Flower bed upgrades

In addition of creating totally new flower bed next to the compost bins I've upgraded the existing beds a bit too. In a post from May 2011 I planted some ferns, old fashioned bleeding heart and christmas rose on the bed in front of the thuja trees. Here is a picture of the bed back then. 

Aren't those just tiny! After a while the bed looked like this. Still quite bare and empty.

Then at some point I had apparently planted some tulips and hostas and common solomon's seal which I later transplanted into a different spot. Under is a picture from May 2012.

After two years there were still some bare spots. I had moved the tulips a bit to the left side of the bed. But since tulips only bloom on the spring and die sometime during early summer I needed something that grows on that spot later in summer and covers up the empty space. Also I seem to have moved the turks' cap lily bit further back, those also bloom on the spring and do not have good coverage of the area later on summer. In that area I now planted a hosta. The old fashioned bleeding heart seems to also have the same problem as the tulips and lily. It goes all yellow and ugly later in the summer, so I needed something to distract the eye from that too and chose to put more hosta there. I seems I like hostas... Here is what the bed looks now.

1. Christmas rose, three plants actually. Those have not bloomed that well, but I like the foliage too.
2. Hosta, I'm not sure which, it was in our garden before we moved in, these I just transplanted here. The leaves are light green.
3. Ferns, those have now died for this summer, but grow very nicely early on spring.
4. Old fashioned bleeding heart, it has beautiful white flowers, but it dies quite early in the middle of summer. 
5. More hosta, this particular one with white edges on the leaves.
6. Windflower, there are actully two varietes, the other one is near the number 10.
7. This is a place for the summer flowers that are not winter hardy. I need this area for wintering the peppermint and the bonsai, so I need to dig out the plants each fall from that area.
8. Turk's cap lily has bloomed already. It has not been a huge success, there is one red beetle that keeps eating the plant and I have not been quick enough to keep the beetle away.
9. Common solomon's seal, when I bought it I though it would grow tall, but this particular one does not, so I moved it some time ago from the back to the front.
10. Some new hosta 'stiletto' with cool narrow leaves and white edges. 

I did upgrade another flower bed too next to our terrace pergola. I do not think I've shown this bed before here on the blog. On that bed I used to have a climbing rose New Dawn, but it did not really thrive. Even though I did cover it in winter at least some of it's branches froze every year and I had to cut those off. So it never got really big and it kept growing wild root shoots, which grew much faster than the actual plant. Ofcourse once the rose did bloom it was beautiful, but the flowers did not last long and there were only a few of those anyway. So the rose had to go. On it's spot I planted a climbing hydrangea. I hope that is more winter hardy and blooms longer.

And here is the whole bed, everything has bloomed already, but here is the list of the plants anyway.

1. Lily of the valley, this has spread quite nicely.
2. The climbing hydrangea
3. The original hosta plant, which I have now divided to many places in the garden
4. Peony, this one has bright pink ball like flowers

We'll see how everything looks like next summer. I do like perennials, it's so easy to move them around and on spring those just grow from under all that snow and dirt and suddenly everything is filled with plants.