The Carriage House Court Yard
200?
The Carriage House Court Yard
May 2009
The Carriage House Court Yard
July 2009
This carriage house turned Inn is the heart of the Goodstone. The beautifully restored building houses 4 luxurious suites, a main "living room" where guests are received and tea is held every day at 3pm, the dining room and kitchen where the chefs turn our local bounty into an amazing adventure for the palate and finally our office~the brains of the operation. Although much is happening in this building at any point in time, it always appears to be serene.
The Carriage House Court Yard has had many looks through out the years. This spring we changed the water feature from a fountain to a pond. I was itching all spring to redo the gardens in the Court Yard but I didn't want to disrupt the Tulips so I had to wait !
These Korean boxwood had been looking sad for about a year and I felt they had over grown their spot. I have a vision of the court yard being a lush and fragrant English style tea garden. So this spring I ordered some new bones and waited for the perfect time to give the court yard a make over!
Diggs Loves the pond too!
The existing structure of the court yard garden is great! The shape is fun to work with, it's protected from the elements and from deer and it has a lot of natural charm! There are large clematis that are gorgeous all year around and a mature Crepe Myrtle in each corner that lend structure and shade. I love the bare shape of them in the winter too!
Finally the perfect day came! It was a rainy morning late in June and all the plant material was in so we went for it !
Out with the old!
Don't worry the old bushes were put to good use in empty other spots!
Above: Armando, my right arm, removes the old shrubs. The cool, rainy weather insured that we would have success in our planting and transplanting ventures.
Once our palette is clear, we lay out the plants and prep the area for planting. I use Espoma Greensand and Plant Tone when installing new plantings. A shovel full of each is worked into the soil before the hole is dug to make sure that the soil is fully amended. The Planting begins and it usually goes pretty fast!
Before we even realized it the transformation had occurred! Instantly the court yard had an entirely different feel! Out came 12 large Korean Boxwood and in went 8 Green Mountain Boxwood, 4 White Knock Out Roses, 4 Vardar valley Boxwood and 12 Sweet Box. All of the echinacea, primrose, ajuga, thyme and tulip bulbs were existing from last year's make over and were just rearranged to fit the new bones! I say bones because they are the structure of the garden. The bones are what is left to look at in the winter when all of the vegetation has vanished!
This is the first phase of the transformation from grass and stone court yard to lush and fragrant English style tea garden! The boxwood, knock out roses and sweet box delineate the boundaries of this garden and stay a beautiful dark evergreen all year around to create a lush feel even in the debt of winter.
Above: 6 Sweet Box ~Sarcocca confusa and 2 Buxus 'Green Mountain' line the path to the Stallion Suite
The evergreen shrubs anchor the stone work and create another dimension to the space.
After the change in vegetation the benches looked out of place to me and it took me a while to figure out why!
Finally I realized that they needed a make over too! Douglas our wonderfully handy maintenance man stained the benches and I gave them a little rearrange and viola' we have a whole new court yard !
The red grass plumes and the furthest crepe myrtle branches lend a small amount of badly needed shade to our little pond!
I love these glazed terra cotta bowl ponds. I came across this one at my sister Morgan's nursery, Gardens of Delight and I knew immediately that it was perfect for our Court Yard. This little pond houses 4 gold fish, 4 black snails, 3 tad poles, water lettuce, water hyacinth, anarchis and a Texas gold medal water lily that blooms yellow and smells amazing!
I love ponds, I feel they add the sense of a whole other living world to a space as opposed to a fountain which is just an eternal trickle.
Hopefully by spring we will be starting on the next phase!
The Garden is never finished !
