Landscaping procrastination

As usual, I began the landscaping season with good intentions, not all of which have come to fruition. The area behind the mailbox (you know, the one that attracts ants) had a low-growing juniper (or some such evergreen, I forget) that I planted last year, but it had mostly died back, and then the nice retired neighbor, who mows my lawn because "it's really no trouble" when he does his, apparently missed seeing the miniscule remaining green portion (not surprising, considering how dead the whole thing looked) and mowed over it, effectively eliminating any possibility of it recovering.

So I bought a bunch of annuals for the little plot – bright red salvia, plus white and deep blue/purple petunias (because I missed the pansy season) – and actually got them in the ground within a couple of weeks, which is pretty good for me; my annuals have been known to sit there in their flimsy plastic Home Depot containers right through the summer or until they die, which is their likely fate when I fail to keep them sufficiently watered in the typical scorching Hampton Roads July weather. And then I arranged a border of small retaining wall blocks around them and dumped a few inches of mulch into the bed.

With the block border ensuring (well, at least I hope so) that neighbors wielding errant lawn mowers won't just inadvertently mow down the greenery, I picked up a new juniper that's a little more upright/mounded than the previous incumbent, and stashed it (in the pot) temporarily behind the Cryptomeria I planted by the corner of the garage a couple of years back (which is doing pretty nicely, by the way). You can see the juniper in the photo at left, the little lighter green one in the pot with the tag still attached, peeking out from behind the cryptomeria.

That was, oh, a couple of months ago. And then it suddenly got too hot for me to have any ambition to work in the yard. The juniper's still sitting in the pot behind the cryptomeria. Despite watering, the petunias died off, first the blue/purple ones, then the white ones. (As you can see from the photos, I didn't get a shot of them before they croaked.) The salvia's hanging on, but it's now surrounded by a wild assortment of weeds that are doing very well, thank you very much (why couldn't the petunias have done so well?).

Got to get out there and take out that unidentified "volunteer" shrub before it shades out the salvia. Yes, it really is about twice the size of the salvia clump. Since my post two days ago, the first I tagged "procrastination", I'm discovering that I should have had that tag long ago. In fact, one of these days, I may even get around to going back and tagging some old posts as "procrastination" posts.