E-Z Garden Path

The northern side of my house has been rather unuseful since I moved to my house a few years ago. It's shaded, and kinda dry due to the eaves, plus it had a fence (not a gate) cutting through it so you couldn't traverse from front yard to back from that side. I tried planting various shade-loving plants in the beds under the eaves, but they all clung on as long as they could before shrivelling up by summer. Those plants miraculously came back each spring, only to die again a few months later.

I took pity on these plants and moved them to a shady spot that gets more rain, so now they stand a chance of making it.

But this didn't solve the problem of what to do with the northern side of the house. I'm a firm believer in things being useful. If they're not useful, then what's the point? So I removed the weird fence that cut that side of the house off and this Monday I put in a really simple path.

Here's what we started out with:



It really was that messy. But it does kinda remind me of those before and after photos of people where the before shows them in black & white, frowning, pasty and with bad posture -- and in the after-photo they're so tan they're orange, smiling with perfect posture. Ha!

I got some landscaping fabric and rolled it out:



And then spread bark on top. Note that this is one of the few Ingy-approved uses for bark. When I moved into my house, the previous owners had spread bark EVERYWHERE. I had to move bark around in order to plant things and give them space to grow. Bark cuts down on weeds but it also cuts down on allowing plants room to freaki' grow. Good for paths and plants that like decomposing wood, bad for everything else.

Here's the almost-end product:



Complete with cute climbing hydrangea and arch. Yay.

Next steps are to fill in the under-eave beds with river rock, and to plant native, shade-loving salal along the side of the path: