Leaves and an exposed wall

My gardening companion has been busy. The snow has melted and the temperatures moderated, so he's been busy rooting up English ivy (and removing it from a stone retaining wall on the edge of our landscape in the mountains).  It's not a bad stone wall at all, built with decent looking rocks, with just a bit of rubble and concrete supporting the parking lot for the adjacent apartment building.  I haven't been much help, with a troublesome finger making heavy pulling and clipping not such a great idea.

The bags of leaves, saved this fall, proved useful for additional mulching down the slope. We're both envisioning woodland wildflowers to accompany the trees and shrubs already planted. 

So the transformation from weedy forested ravine to native forested ravine continues...

Native plants and natural gardening

I visited two great gardens this morning, one public and one private. This post is about the public one.

I first visited North Carolina Botanical Garden about 25 years ago. It was fabulous then (and I've been a member ever since). Their mission, promoting native plants of the Southeast, and being a conservation garden, is essential to preserving and restoring our native plant communities.

They provide a garden vision that I (and my gardening companion) have embraced: trying to create a sense of place in our garden that reflects our native plants and their habitats.

It was wonderful to return and see the Coastal Plain Habitat Garden in its fall glory. Based on a plant rescue, this habitat garden has been burned periodically, and is a wonderful reflection of what our coastal plain habitats are like, when relatively undisturbed by human activity.

The pitcher plant bog habitats, in new raised stone beds were spectacular.

The borders were lovely, too.