During the torrential rain we had in June, I noticed that we had a little stream appear in our backyard. The water flowed out between those two big rocks in the photo above. Inspiration hit, and I decided to make a dry river bed that followed that stream. It would make a great focal point in an area of our yard that is currently very unattractive. The previous owner had built a small berm on our property line, and added to it when he was fixing the drainage at his shed. It is just a pile of broken concrete blocks, dirt and weeds. I can't do too much about the weeds since they are not in our yard. Hopefully an attractive little garden will distract your attention from our neighbor's weeds.
The first step was to pull up the ferns and weeds that were in my way. Then I started to build the wall. I dug out whole bunch of concrete blocks (and left some for slope stability). I used rocks from our old rock wall by the porch and found a couple up in the woods. I planted shade loving plants on the lower terrace (maidenhair ferns, a hosta, hellebore, pulmonaria, and European wild ginger) and a rhododenron and Komodo Dragon hosta on the upper terrace. Unfortunately the pictures below don't do the landscaping justice. The plants have already begun to go dormant and the leaves are covering everything. I'll have to post another photo in the spring.
Once the most of the plants were in the ground, I added the smooth river stone we picked up from the street after the flood and added gravel in between. Again, difficult to see in the photo, but you can tell that this area of the garden looks much better than it did before. Looking forward to seeing water flow in the spring.
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