A new bed exposed

I knew I had to prune one shrub that had got out of hand. It had not only taken up the whole of one flower bed, but was killing off the grass in it's shade. I had even thought about taking it out altogether, but that seemed like too big a job. However, once I got going on digging out the huge root system it had created, I managed to leave the best trunk and make a kind of standard bush.

What was left was a much larger flower bed than I had imagined. And the soil was not too bad, especially when I added four bags of blended farmyard manure. I have now planted some Dianthus and transplanted some Flox. But there is still masses of room for some more plants.

I looked back to some old photographs of the garden to see what this bed looked like in previous years. The following pictures show some of it's development.