Wow! It all really looks wonderful. :-) Great job.

Love the style of your beds. In contrast mine are "eclectic"? Perhaps "haphazard"?? lol Though I think you and I might be at a similar point in the building process.

It's so neat to see it all grow and change, even as young as it all is at the moment. The picture in my mind of what I think our mature yard will look like one day seems both closer and farther away.

Thanks for sharing. :-)

Holy cow I had no idea boxwood was so easy to propagate! I just counted, I have 116 of them, and none of them were free, lol, I know what I am doing come cooler temps! I recently installed a drip system to everything so it should be easy to keep them watered.

So humid out my camera lens kept fogging up this morning while I tried to get pics of PJPII:

Earth Angels only bloom at the moment(and I have four EA's!)

Love Song hits me one bloom at a time, never see more than that but she seems steady as she goes.

Earth Angel left side bushes in the front middle and left. The one in the back with all the buds? PJPII, of course. LS giving me one bloom on this side as well. Plum Perfect is on the front right.

Heirloom saves itself from shovel prune every time I start thinking about it. I got it as a sickly looking body bag for $2. He's on the front right. Front left is PP. PJPII is the one in the back with all the buds. Say it with me now, 'OF COURSE!' lol Young Lycidas was also a body bag, but he wasn't cheap, and I was desperate for him. He got shovel pruned when he failed to take off after two months. Fortunately he came from a garden center that guarantees their trees and shrubs. The black diamond crapes on the right had all of their blooms devoured by JBs. In one night. Which is beyond a shame because they are bright white and they are glorious surrounded by dark purple foliage.

looks like things are filling in nicely

You have done a wonderful job.

It's already lovely. It will be amazing when everything grows.

Sharon

Enjoyed seeing the transformation. Looks great. You might just need to give things more time to settle in and grow (and for your pocket to recover).

What a ton of work. It really looks great. Your hard work is paying off

I love your garden design and your wonderful, detailed descriptions of what you're doing. It's really helpful to hear about plant failures as well as successes!

I also love boxwood and symmetry. I feel your pain about trying to line everything up and having it be slightly off :) I went through this as well and I could never get it all to quite line up, no matter what I did!

Keep posting updates and progress pics!

Also, in what part of the US are you gardening? and what zone?

Lyla- We could all offer better advice if you at least list your agricultural zone and state since climate conditions have such an impact on roses growth and health.

From almost all our observations here in the rose forum the Kordes roses are a bit slow and don't really hit their stride until about 3 years of age so they really require patience.

I have Kordes Honeymoon and she flowers nicely for a two year old band rose. I live in MA, black spot heaven but some of my Kordes are doing great. Fire Opal flowers almost nonstop in only 5 hours of sun a day in mostly subsoil with just a skim of loam on top. I plant in small holes (it's almost impossible to dig large holes in our rock strewn New England soil) and fill the hole with bagged composted manure or humus. I also sprinkle a generous scoop of mycorrhizal to stimulate root growth. It works extremely well. Honeymoon has had two small flushes this year.

Have you tried any David Austin roses besides Darcy? I have Windermere which flowers well and gets very little to no blackspot and Queen of Sweden which is also very disease resistant. Heritage does well. DA lists disease resistance in his rose descriptions. Darcy is listed as good. Both Windermere and QOS are listed as excellent for disease resistance.

Some Easy Elegance roses do well. I have My Girl a cherry red rose planted in about 4 1/2 hours of sun, crappy soil on the edge of the woods and she is growing like a weed. No black spot at all. Plus she has a nice mild scent, something never mentioned in her description.

Bolero is always in bloom but she does get some black spot but her flowers and scent are exquisite. She's my favorite rose. Julia Child flowers nicely and is disease resistant. Not completely clean but very good.

This year has been awful for fungal disease since it has been wicked muggy but relatively cool so a real test for the roses. We haven't had any JB's but I have rose midge. It seems there's always something to deal with.

Your designs are looking beautiful so far. Have faith. You will find the perfect roses for your lovely garden.

Sharon

I am so bad at getting things in a straight line. Even when I buy a little fence to put around an area I go back about a billion times because it never looks straight . So, good job it looks really nice.

Sharon, you're correct about different zones . Every time my husband mentions maybe moving somewhere else first thing I want to know what zone is it in LOL

Kristine- too funny! I'll stay in Massachusetts. Although PNW looks stunning! Our summers are short, our winters are long, but few tornadoes, few hurricanes, (although we do get some massive snow storms) no poisonous snakes or spiders, beautiful autumns, mountains and oceans within driving distance and every winter I'm still captivated by the magic of a snowfall. I think I'll keep it. :-)

Sharon

Thanks guys, I am on the edge of 7b/8a just south of Charlotte, NC. This summer has been weird with either tons of dry spells and temps in the 90's or days upon days of rain and temps in the 80s.

The side yard that gets full sun is doing great, the gardenia are going nuts, and they bloomed their little hearts out earlier. It was absolute heaven to sit on the porch and read. They still put off the odd bloom here and there. The Eden here is growing like mad but not a single bloom. I have two, one on the fence on the other side of the yard and the one here. The one on the fence will most likely be replaced with quicksilver, it has black spotted something fierce and I think the lilac color will look better there anyways.

Early March

Early April

Early August

This week(eden)

Sharon, it sounds heavenly. I had a woman on tour from the Catskill Mountains and the way she described it it sounded pretty nice as well.

But here's the thing , no matter how beautiful another state is this is where all my grandchildren and great-grandchildren live so here I shall stay good thing I like Zone 8

Kristine- Much of new York state is gorgeous with the mountains and the farmland . We've been to the Catskills several times. It's under 4 hours from here. But like you all our kids and grandkids are here within a 40 minute ride and I could never leave them behind. We won't even let any of them move away! The setting for our home is beautiful. We only have an acre but back onto probably 500 acres of woods, have a swamp as one boundary and another swamp across the road. Our road is 1/2 mile long but has only 10 houses scattered down the length of it. It's very quiet and beautiful in the fall and especially in winter when it snows. It definitely would be too difficult to leave all that behind. Although I could possibly do it for oceanfront ;-) (not that we could *ever* afford *that*!)

Sharon

Sharon, that really sounds idylic.

Krisitine- it really is. We are out in the country but only 15 minutes from Worcester and about an hour from Boston, if the traffic isn't nutty, so we have the best of both worlds. Country living without truly being in the boonies like in some of the larger states. I have a friend in SC who travels to visit her kids who live in SC but are 5 hours away! We can almost drive through every New England state in 5 hours. If my kids lived five hours away in New England we'd be in Quebec!! Unless they lived in Maine, which is huge compared to all the other NE states. We are truly blessed.

Lyla , I absolutely love all you have done!! I have come back to your photos a few times . Your energy for your garden is obvious and contagious! How do you get your lines so strait in your beds? I'm like Kristine, horrible at strait lines and pretty much wing it all the time so things are rarely perfect .

My eden is so annoying too. It finally got some height and is black spot at the bottom but does have one bud on it ! Still though .. ugh. Waste of 3 years .

You should be so proud of all the hard work you put in! I hope your husband appreciate it too. Mine sounds similar, dosnt understand why the roses I have aren't enough. Oh well all the decisions are mine and I like that

Lily- my husband doesn't care what I do as long as he has to help as little as necessary. So total control of decisions here too :-)

Oh yes enchanted rose- he is so not into helping! Which is ok by me! Just hand me the credit card and step aside . Get back to golf and football ;)

Lilyfinch, to be honest I wing it as far as the lines of the beds. I use an edger shovel and eyeball it. I want to be outside right now cleaning up edges and getting rid of sod by the fence but I injured my ankle at crossfit yesterday and I am beyond annoyed with myself. I had tweaked it Monday but Tuesday it felt fine, yesterday I did a bunch of skaters and boom! My ankle told me it was very angry. Sigh. The weather was gorgeous yesterday in the mid seventies so I sat on the porch and daydreamed about the changes I want to make. I REALLY want to find the black and white anemone corms for sale but the only place I can find online that sells them to anyone has been sold out for months on end.

I find the hardest part of gardening to be restraining myself. I ADORE formal English gardens which are so full of boxwoods and single varieties planted in multitudes but then I also want a cutting garden with all kinds of blue-based reds and purples and whites and pinks.

The other side of the house by the AC unit has morning sun until noon and then afternoon shade, perfect for my hydrangea obsession. Unfortunately the ac units drain so much water that it floods the bed, I rigged up a hose to pipe it away into the grass but not until I realized how bad it was, AFTER my hydrangea all got terrible blackspot, which is pretty rare on a hydrangea. They are recovering slowly. The five hydrangea here in early April are blushing brides. The Japanese Maple was $5 from Lowe's, it had frost damage from a late frost after things had leafed out so I snatched it up because I adore coral barked Japanese Maples.

I didn't take many pics of this area, I thought I had but I just checked and no such luck. Here is a close-up of one of the blushing bride's from June

And now, they had been so full and covered in blooms but the added water just wrecked them. The rose on the left is about twenty years old, and don't tell anyone, but I kind of hate it. My old co-worker gave it to me because it wasn't happy in her yard, she wasn't sure what variety it is, some sort of David Austin. While it blooms regularly for me, the blooms don't smell like anything and they fall apart within a day, and they are only about an two-three inches wide or less. Meh.

I have a pretty meh peach colored rose. It may have to be relocated to a lesser spot. Right now it is in the front yard in prime real estate. It holds its blooms but the bloom is small. Like I said, meh.

I love hydrangeas too. They do really well in the PNW. My white one is finally blooming. Yay