Yi's Garden

Notes from one backyard, one bloom at a time.

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A Carpet of Creeping Phlox

Six years ago I planted eleven little creeping phlox plugs along the front fence because the strip was too steep to mow and I was tired of pretending I'd fix that. This is what eleven plugs turn into if you mostly leave them alone:

Front border along a white rail fence completely covered in pink, magenta, and lavender creeping phlox with tulips and grape hyacinth behind
Golden hour on the front border. The phlox has fully merged into one quilt.

Three colors — lavender-blue, soft pink, and a magenta that refuses to be photographed accurately — have grown together into a single quilt that pours over the curb wall. For three weeks in April, strangers photograph my fence. The mail carrier told me she reroutes to end her loop here. This is the highest honor I have ever received.

Steep front border with lavender and magenta creeping phlox in the foreground and a line of tulips and grape hyacinth up the slope
Looking up the slope: phlox at the curb, then the tulip-and-muscari line, then the hedges.

The layering is the part I'm proudest of, because it's the part that took actual planning: phlox at ankle height, then a ribbon of grape hyacinth, then tulips, then the old hedges as a backdrop. Everything blooms in overlapping shifts so the slope never has an off week from late March to mid-May.

Wide carpet of pale lavender creeping phlox in the foreground with patches of magenta phlox and tulips beyond
The lavender section up close — thousands of flowers, zero bare soil.

Care, honestly, is almost nothing: I shear the whole carpet lightly after it finishes blooming (it keeps the center from going bald), pull the odd weed that dares, and that's it. No watering after the first year, no feeding, no mowing that slope ever again. Best eleven plants I ever bought.