Sadly, I have gotten to that age where my cast iron back has given out. My knees gave out long ago. And my ankles are shot too. So for all but the most trivial gardening projects–or container gardening, my favorite type of gardening anyway–I now have to hire muscle.

Hence the title of this post. It actually came about when I was telling the Spoiler about my re-design of the gardens at work.

You may remember this from a year or two ago. I had planted all this myself a few years’ back. I had bought the plants and installed them and they were flourishing–until last year when the roses came down with rose rosette disease. I understand that it is particularly bad on the East Coast–but in a pandemic year, it just made the loss of these roses sadder.

So the roses all had to go and new plants had to come in that were not roses. That was too big a job for me to handle, so as I described to the Spoiler, I had our landscape company do it. I told them what plants I wanted, I told them what cultivars to buy, and when the plants arrived, I placed them–the point and place gardener.

And this is how it turned out. Of course there’s quite a difference–and quite a lot of mulch, which normally I don’t generally use. But when the shrubs are this small, and I am not weeding because this is work and not home, and it needs to look presentable because this is a business, you use mulch.

This area is shady so we used shade perennials. Honestly, I am a little nervous about this because we have woodchucks but we’ll see. I’m thinking that the hosta, especially, look like lettuce to the woodchucks. I sure hope I am mistaken!

We had no sooner gotten everything planted and the woodchuck–whom we hadn’t seen all spring–waddled out to begin dining in our grassy median.

This planting was done right before Memorial Day weekend. I am very afraid to go back to see what’s left on Tuesday.

[Update: I still haven’t been back to see it because of an emergency appendectomy on June 1st with complications. From what I understand, the plants are fine and the visitors–with the exception of our woodchuck–like what we have done. The woodchuck has decided to show its displeasure by tunneling through the mulch everywhere. I have been told there’s a pile in the corner by the steps that we could remove with a truck. Ah well.]