The last day of Indian Summer

The weather has been wonderful this past week. Warm and balmy, like spring. So nice. I hate to see it end, but it will. Tomorrow brings the cold, the sleet, the snow.
I have been taking advantage of this nice weather and transplanted many things.

I dug up a dozen Forsythia from a spot on the wooded hillside and planted many of them along the south edge of the property. We have a lane there that goes all the way to the bottom of the property. It is a nice lane, but I thought I would spruce it up with the Forsythia. They will also give some nice spring color and provide a bit more privacy for neighbors. It was a bit of a challenge to digging these up on the hillside. It is a bit steep and there is a lot of saplings to work around also. I fought falling down the hill more than a few times.
The new location will give them much more visibility and also much more sunlight. There are still a dozen or so left on the hillside. I am going to keep one or two of them there and move the rest of them to various parts of the property. I have another patch of Forsythia that also needs dug up and moved. It is right against the north side of the barn, right under a door. It is a tight grouping of many. They do not bloom well in this location, needing much more space and sunlight.

One of my favorite trees is the Eastern Red Bud. We are lucky to have a uncountable amount of them, of all sizes. They are mostly on the north end of the house, mostly lining the hillside and the state park property line.
There are also hundreds more seedlings no taller than a foot everywhere. Red Buds do transplant well, but only if you move them when they are less than 3 foot tall. As a smaller tree when dug up, I usually bare root them (even in the middle of summer) and so far have had good success.
These taller ones are visible from the bedroom windows and also from the street. I absolutely love the color.

I transplanted one to the new Forsythia bed alongside the lane. It will contrast nicely with the yellow. I transplanted four more to the west side of the house in a newer bed that I have been working on for a few months. I also dug up a large clump of Liriope Muscari, divided it into four clumps and planted these in the same bed. The Liriope stays green through the winter, an added bonus to this plant with fall purple flowers.

I have a small Japanese Maple that I have been growing since it was a 6 inch twig that I purchased off of Ebay several years ago. This is a tough tree. I brought it from our old house, where it had been moved three times. I dug it up again this past week from its very sunny spot and moved it to a shadier location. The early afternoon sun was crisping the leaves in the summer, so it had to be moved. This also went into the newer west side bed with the Red Buds and Liriope. Two Blue Prince Hollys were also moved into this bed. I got these this past spring dirt cheap at the Flea Market ( one of my favorite places to go on Sunday mornings).
Other things in this bed include 2 Boxwood and various types of ferns, one being the Japanese Painted Fern.

Here you can see this new long bed looking at it from both ends. I put the path in first, early in the summer. The black tube runs from our drainspout and needs to be buried. Another day, another project. The three windows are our bedroom. Once everything gets large enough, it is going to be wonderful to look out and see everything in bloom.