Unplanned plant purchases

Today we went to the Indianapolis Museum of Art gardens to enjoy the nice weather. And it was lovely. I walked around the gardens taking pictures of the names of various plants that were planted in areas that seemed to have similar lighting conditions to areas of our yard, mostly shaded to part sun. I'll save those for another post someday as they aren't too terribly exciting. But what is exciting is that we purchased some plants today! This was entirely unplanned. We ventured into the plant store that they have on the grounds and we couldn't resist purchasing some. Then since we needed some potting soil, we stopped at another gardening shop on the way home, and of course I couldn't help myself again and purchased even more. I don't have photos of all of the tags of the plants yet, but here's a photo of them:

New plants!

A total of 15 - better keep me away from plant stores or we'll go broke rather quickly.

I do, however, have plans for the majority of them. Most of them will end up in small garden that we are planting in memory of our son who died at birth in a miscarriage earlier this year. The spot we chose for this garden is next to the deck in the back yard. It's a shady location that gets an hour or two of direct sun a day, thus most of the plants we purchased are shade tolerant or partial sun. I like them. There's something about shade loving plants. They just seem more peaceful to me for some reason and I think for the purposes of this garden that is fitting as there was nothing more peaceful than looking into the eyes of our son. We named him Calum Saul - Calum meaning "resembling a dove" and Saul meaning "one who was prayed for". One of the plants I found is called "Praying Hands" Hosta and I just had to get it - the leaves of the plant are folded upward together and I guess someone thought that looks like praying hands - I don't know if I really see that, but I got it for the name anyway. We also got a couple of bleeding hearts - one that has red and white flowers and another that are all white.

Other than the plants for the memorial garden, I also got some annuals for our patio that I'll put in a pot (the yellow and orange flowers on the right in the photo). I don't remember what they're called.

So when we got home, the work began. The future Calum Memorial Garden is currently home to a large hosta and an intermingled mess of pachysandra and lily of the valley. He's a "before" photo:

Future Calum Memorial Garden location.

This is also the location where I planted the phlox last year. I'll be transplanting that very soon to a more sunny location.

We began by carefully digging up and separating the pachysandra and lily of the valley. And you heard me right - I said "we" - I am overjoyed to say that my wife decided to join me in this project! It was wonderful having her out there with me and I told her that she looks like a natural gardener. I'm hoping that this is the beginning of a shared love for gardening!

Once we had dug them all up, my wife began the task of transplanting some of the pachysandra to a couple other areas of it in our yard that were sparse. We're hoping that it survives and eventually fills in those areas. We still have quite a bit of it left and of course there's also the pile of lily of the valley plants. I'm not sure if we'll try to transplant those somewhere else or not. We obviously didn't get to it today, so we may lose our opportunity anyway.

While she was planting the pachysandra, I dug up the hosta and moved it to the north side of the house. I ended up splitting it in two and replanting it in two spots there. I have plans to create a walkway through  for that area connecting the front and back yard. My idea is to fill the area with shade loving plants (the area is full shade) and there are already a number of hostas planted there. We'll see if the new hostas are able to get re-established there. The soil is very compacted and contains a good amount of clay and roots from nearby trees. It was difficult to dig the holes.

So after a good day's work, the Calum Memorial Garden is almost ready for planting. The only things left are to transplant phlox and possibly the other hosta (in the upper right of the photo). I noticed that I forgot to purchase some forget-me-nots (the irony...), so I need to remember to plan a spot for those in the garden once we get to planting it; if the weather isn't too rainy, we should be able to do that tomorrow!