Spring Landscaping Project 1: Musical Trees

Big doin's this season in the backyard! We started out by cutting out and grinding a bunch of stumps around the house, and were then able to plant an ash tree in the back corner where we cut down a hackberry (which will eventually provide shade, although now, not so much), and in one of the side-yards we cut out some kind of smelly flowering tree that was right up next to the house (and whose stinky blooms were right outside the study windows) and put in a young Mexican redbud that I bought at the Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center. Our tree cutters came back and cut down a huge hackberry in another corner of the backyard (hackberries suck--people plant them b/c they grow fast, but they are very weak trees and messy), and another "trash" tree in the backyard, a "silk tree" also called a mimosa, although it's not really. The plan was to basically replace it with a Mexican Plum (white blooms) that I bought our first year here, and after the loss of the hackberry is in too much sun. Here's the original set-up:

Had to move the other end of my clothesline, which the young plum tree couldn't handle yet, but this is much better in every way. Mimosas actually want more sun than that one was getting and it was all stretching out to one side, but now the plum tree will be a pretty understory tree that will be sheltered from the summer sun by our pecan tree. The guys who cut down the other trees helped me transplant this one, and they had also brought (the trip before) a pick-up truck bed full of fieldstones that I had already started setting out when they came back to take out a stump and transplant the plum tree:

As I think I might have stated before/elsewhere, the grand scheme of this project is to reduce the lawn area of the yard to an oblong in the middle surrounded by flower beds and plain mulched area filling in the entire edge and corners of the yard. I've been well on the way toward this by putting in discrete beds and borders in former seasons, and putting out the wildflower seed last year that has filled in a big strip along the road-side of the yard, but I wanted something cohesive--and in the outer corners, pretty but xeric (to non-gardenders that is heat and drought tolerant). PLUS, putting down landscape tarp under the mulch will, HOPEFULLY, help to stem the tide of that tenacious trumpet creeper vine, that I have been battling for almost three years and is STILL coming up from a huge network of roots in the ground along the edge of the yard.

Thus moving the plum tree out of the middle of the yard into an area that I wanted to turn into mulched paths helped build on this idea, but I also wanted a little flower bed around the tree. Transplanted trees need a lot of water, so instead of just watering a bunch of mulch, why not some plants around it, eh? And...well, NOT like I need many excuses for new flower beds! So I improved the area around the tree, put in a low rock wall around it, and set some really big flagstones in the ground to support a cool new garden bench I got (along with that bistro set for the back patio). This side view shows the size of the little flower bed:

Into this bed I transplanted a bunch of purple irises from the rose/herb garden, a couple white daylilies from a bed in the front yard (one was a big clump so I divided to spread it out), and some lamb's ears from a bed in the back yard (lamb's ears HATE to be transplanted, so I'm still coddling them). The theme is purple/lavender and white, so I added a purple-flowered creeping veronica in one of the "horns" to the side of the bench, and one of the LBJ Wildflower Ctr purchases Wooly Stemodia and Barbara's Buttons on the other side (both of those have white flowers and silvery foliage like the lamb's ears). Also from LBJWC I put in a Chocolate Daisy, which has cheery little yellow daisy-like flowers that smell kinda like a chocolate milkshake. The yellow is a bit off message, I suppose, but it goes just fine with purple in color theory and the foliage is silvery. To round it out I also put in Walmart-purchased lavender scabiosa (butterflies love) and honey-scented purple-flowered heliotrope. The latter is an annual, but I've been able to buy it every year--I love the smell and so do the bees and butterflies! We'll have to wait until next season to get the full effect of the garden bed in bloom, but here's the finished product, including some solar-powered lamps: