Bees, Bees and more Bees.....

There are bees everywhere in my garden.  They especially love the "Autumn Joy" sedum.  It must taste very sweet to them.  The flowers are still rather pale in color.  They will eventually turn a brilliant red.  I will show more of them in a few weeks, when that happens.

  

I wanted to show the upright habit of the plants.....

 I have lots of these plants..... they are very easy to root in the spring.  The clumps get bigger every year!  This is one of my favorite plants.
'Til next time,  Love ya,  Jean

Flowering Beauties!......

(Click on the pictures to enlarge and get a closer look)

This rosebush is a gift from my daughter for Mother's Day last year. It is low in height, has beautiful orange buds that open to a peach color with a pale yellow center. Gorgeous!





This is a new variety of Cone Flower. It is called...Cone-fections (TM) Hot Papaya Coneflower (Echinacea purpurea 'Hot Papaya' PPAF... Believe it or not, I found this beauty at Lowe's for $12.98! This is an immature flower, it will be much fuller when it opens up in a few days.

I found this beauty in my garden today. It is a rudbeckia--a double or triple one! It sure is pretty and I will save seeds from this one.

My garden is changing from lavender, pink and yellow to lavender, orange and yellow. It looks quite different from a few weeks ago.

This is a hydrangea that is just starting to color up. I planted this in 1990 and it has been beautiful every year, loaded with large blooms that are bright blue!

Another flower, close up! I hope you enjoyed seeing some of the beauties that live in my garden!

'Til next time, Love ya, Jean

My garden.....

is at it's peak right now.......

I wish you could come over to see it!

'Til next time, Love ya, Jean

My truly favorite time of year......

So beautiful..........God's colorful creations.....

Come, take a stroll with me.....


Blue & white Salvia and Daisies.....
Goldflame Spirea with Lamb's Ears, and Blue Bedder Salvia.....

Siberian Iris.....

Hostas.....

Bearded Iris..... (These rhizomes are at least 35 years old!)

Lupines.....

View across my side yard.....

Sarah Bernhardt Peony.....

Iris.....

Old standby.....Daisies, I love these.....

The roses are just starting to bloom.....

I grew this one from a cutting about 4 years ago...

Another Peony..... (These smell incredible!)

A white Peony that turns pink as the flower ages.....

A pretty combination.....

Lambs Ears.....

Lots more Salvia.....

More Siberian Iris.....

I have been busy in my garden every day. I have been edging all the beds, getting the weeds out and mulching the beds. We are having a new fence installed, so I had to remove about 50 pots of flowers. This took a lot of time and work. And they were supposed to put it in three weeks ago, so I have been impatiently waiting for this to be finished. When I had the large silver maple trimmed, and the other large maple removed, it changed the yard from shade to sun, so now I have lots of shade plants to squeeze in somewhere. I'm still trying to figure out just where that will be.

To me, that's a lot of the fun of gardening, the changes that constantly take place. I've found that a garden is never done, but constantly evolving. And that is a beautiful thing!

'Til next time, Love ya, Jean

My obsession..........

OK, I've let you go for a few days without pictures of my garden......Now, it's time to see more!



I've shown you this border before-----
Right side of garden.........

(click on the pictures to enlarge)

This is the left side of the garden......

Below is a rosebud...

Sorry, it's a little blurry, but I don't know how to remove a picture, so it stays.

This is the most fragrant rose I've ever smelled~~~~
The rose is: Climbing Aloha -- Rosa trepadora 'Aloha'

Below is a Coral Bells 'Caramel' on the left and Bergenia on the right. These are both new this year~~

Lambs Ears sending up her flower shoots---

We had a sunny day yesterday, and today it is raining again. I worked outside for 3 hours in the rain this morning. I've decided that this is the only way I can get the work done. The forecast is for rain for the next TEN days. Oh JOY, the lawns will be nice and green! I'm trying to be optimistic about this! So much for now.

'Til next time, Love ya, Jean

Some accomplishments this week...........

I had a busy week and I got a few things accomplished. First, I shopped for my swing for my backyard. I found a nice one a Lowe's, bought it, brought it home, and my honey and I put it together and hung it up. It was pretty easy to do and I totally love it. It is made of cedar, nice and sturdy, well made, and I think it will hold up well. Remember the yard sale money? This is how I paid for my new swing and all the "extras".




I also shopped for some fabric to make new covers for my pads for the outdoor furniture, brought it home, cut out the shapes for the pads. I had to go to work, so I came home that night and sewed them.





Then, we decided we needed one of those little fire bowls that you can use in your backyard. We need to be able to toast marshmallows with the grandchildren. So, we go shopping again, and found one of those at Target. What fun! It needed to be put together, also. My honey took care of that and set it all up.


I set up a little garden in the center of the backyard. Here is a picture of it.

I also cleaned up my potting bench, swept off the leaves, spider webs, and dirt that accumulated over the winter.

I also bought lots of flowers, cold weather ones and some artificial ones. It is still not safe here to put out annual flowers yet. The safe date is Memorial Day (end of May), and so we can use cold weather annuals or perennials. I'm still cleaning out the beds and pulling weeds and getting last years leaves out of them.


This is where I put the artificial flowers......




My compost pile is growing fast. I should have usable compost by mid-June, hopefully. I love that stuff. My beds where I use it are so soft and everything grows so big and beautiful. It is so worth the work of making it.
So, this was my week, I got a lot accomplished and now I feel that I can work in the garden and that I have gotten a lot of the stuff that I wanted to do out of the way. My pond is coming along nicely and that will be another post later on.

'Til next time, Love ya, Jean

Spring is Finally Here!

I know I have been MIA for a few weeks. There are not enough hours in the day to do all that I need to do. So therefore, my blogging has taken a back seat to everything else.

So, last weekend, we had a huge yard sale on Sat & Sun and the preparation took the whole week. Every minute that I was not working at the Sweet Boutique, I was cleaning everything, organizing it, pricing it, putting up tents and banners in the yard, and causing a lot of excitement in the neighborhood for the big sale, and it all took hours and hours of preparation. The sale was a big success and it was really hard to let it go, but I did get rid of a lot of my precious things. I just have an overload of stuff and I need more room, and that's the main reason I decided to do the yard sale. It was really hot during the sale (90's, a fluky thing, we're totally not used to it!), but it was fun and we had a good time. (And made some money.) By contrast, it is 56 degrees today.

I hope to buy a swing for my back yard with the money. I can't wait to start looking for it. I'll show pictures when I get it. The good part is, the thing to hang it on is already there. I've always had a swing back there until it totally broke 2 yrs ago and I said I would build one....but, it never got done! So now, I decided that I will just buy one instead.

So, I ran outside today, in the rain, and took some pictures of my flowers. As I said, spring is finally here and I am loving it. Today, I worked outside for about 3 hours with sprinkles on my back, and I loved it until it really started raining hard and I had to come in. By then my back was aching, so it was a good time to stop.

So here are some of the pictures that I took:

I love tulips, even though they are not as long lived as I would like them to be.


A closeup of some fuchsia colored ones:

My sweet cherry tree, it has the most delicious, sweet cherries, if I can beat the birds to them......

I love the wild violets and let them reseed in my yard. If they are in the wrong spot, I just pull them out.

A Closeup, you can see the raindrops on the flowers.

These are the flowers on my Pieris Japonica. I love that!

A big bunch of Phlox that is in the front foundation border.

This is a whiskey barrel that I have out front. I planted it with cool weather plants, until it's time for the annuals to go out.

Another patch of white Phlox. I love this and I have quite a bit of it around the yard. It smells delicious!

That's all for today. I will be showing more as the garden progresses.

'Til next time, Love ya, Jean