A Phlox on this House

This weekend we rid ourselves of the last vestiges of the overgrown front gardens we got with the house. This patch here, made up of what I discovered later is called Japanese Spurge, as well as some English Ivy and Creeping Myrtle, has mostly stayed put since we cleared the rest of the garden patch last fall, but it was still an eyesore. And the ivy kept creeping, as ivy does, up our oak tree, so keeping it off the trunk was a constant battle. But not any more...

 Fast forward about two hours and this is the new view:

It took longer than I expected, because even though the spurge came out fairly easily, it turned out that the overgrowth was home to dozens--if not hundreds--of baby oak trees. They were rooted deep and it took a lot of shoveling and pulling to get them out of the ground (I almost named this post something like Baby Killer but figured that might attract the wrong kind of readers).

Finally with everything cleared away, it was off to Home Depot for some new plants. Ever since a helpful reader identified the cute little flowers in this post, I knew that phlox was the way to go. It will spread but it doesn't root so deeply that I'll be back in the same boat in a few years with hours of wearying labor. Plus it's much lower to the ground than the spurge (if ground cover is so high that small things like tennis balls can get lost in there, then they're too high). And it flowers, so it's even colorful for a few weeks of the year.

I also tried an experiment and bought some German thyme for around the tree, because it's also a nice low-lying plant. Here's what they looked like all spaced out and ready for planting--3 pots of thyme and 8 of phox. I have some pink and some purple phlox, so I tried to space them out so they'll blend together as they eventually speed out. The recommended spacing is 20'' in between to give them room to grow outwards. Hope they spread quickly...

One hour more and ta-dah! planted and mulched. I split the thyme plants into 3 so that there are 9 ringing the tree.

A particularly funny moment occurred at Home Depot when I noticed one rack in the garden center selling ground cover plants: English Ivy, Creeping Myrtle, and Japanese Spurge (that's how I learned what it was called). You mean people buy this stuff?!!!

I also came home with this pretty new addition:

I WILL have my climbing vine, I tell you. The first year, I tried jasmine. Last year, I tried sweet pea seeds followed by clematis. This year, I'm back to clematis. I thought that with the liriope finally gone and after our hard work with compost and soil conditioning, this poor little guy might actually stand a chance, unlike the last few attempts. Keep your fingers crossed!