March Garden Tour!! | Front Yard of My Carolina Garden

Welcome to my March garden tour of the front yard of My Carolina Garden!! It’ll be nice to give you this view of things beginning to sprout and colors beginning to show up to compare it to how things look in the Summer.

We’ll walk my front yard gardens, show what looks good and bad, and some new plants I’ll be adding to jazz up the landscape.

My name is Nicole Roggeman, and My Carolina Garden is located in growing zone 8B in coastal North Carolina. Stick with me for more gardening inspiration, planting tips, greenhouse chats, and garden tours!!

#SpringGardening #gardentour

welcome to my front yard garden tour for the month of March now this is going to be good and interesting because yes a lot of things are waking up not tons of cleanup has been done at this point and we are not at a spot where everything is just beautiful and awesome no mulch has been added at this stage no edging has been done to make those lines as crisp as I love them but things are starting to become colorful and there are definitely things to point out so let’s learn a lot as we walk around the front yard Garden today hi you guys this is Nicole from my Carolina Garden my garden is located in growing zone 8B and I am in Southeastern North Carolina we are going to start right up here near my front pathway as it leads up to my front porch so I can show you some of the things that are waking up but how they look kind of scraggly coming out of winter one plant that I want to talk about is the Lemon Coral Sedum I talk about it a lot because it’s very easy to grow now it’s a semi my evergreen because yes you can see some of this like lime green yellow color even during the cold months of the year but I wanted to show you how scraggly it can get in the winter I have a lot of empty spaces or I have a lot of legs on some of these pieces and it’s not like overly desirable so essentially I would say some parts that are really heaping and kind of like a mounding style perennial that’s awesome that’s the way I like it that’s the way I want it to look but if I do have scraggler or leggy pieces I’m just going to cut those back cut them back even if it’s with my hands it doesn’t really matter I’m not overly particular about this this stuff is super duper duper duper easy to root so I could drop it even back to the ground and maybe those pieces I just broke off are going to root again so ideally this is going to look like a beautiful kind of lime green blanket here right by my walk way and then as we step just a smidgen back this trailing verba that is giving us these hot pink blooms this trailer right here like let’s call this a leg I could bury this piece here any one of these legs and get it to re-root again which means it’s just going to sprout the plant from where it’s rooting and then take off from there why would I want to do that when I’m already getting these beautiful legs with the beautiful colored blooms well that would be for dividing purposes if I want to re-root this spot so that I can then chop it off of the parent plant and move it somewhere else I can do that here’s another example of something I’m going to cut off of this plant it is get extending its legs so far that it’s actually coming up here through this Nandina bush now I see I have some buds on the the plant right here so I don’t want to cut that off entirely and lose it but if I don’t have Roots close to the bottom of the Nandina so I can separate this plant I’m going to make it root so I can separate it and actually just take this piece of plant and put it somewhere else entirely but yes verb coming back like this with beautiful color early on when it’s still chilly out is awesome I like the idea of having some sort of plant as like a border plant along the edging of my flower beds now I am very particular about keeping a c blind at the end and I know everybody’s different some people use like rocks or bricks or something as an edge I just like a clearly defined line which I will be fixing up here this Lop or lopy however you want to say it was meant to be a plant like that that kind of kept going around the front of my flower beds but it was small when I put it in the ground so then last year I had added these dianthus which are supposed to be a an annual plant you can see some buds coming up on here I like dianthus I talk about it a lot actually how much I like it dianthus can be like even carnations some people call them pinks it’s got a bunch of different names because there are a bunch of varieties of it but the thing I discovered last year is I don’t like this particular plant as my border plant it was not very showy it didn’t Bloom continually so you have to really keep up with deadheading and of course you know taking off the brown pieces of dead foliage and things like that so not my favorite border plant but if I move this somewhere else and maybe Bunch it up into a bigger section that might be more beneficial but this lorii right here or lope as I said you can see this is the new fresh growth coming out for this year so it begins to just look like this I sometimes snip off all the old growth sometimes I don’t and I just kind of let it Mound over I’ve done both it doesn’t seem to affect how much New Growth I get at all so it’s just probably a style choice if you want to get all these oldies off to give the front yard garden bed some fall interest I had planted the decorative cabbage and even some beautiful pink moms over here both of them looked awesome in the fall but this is now kind of awkward we have a very long stem with some other cabbages coming out of it Etc I may just chop this down see if I could just re-root this head elsewhere see what happens over here I’m kind of up in the air about it but a decorative cabbage is not an overly expensive plant it’s generally used as an annual anyway so if I remove it completely that would be fine too but I am impressed with the color it’s kept and also how kind of just healthy it looks even right now so my DIY garden easel that I can just change the flower arrangements out seasonally is still here looking great with the violas and it’s going to stay that way for a little bit yet as we come around the corner I have the Weeping yaon Holly big fan of this plant it’s taken a lot of abuse from different tropical storms and hurricanes and it has just been amazing how it keeps coming back and back these gardinas I’m only so so about I think they’re about a year old maybe a year and a half old they’re okay not my favorite I wish I picked something different for this spot I don’t know if they get too much sun or what but they’re only okay and then traveling in this direction you’ve recently seen me kind of rework this space over here first of all my Laura pedum Hedges uh love these Fringe flowers They’re fuchsia Chinese fringe flowers boxwood does amazing there those guys are original plantings that the Builder actually provided us on this property when we moved in 10 years ago and then this is the bed that was completely reworked so we have some irises that are going to bloom later on of course this is more of that it’s the same exact kind of dianthus that I showed you in the front there but because these are new plants from this year that’s why they’re full of flowers at this stage but again imagine these clumping all together giving us a beautiful sea of color I love that idea all of these plants like the dusty miller right there is the next line toward the back they’re going to gain a lot of size this growing season and then of course I can’t say enough Wonder ful things about my Kilmer knock Willow that I recently found out is actually named from a place in Scotland which I love my family and I visited Scotland last year we had an amazing time so it holds a special place in our heart so that just made this weeping tree even more glorious to me so the flower bed with the Kilmer knock Willow is just to my left this flower bed here is the peninsula Garden we have quite a bit of lawn in between the two flower beds that ideally is going to shrink over time now typically what I love to do is if I have a flower bed that has a clear front and a clear back I like to have tall things growing in the back and then shorter things growing in the front the peninsula Garden however since you’re going to be able to walk around it on three sides it’s a little bit of a mixed bag I have all of my decorative grasses in the middle which get quite tall I shouldn’t say middle but this kind of level right here this layer and then I’m building out with some shorter plants coming this way again with the walking path between Kilmer knock Willow area and this flower bed being right here so the lower things that I have growing I have some artemesia which I just recently cut back some of its leggy branches and dead foliage I have more dianthus over here again a different style cuz I just love it and we’re so we’re sticking with some lower growth I have a lot of different varieties of things here here like I have um some Dalia going on that there’s nothing to see just yet because that’s a summer flower but I have all sorts of things that over time we’re going to look at more color more Beauty and it’s just not showing yet so the peninsula Garden starts out with having the golden sword yucka I go to a CRP Myrtle and then this bit of beautiful fresh Greenery is the dayes so these dayes are all orange I believe and they spread very very very EAS easily so I divide those and move them into multiple parts of the yard all the time I have a ton of cone flowers in this section these being blackeyed Susans and this being some eonia the eonia is going to start blooming first it’s already getting some fresh foliage on it and I just got to do some cleaning up of the blackeyed Susan’s there moving in this direction I am going to have a ton of different kinds of plants in here I have Primrose evening Prim Rose that’s yellow Twilight Prim Rose which is pink I have mums I have blanket flowers I have hearty hibiscus a lot of things that just don’t look like much right now this is one of my decorative decorative cabbages from last year that I did take the top off so I can use it in one of my container Arrangements on the front porch we’re going to see if this does anything besides sprouting more around the outside and again if it needs to come out of the ground it does no biggie I have plants that are going to be new newly added into the front Gardens though I’m not sure if it’ll be here in the peninsula Garden which gets quite full of some of these things they get really big but I have some gorgeous colius that not only is great as colorful foliage that now can tolerate some sun but you can propagate these plants so easily just by breaking off part of the stem or I should say cutting off part of the stem rooting it in water and going for from there so I fully intend to use this colius to make many more plants of it but besides that just some other little goodies that I want to share with you are this is the gra Grace Ward lithodora the blue and the yellow of the coreopsis I love together because of sort of a complimentary color pairing purple and yellow are actually complimentary colors but you know the cool and the warm together I’m all about that so these are things I’m looking to add into the landscape in the very very near future all of these things by the way are on sale and that’s of course my favorite some goodies that are actually springing to life and you can see it are that trailing vervana with a lot of purple blooms on it that was just a small little cutting I got from my neighbors now really spreading out that is something I’m probably going to divide up as well cuz it really is taking up a lot of space at this point and then this I have a pin cushion flower starting right here you can really just see one bud that’s standing up tall but I have a couple others that are still low here’s the thing about me I had not been very good about planting in Mass groupings or in drifts that is something I told you I want to Chang this year because I want more impact in the garden so I think maybe while the pin cushion flowers are also on sale at the Garden Center I need to just buy a few more so I have a beautiful grouping and then you’ll be able to see lots of little purple blooms another thing I wanted to show you is right here I have a Denver Daisy Rudbeckia which is one of my favorite rud beas cuz it’s multicolored and has Big Bloom heads on it well that is showing me some foliage right now at a time when like I we just saw not a lot of the cone flowers have fresh foliage this is another example right in front of me cone flowers nothing new and fresh on it just yet so clearly I have a lot of clearing out to do of weeds and things like that I mean you can see some weed right around these Canales the Canales are just starting to sprout up some fresh green growth just cuz it’s been a little bit more mild lately but what I wanted to actually show you here was this plant right here which is a guara crimson butterflies Gua this plant is super cool because it’s got like this nice red and green colored foliage but then the flowers actually stand up tall on these little tiny wisps up here and they look like pink butterflies sparkling over thep top well what’s neat and what’s happening is this is self-seeding so I now have some other pieces of it like right here and I’m going to show you a bigger piece of it that direction and that is fun you get more bang for your buck when you get plants that want to self seed like that as you can see my magnolia tree has lots of pollen on its foliage we have pollen everywhere right now the magnolia tree is sort of the anchor to the peninsula Garden that juts out that way way everything coming this way along the fence line is my favorite what I refer to as my Island of Misfit Toys or my garden of Mis of Misfit plants so everything in this direction was either given to me through a garden share is a clearance plant is a division of a perennial of my own or something like that so it’s kind of that place where you put all the plants where you don’t really know where else they should go right now becomes a hodg Podge but sort of a beautiful one so lots of work is going to be done in this Garden this year but I wanted to show you the very front this is that Gora volunteer a little baby came right out of the seeds from the last Gua I was showing you so it’s cool again multiple Volunteers in this Garden so we’re just going to walk and talk as we walk down the fence line here I obviously have to get my drip irrigation tube buried under the dirt instead of letting it be shown like that which is awful this right here is tiger lies these tiger lies have like almost like onion grass the little tiny bulbous roots that just start dropping and moving everywhere throughout when it rains it helps these things to move inside the soil when the soil temperature changes these things move and shift under the ground so I’m going to have to kind of neaten up all these Tiger Lily roots and kind of mayy plants here just to make it more showy more grouped better grouped what’s interesting in wild about this Lop right here again I was trying to make the Lop be the edging to all my flower beds still looking scr scraggly right now this is all the Tiger Lily in here as well so it really just got mixed up I’m going to have to untangle those babies so they can both perform these are my junipers planted in the fall got them on a clearance sale last year the idea here is we need to stop this erosion that’s happening as it’s going down into to our drainage ditch so we’re looking for things that are like ground covery to fill in our space lemon Coral Sedum is another one it can be a great ground cover you just got to keep it cleaned up trim off the leggy edges and let it kind of bush up so that’s the idea that’s happening over there I have bits of the creeping Moss flocks in a few different spots they were just pieces that were moved around the yard as well so all of these flocks right here the idea on all of them is to spread out be Ground Covers let me have to buy less mulch for my flower beds but also really have their Roots hold in the soil so we don’t have so much of an erosion problem knockout roses these were planted in the backyard I transplanted them last year that is a piece of one that’s growing into its very own shrub and then of course this one is clearly much bigger so I’m going to have some beautiful pink flowers on this in not too long from now and then at this point a bunch of blank spaces because I need to fill it all in very much a work in progress out here but it is one of the things that’s top on my to-do list for this year because well all my neighbors drive by on the road and can see this and this is not the best display of my gardening talents so I really want to fix this space up and make it look awesome this year so fun things are sprouting to life right now I have my hostas are all coming up which leads me to say now is actually or early spring is a great time to divide up your hostas once you can see those Nubs starting to come up out of the ground it makes it so much nicer to divide the plant up and it’s a lot easier than when it is fully leafed out and you could potentially damage your leaves so that was just a little tidbit I thought of but I’m looking forward to actually utilizing this great weather that we’re having to fix up my Gardens get rid of some of the weeds get rid of more dead foliage and start planting some more colorful things hopefully you enjoyed seeing this kind of before shot before the gardening season fully gets underway and seeing all the changes then that are going to be happening every single month as we do a tour moving forward I appreciate you all I appreciate your comments and your love and until next time happy planting