Finally, I got some free time to clean up the backyard. The backyard is actually very small. It has only the basement entrance, which I wrote about recently, my new onion/lettuce bed, and a retaining wall area which, no matter how much I try can’t get an actual theme or a purpose other than being a retaining wall.

Last year I cleaned this whole area, added a tile border, and planted new plants wanting to make a rock garden. I thought this would work well since this side drains really fast, the soil is mixed with rocks and bricks, and the sun burns it fairly easily. Well, I can now say that this plan fell to bits.

In the place of the tile border is now my new onion bed and most of the plants which I bought last year did not survive the winter. Although all of them were frost-resistant I’m guessing the drought killed them and since this year April was very warm all of my old plants reappeared and the garden turned back to wild/meadow looking. I tried to make a meadow-style garden a few years back, but due to the drought and extreme winters, the plants I’ve sown and planted just wouldn’t grow so I thought I’d try something else.

One of the plants that I wanted to grow was Hesperis Matronalis aka Sweet rocket. Although, this is in some countries considered an invasive plant, here it is not native and we don’t have them in the gardens. I was ecstatic when I managed to grow it in my garden, and it started actually spreading around. I thought I have achieved my plan of covering the area with a purple beauty, only to be disappointed when every year I got fewer and fewer plants until eventually last year they were growing in just one small area, and I had only a couple of plants. This is why I gave up on them and went with finding a different garden style.

But as always, the retaining wall had other ideas in its mind, and this year Dame’s rocket is back and stronger than ever. The plants are everywhere. The whole wall smells of them, which is a surprise considering that both Black locust and elderberry are in full bloom, but still, you can smell them every evening. I even had to cut some of them off while I was trimming the path on the top of the wall to get to other plants. 

The other two plants that went bonkers this year are Weigela and Periwinkle. They have both been in this spot for a decade, both just grew in the same area without spreading for years, and I was already finding a way to fill the holes around them. This year they both went insane, both grew twice in size in just one spring, and both are starting to cover even the parts where they never grew before. 

Now I have plants tangled up in Periwinkles and other plants just hiding under the big Weigela bush. It’s just amazing how desperate my garden was for the spring warmth. Our summers are very warm, with temperatures over 35°C (95°F), but the plants were desperate for that early boost of warmth in April and May. 

The one plant that is not happy with the conditions we’ve been having is Hydrangea. The plant dried completely this winter, and not just mine. The plants in neighbors’ yards also dried. There’s not a single plant that has survived this winter. Yes, conditions were bad for them here before, we had to water them constantly, and they never formed big bushes, but still, they survived. This year they just couldn’t cope. Luckily the roots are starting to grow baby branches so the plant didn’t die completely, but it was badly damaged. The funny thing is that only 15km away, on the other side of the mountain hydrangeas grow like mad, there are whole walls made of them and some can reach over 3m tall, but here is not the case.

So what will I do with my retaining wall? Nothing. I have no idea what to do, I’ve cleaned all the weeds off, and I’ve let every single plant grow as it wishes. Maybe the Periwinkles will spread all the way to weigela and the dame’s rocket will cover the second part and I won’t need any new plants. Or with my luck maybe even the Columbines, which were here before, will miraculously appear again. I can’t really know, the only thing I know is that this part of the garden has its own mind and won’t take any suggestions from me.