South Lawn at the Inn on Mill Creek B&B
Fourth on the list is something we’re really excited about: We’re going to develop a small portion of open land in the Inn on Mill Creek’s apple orchard into a Monarch Butterfly-loving milkweed field with the help of our friends from Hop-n-Blueberry Farm in Black Mountain. We’ll have more on that this spring.
Finally, will 2015 be the year that we add a raised vegetable garden? Stay tuned!