As the work continues on this major landscaping project, I am hoping to post updates roughly once a week so we can continue to see the progress and maybe inspire you (and motivate ourselves) to have some fun designing your own yard projects.

This week, we completed digging the depth of the water garden and determined where we will be adding cinder block retaining walls and where we will be sculpting the underwater shelves. The area we have placed the watergarden in is in the side of a hill and there is a 2-3 ft difference in height from one end of the garden to the other.

We will be creating a wall at the bottom of the hill and will backfill behind the wall with the rocks and dirt that we extracted from the center of the watergarden. Basically, we are rebuilding the hill on the other end of the water garden. That will take a while and I will continue to post progress photos.

You can see, in these photos, the line we strung to loosely determine the water level and how tall we would need to build up our end wall/hill. The watergarden is going to be in an “L” or kidney bean shape when completed.

The area where the new “hill” is going to go was filled with daylilies and three rose bushes. We moved the daylilies up to the front of the house where they will be able to get much more sun and we planted perennial Black Eyed Susan plants around the oak trees in the yard.

Finally, this week, I reworked a fairy garden that my friend gave me and placed it in the front garden where nothing else seems to ever grow. I think it will thrive there while being protected by the new gargoyle downspout we got from Amazon.

Next week, we will be adding two more shade sails and moving the rose bushes from the “new hill” area so that the area is ready for piling on of dirt and rock.